Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Limitations And Exceptions In The Wipo Instrument On Genetic Resources And Associated Traditional Knowledge, Sean Flynn

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

One of the hot topics in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) diplomatic conference on an instrument on “Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Traditional Knowledge Associated with Genetic Resources” is whether and what exceptions language should be included in the text. At the brief public report from Committee I on May 15, 2024, the Chair reported: “There appears to be adequate support for eliminating Article 4, limitations and exceptions. Some parties opposed.” This Blog provides some background information on the Article and analysis of potentially applicable models and concepts for the provision, including analysis of similar treaties with no exceptions.

Sanctions For Non Disclosure, As Set Out In Article 6 Of The Wipo Basic Proposal On Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources And Traditional Knowledge, Should Include Possible Revocation Of A Patent, James Love, Claire Cassedy

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

The basic proposal for an international legal instrument relating to intellectual property, genetic resources and traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources prepared by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Secretariat (GRATK/DC/3) sets out in its Article 3 a narrow obligation to disclose (1) the country of origin of the genetic resource, or if not known, its source, and (2) the Indigenous Peoples or local community that provided traditional knowledge associated with the genetic resource, or the source of such knowledge.

Article 6 of the basic proposal sets out the sanctions and remedies for failures to make such disclosures. Among the …

Wipo Good Practice Toolkit For Collective Management Organisations 2021: Suggestions For Possible Amendment, Desmond Oriakhogba

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

Drawing examples from national and international legal instruments, and based on existing studies, this comment makes suggestions for possible amendment of the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Good Practice Toolkit for Collective Management Organisations 2021 (CMO Toolkit). The suggestions are for inclusion of good practices in the CMO Toolkit that can inform the regulation of CMOs to prevent them from constituting obstacles to open access non-commercial licensing and L&Es-enabled access for education and research. The suggestion also covers good practices that will prevent CMOs from impeding the smooth and effective development of artificial intelligence systems. Recommendations include protecting rightholders' ability to …

Elaborating A Human Rights Friendly Copyright Framework For Generative Ai, Christophe Geiger

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This paper analyses the copyright issues related to so-called “generative AI” systems and reviews the arguments currently advanced to change the copyright regime for AI-generated works from a human rights perspective. It argues that because of the applicable human rights framework for copyright but also the anthropocentric approach of human rights the protection of creators and human creativity must be considered the point of reference when assessing future reforms with regard to copyright and generative AI systems. Consequently, the copyrightability of AI-generated outputs should be considered with utmost care and only when AI is used as a technical tool for …

U'Wa Indigenous People Vs. Columbia: Potential Applications Of The Escazu Agreement, Ariana Lippi

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

Though the case is ongoing, and results are still to be seen, it in many ways sets a precedent for indigenous communities in Latin America seeking redress for environmental and cultural injustices. With Colombia’s recent ratification of The Escazú Regional Agreement (the Agreement herein) in 2022, this case presents a unique opportunity for implementation of the Agreement and greater accountability within existing domestic legislation.

Natural Resources In The Arctic: The Equal Distribution Of Uneven Resrouces, Ganeswar Matcha, Sudarsanan Sivakumar

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

This paper analyses the governance machine in place at the Arctic and examines the application of the principles of “common heritage of mankind” at the Arctic. This paper also offers some tentative propositions aimed at protecting Out Bound investment rights and how the World Trade Organization or other countries, like the U.S., can intercede in the Arctic investment sphere and attempt to regulate along with the United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea.

Incentivizing Sustainability In American Enterprise: Lessons From Finnish Model, Vasa T. Dunham

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

The disparate climate performances of Finland and the United States, two of the wealthiest countries in the world, bring to light the question of how corporate responsibility has been inspired in each jurisdiction. Having established the urgency of the climate crisis and the importance of corporate behavior in optimizing a given country’s approach to protection of the global environment, an examination of each nation’s legal frameworks may shed light on features of the corporate regime that are effective in advancing sustainability goals and those that are not.22 Part I of this paper establishes a comparative framework by providing background on …

Editor's Note, Shade Streeter, Reagan Ferris

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

The Sustainable Development Law & Policy Brief (ISSN 1552-3721) is a student-run initiative at American University Washington College of Law that is published twice each academic year. The Brief embraces an interdisciplinary focus to provide a broad view of current legal, political, and social developments. It was founded to provide a forum for those interested in promoting sustainable economic development, conservation, environmental justice, and biodiversity throughout the world.

Building A Text And Data Mining Limitation: The Brazilian Case, Luca Schirru, Allan Rocha De Souza, Claudia Chamas

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

In recent years, there has been a growing body of legal regulation of

TDM. Since 2018, Japan, the European Union, Singapore and others have

promoted changes to their copyright law and included specific limitations and

exceptions for TDM. These changes have been slow in the Global South and

the developing world, even though they are urgently needed there. This report

aims to present the Brazilian copyright legal framework and the policy

documents related to Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence and

innovation influencing political and public debate. This set of policies and

legislative texts provides the grounds for the discussion on the …

Briefing Note: 45th Meeting Of The Wipo Standing Committee On Copyright And Related Rights, Sean Flynn

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This analysis provides a historical and legal overview of the principle agenda items to be discussed at the 45th meeting of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights.

The Right To Research As Guarantor For Sustainability, Innovation And Justice In Eu Copyright Law, Christophe Geiger, Bernd Justin Jütte

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

Research is essential for scientific, cultural, and social advancement and will be crucial for the economic and societal recovery in a post-pandemic world. Restrictions to access and use of information contained in copyright-protected expression however can constitute significant hindrances to conducting research efficiently, especially since modern research methods rely on accessing, storing and processing large amounts of digitized data. Over the last decade, copyright in the European Union (EU) has undergone a process of constitutionalization, which saw a growing importance of fundamental rights arguments in policy- and law-making, as well as in the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of …

Copyright And Covid, Sean Flynn

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

During the COVID-19 pandemic it became widely recognized that speedier access to patent rights should be enabled to speed global scale-up of vaccine production. This understanding was expressed in a proposal by India and South Africa that the World Trade Organization suspend multilateral intellectual property rules on COVID vaccines, treatment and containment. The original waiver proposal proposed a suspension of WTO rules on all forms of intellectual property needed for a broad range of COVID-19 response measures, including “vaccination,” “treatment,” and “containment.” The final “TRIPS Waiver,” however, was ultimately limited to a minor provision of TRIPS permitting greater use of …

Stakeholder Capitalism’S Greatest Challenge: Reshaping A Public Consensus To Govern A Global Economy, Leo E. Strine Jr., Michael Klain

Seattle University Law Review

The Berle XIV: Developing a 21st Century Corporate Governance Model Conference asks whether there is a viable 21st Century Stakeholder Governance model. In our conference keynote article, we argue that to answer that question yes requires restoring—to use Berle’s term—a “public consensus” throughout the global economy in favor of the balanced model of New Deal capitalism, within which corporations could operate in a way good for all their stakeholders and society, that Berle himself supported.

The world now faces problems caused in large part by the enormous international power of corporations and the institutional investors who dominate their governance. These …

A Different Approach To Agency Theory And Implications For Esg, Jonathan Bonham, Amoray Riggs-Cragun

Seattle University Law Review

In conventional agency theory, the agent is modeled as exerting unobservable “effort” that influences the distribution over outcomes the principal cares about. Recent papers instead allow the agent to choose the entire distribution, an assumption that better describes the extensive and flexible control that CEOs have over firm outcomes. Under this assumption, the optimal contract rewards the agent directly for outcomes the principal cares about, rather than for what those outcomes reveal about the agent’s effort. This article briefly summarizes this new agency model and discusses its implications for contracting on ESG activities.

The Esg Information System, Stavros Gadinis, Amelia Miazad

Seattle University Law Review

The mounting focus on ESG has forced internal corporate decision-making into the spotlight. Investors are eager to support companies in innovative “green” technologies and scrutinize companies’ transition plans. Activists are targeting boards whose decisions appear too timid or insufficiently explained. Consumers and employees are incorporating companies sustainability credentials in their purchasing and employment decisions. These actors are asking companies for better information, higher quality reports, and granular data. In response, companies are producing lengthy sustainability reports, adopting ambitious purpose statements, and touting their sustainability credentials. Understandably, concerns about greenwashing and accountability abound, and policymakers are preparing for action.

In this …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

The Sec, The Supreme Court, And The Administrative State, Paul G. Mahoney

Seattle University Law Review

Pritchard and Thompson have given those of us who study the SEC and the securities laws much food for thought. Their methodological focus is on the internal dynamics of the Court’s deliberations, on which they have done detailed and valuable work. The Court did not, however, operate in a vacuum. Intellectual trends in economics and law over the past century can also help us understand the SEC’s fortunes in the federal courts and make predictions about its future.

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Memories Of An Affirmative Action Activist, Margaret E. Montoya

Seattle University Law Review

Some twenty-five years ago, the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) led a march supporting Affirmative Action in legal education to counter the spate of litigation and other legal prohibitions that exploded during the 1990s, seeking to limit or abolish race-based measures. The march began at the San Francisco Hilton Hotel, where the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) was having its annual meeting, and proceeded to Union Square. We, the organizers of the march, did not expect the march to become an iconic event; one that would be remembered as a harbinger of a new era of activism by …

Same Crime, Different Time: Sentencing Disparities In The Deep South & A Path Forward Under The Fourteenth Amendment, Hailey M. Donovan

Seattle University Law Review

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. The American obsession with crime and punishment can be tracked over the last half-century, as the nation’s incarceration rate has risen astronomically. Since 1970, the number of incarcerated people in the United States has increased more than sevenfold to over 2.3 million, outpacing both crime and population growth considerably. While the rise itself is undoubtedly bleak, a more troubling truth lies just below the surface. Not all states contribute equally to American mass incarceration. Rather, states have vastly different incarceration rates. Unlike at the federal level, …

Pacific Islands And The U.S. Military: The Legal Borderlands Of The Environmental Movement, Sonia Lei

Seattle University Law Review

Climate change remains an urgent, ongoing global issue that requires critical examination of institutional polluters. This includes the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum: the United States military. The Department of Defense (DoD) is a massive institution with little oversight, a carbon footprint spanning the globe, a budget greater than the next ten largest nations combined, and overly generous exemptions to environmental regulations and carbon reduction targets. This Comment examines how this lack of accountability and oversight plays out in the context of three Pacific islands that have hosted U.S. military bases for decades. By considering the environmental impact of …

The Need For Corporate Guardrails In U.S. Industrial Policy, Lenore Palladino

Seattle University Law Review

U.S. politicians are actively “marketcrafting”: the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act collectively mark a new moment of robust industrial policy. However, these policies are necessarily layered on top of decades of shareholder primacy in corporate governance, in which corporate and financial leaders have prioritized using corporate profits to increase the wealth of shareholders. The Administration and Congress have an opportunity to use industrial policy to encourage a broader reorientation of U.S. businesses away from extractive shareholder primacy and toward innovation and productivity. This Article examines discrete opportunities within the …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Public Primacy In Corporate Law, Dorothy S. Lund

Seattle University Law Review

This Article explores the malleability of agency theory by showing that it could be used to justify a “public primacy” standard for corporate law that would direct fiduciaries to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of the public. Employing agency theory to describe the relationship between corporate management and the broader public sheds light on aspects of firm behavior, as well as the nature of state contracting with corporations. It also provides a lodestar for a possible future evolution of corporate law and governance: minimize the agency costs created by the divergence of interests between management and …

Shareholder Primacy Versus Shareholder Accountability, William W. Bratton

Seattle University Law Review

When corporations inflict injuries in the course of business, shareholders wielding environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) principles can, and now sometimes do, intervene to correct the matter. In the emerging fact pattern, corporate social accountability expands out of its historic collectivized frame to become an internal subject matter—a corporate governance topic. As a result, shareholder accountability surfaces as a policy question for the first time. The Big Three index fund managers, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, responded to the accountability question with ESG activism. In so doing, they defected against corporate legal theory’s central tenet, shareholder primacy. Shareholder primacy builds …

The Limits Of Corporate Governance, Cathy Hwang, Emily Winston

Seattle University Law Review

What is the purpose of the corporation? For decades, the answer was clear: to put shareholders’ interests first. In many cases, this theory of shareholder primacy also became synonymous with the imperative to maximize shareholder wealth. In the world where shareholder primacy was a north star, courts, scholars, and policymakers had relatively little to fight about: most debates were minor skirmishes about exactly how to maximize shareholder wealth.

Part I of this Essay discusses the shortcomings of shareholder primacy and stakeholder governance, arguing that neither of these modes of governance provides an adequate framework for incentivizing corporations to do good. …

A History Of Corporate Law Federalism In The Twentieth Century, William W. Bratton

Seattle University Law Review

This Article describes the emergence of corporate law federalism across a long twentieth century. The period begins with New Jersey’s successful initiation of charter competition in 1888 and ends with the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002. The federalism in question describes the interrelation of state and federal regulation of corporate internal affairs. This Article takes a positive approach, pursuing no normative bottom line. It makes six observations: (1) the federalism describes a division of subject matter, with internal affairs regulated by the states and securities issuance and trading regulated by the federal government; (2) the federalism is an …

How To Interpret The Securities Laws?, Zachary J. Gubler

Seattle University Law Review

In discussions of the federal securities laws, the SEC usually gets most of the attention. This makes some sense. After all, it is the agency charged with administrating the securities laws and regulating the industry as a whole. It makes the majority of the laws; it engages in enforcement actions; it reacts to crises; and it, or sometimes even its individual commissioners, intervene publicly in policy debates. Often overlooked in such discussion, however, is the role of the Supreme Court in shaping securities law, and a new book by Adam Pritchard and Robert Thompson demonstrates why this is an oversight. …

The Pioneers, Waves, And Random Walks Of Securities Law In The Supreme Court, Elizabeth Pollman

Seattle University Law Review

After the pioneers, waves, and random walks that have animated the history of securities laws in the U.S. Supreme Court, we might now be on the precipice of a new chapter. Pritchard and Thompson’s superb book, A History of Securities Law in the Supreme Court, illuminates with rich archival detail how the Court’s view of the securities laws and the SEC have changed over time and how individuals have influenced this history. The book provides an invaluable resource for understanding nearly a century’s worth of Supreme Court jurisprudence in the area of securities law and much needed context for …

Three Stories: A Comment On Pritchard & Thompson’S A History Of Securities Laws In The Supreme Court, Harwell Wells

Seattle University Law Review

Adam Pritchard and Robert Thompson’s A History of Securities Laws in the Supreme Court should stand for decades as the definitive work on the Federal securities laws’ career in the Supreme Court across the twentieth century.1 Like all good histories, it both tells a story and makes an argument. The story recounts how the Court dealt with the major securities laws, as well the agency charged with enforcing them, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the rules it promulgated, from the 1930s into the twenty-first century. But the book does not just string together a series of events, “one …