Law Commons^™

A Collision Course Between Trips Flexibilities And Investor-State Proceedings, Cynthia M. Ho

Cynthia M Ho

This Article discusses an important, yet understudied threat to patent, as well as other intellectual property sovereignty under TRIPS: pending and potential challenges by companies under international agreements protecting investments. Although such agreements have existed for decades, Philip Morris and Eli Lilly are blazing a new path for companies to sue countries they claim interfere with their intellectual property rights through so-called investor-state arbitrations. These suits seek hundreds of millions in compensation and even injunctive relief for alleged violations of internationally agreed intellectual property norms. The suits fundamentally challenge TRIPS flexibilities at the very time the Declaration on Patent Protection …

Intellectual Property And Public Health – A White Paper, Ryan G. Vacca, Jim Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Tom Folsom, Timothy Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank Pasquale, Elizabeth Reilly, Jeff Samuels, Kathy Strandburg, Kara Swanson, Andrew Torrance, Katharine Van Tassel

Katharine Van Tassel

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions.

Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …

Intellectual Property And Public Health - A White Paper, Ryan Vacca, James Ming Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Tom Folsom, Timothy Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank Pasquale, Elizabeth Reilly, Jeff Samuels, Katherine J. Strandburg, Kara W. Swanson, Andrew W. Torrance, Katharine Van Tassel

Katharine Van Tassel

On October 26, 2012, The University of Akron School of Law's Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants, and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions.

Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …

Business Methods, Technology, And Discrimination, Daniel Harris Brean

Daniel Harris Brean

Drugs, Drugs Everywhere But Just Not For The Poor, Srividhya Ragavan

Srividhya Ragavan

The objective for this article is to understand the legitimacy and limitations of US involvement in another country’s sovereign actions taken expressly in the public interest, or to protect public health, such as the compulsory licensing of pharmaceuticals.

Corporate "Human Rights" To Intellectual Property Protection, J. Janewa Osei Tutu

J. Janewa Osei-Tutu

International Cooperation And The Patent-Antitrust Intersection, Stephen Yelderman

Stephen Yelderman

Commentators have long recognized the need to coordinate questions at the patent-antitrust intersection with other policy levers available under patent law. In the international context, however, control over patent policy has been fractured and entrusted to diverse decisionmakers. Many details of patent law are tightly coordinated by international agreement, while others related to antitrust are left to national discretion. This Article evaluates the consequences of this fracture, and notes ways in which the prevailing treaty regimes (the Paris Convention and the TRIPS Agreement) distort incentives for national policymaking. National discretion at the patent-antitrust intersection can be expected to result in …

Adjudicating Trips For Development, Molly Land

Molly K. Land

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property And Public Health – A White Paper, Ryan G. Vacca, Jim Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Tom Folsom, Timothy Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank Pasquale, Elizabeth Reilly, Jeff Samuels, Kathy Strandburg, Kara Swanson, Andrew Torrance, Katharine Van Tassel

Frank A. Pasquale

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions.

Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …

Intellectual Property And Public Health – A White Paper, Ryan G. Vacca, Jim Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Tom Folsom, Timothy Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank Pasquale, Elizabeth Reilly, Jeff Samuels, Kathy Strandburg, Kara Swanson, Andrew Torrance, Katharine Van Tassel

Katharine Van Tassel

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions.

Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …

Intellectual Property And Public Health – A White Paper, Ryan G. Vacca, Jim Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Tom Folsom, Timothy Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank Pasquale, Elizabeth Reilly, Jeff Samuels, Kathy Strandburg, Kara Swanson, Andrew Torrance, Katharine Van Tassel

Yaniv Heled

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions.

Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …

Rebalancing Trips, Molly K. Land

Molly K. Land

In recent years, global intellectual property scholarship has been preoccupied with “rehabilitating” the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). With some distance from the polarizing rhetoric that accompanied the early years of TRIPS, contemporary accounts laud the treaty as far more flexible and sensitive to the needs of developing countries than had previously been believed. This article argues that, contrary to these accounts, the fears of developing countries concerning TRIPS have indeed been realized—just not in the manner they imagined at the time of its conclusion. Although TRIPS does contain significant flexibilities, states have largely failed to take …

Some Reflections On Method And Policy In The Crowded House Of European Patent Law And Their Implications For India, Justine Pila

Justine Pila

This article considers the appropriate method for assessing substantive principles of European patent law, including limits on European patentability. In the argument made, European patent law is a crowded house in which “substantive convergence” around principles is inevitable but unsatisfactory: it will generally be the product of complex institutional dynamics as much as principled policy making, and in the absence of unified methodology and values will fail to ensure coherence or consistency within the European patent system. The implications of this argument with respect to India are then considered, and some reflections offered regarding India's experience of patent law harmonization …

Special 301 Of The Trade Act Of 1974 And Global Access To Medicine, Sean M. Flynn

Sean Flynn

Since its inception in 1988, the United States Trade Representative’s “Special 301” adjudication of foreign intellectual property law standards has been used to promote policies restricting access to affordable medications around the world. President-elect Obama released a platform promising to “break the stranglehold that a few big drug and insurance companies have on these life-saving drugs” and pledged support for “the rights of sovereign nations to access quality-assured, low-cost generic medication to meet their pressing public health needs.” The 2009 and 2010 Special 301 reports, however, indicate that the Obama Administration has not yet implemented this pledge into administration trade …

Will International Trade Law Promote Or Inhibit Global Artificial Photosynthesis, Thomas A. Faunce

Thomas A Faunce

Artificial photosynthesis (AP) is an area of well-advanced research involving large international groups at the cutting edge of synthetic biology and nanotechnology. In simple terms it offers to produce a cheap source of hydrogen for fuel through using sunlight to split water, as well as making basic starches by a process involving absorption of carbon dioxide via the enzyme RuBisCO. As the proliferating numbers of university-based research teams working in this area begin to combine, there will be a natural escalation of the expected time for a global roll-out of AP domestic and international devices. Policy attention will then turns …

How China Succeeded In Protecting Olympic Trademarks And Why This Success Will Not Generate Immediate Improvements In Intellectual Property Protection In China, Aileen M. Mcgill

Aileen M McGill

After centuries of stagnant growth and international isolation, China has emerged as the fastest-growing economy in the world and one of the most important parties in international trade. This staggering growth and influx of foreign goods has led to rampant counterfeiting of brand-name goods in a society with little cultural basis for individual intellectual property rights. When Beijing was awarded the 2008 summer Olympics in 2001, the Chinese government moved quickly to prepare for this beloved international event, rallying this massive country for, what many considered to be their grand emergence onto the world stage. One of the reforms enacted …

Intellectual Property Rights And The Right To Participate In Cultural Life, Molly Land

Molly K. Land

Although many contend that human rights law is a justification for intellectual property rights, precisely the opposite is true. Human rights law is far more a limit on intellectual property rights than a rationale for such regimes. In a variety of ways, human rights law requires states to take specific, concrete steps to limit the effects of intellectual property rights in order to protect international human rights. This powerful and emancipatory dimension of human rights law has unfortunately been overshadowed by those who claim human rights as a basis for granting exclusive rights.

The U.N. Committee on Economic, Social, and …

The Political Economy Of Aids Treatment: Intellectual Property And The Transformation Of Generic Supply, Kenneth C. Shadlen

Ken Shadlen

This article examines the relationship between intellectual property (IP) and public health, with a focus on the extension of AIDS treatment in the developing world. While most of the literature on IP and health examines the conditions affecting poor countries’ capacities to acquire essential medicines, I show the distinct – and more complicated – political economy of production and supply. IP regulations alter the structure of generic pharmaceutical sectors in the countries capable of supplying essential medicines, and changes in market structure affect actors’ economic and political interests and capacities. These new constellations of interests and capacities have profound implications …