Journal of World Intellectual Property最新文献

India is a country with a diverse ecosystem. Traditional knowledge (TK) is an important element of Indian culture and society. Because of its diversity, India has been a victim of biopiracy on multiple occasions, though it has learned from the haldi, neem, and basmati episodes. While it is critical for countries to maintain their biodiversity and indigenous knowledge, it is also critical to protect the rights of those who add value to it and expand its usage through intellectual property rights (IPR). As a result, biodiversity conservation and IPR come into conflict. Biodiversity conservation conventions and statutes aim to strike a balance between the interests of both parties. The Biodiversity Act of 2002 in India stipulates that indigenous tribes must give their prior informed consent before accessing and utilizing a bioresource. It also establishes a legal framework for benefit sharing in various ways in the event that any intellectual property on the bioresource or relevant TK is acquired. However, putting the plan into action is still a struggle. This, in turn, deprives the true bearers of the relevant TK, who have either nurtured bioresources for years. The framework of biodiversity conservation legislation as a way of protecting TK holders' rights in the international and Indian contexts is discussed in this study.

Despite over 25 years passing since TRIPS entered into force, the full potential of the patent exceptions provision under Article 30 TRIPS (Article 30) is yet to be realised. The hesitation by developing states to implement new patent exceptions in their domestic laws has presented a barrier to reconciling the tension between protecting patent rights and achieving access to essential medicines for all as committed by states under Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG 3). This article addresses the uncertainty of the interpretation of Article 30 through a doctrinal analysis of treaty interpretation rules and the recent Australia-Tobacco Plain Packaging decisions. It proposes an original interpretation of Article 30 that permits public interest considerations, and uses this interpretation to justify a proposed stockpiling exception for pandemic and epidemic preparedness aimed at facilitating access to essential medicines to achieve SDG 3. Accordingly, developing states should feel more confident about implementing patent exceptions tailored to their public interest needs in pursuit of SDG 3.

The article outlines the regulation of streaming platforms under Portuguese copyright law, against the background of EU legislation and case law. Its purpose is not merely to provide a description of how streaming platforms are regulated in Portugal, but also to highlight some of the specificities of the Portuguese approach to combating online copyright infringement. Throughout the article, reference will be made to three types of online platforms, which are broadly included under the general category of “streaming services”: (i) “legal streaming services,” which grant access to catalogs of music or audiovisual works with the authorization of the respective rightholders; (ii) “semi-legal streaming services,” specifically online content-sharing services that, at least before the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, did not require the authorization of rightholders due to their eligibility for the hosting safe harbor; and (iii) “illegal streaming services,” covering not only streaming platforms where content is made available without the permission of rightholders, but also all those platforms whose main purpose is to facilitate copyright infringement, even if they do not resort to streaming technology, including popular torrent aggregators like The Pirate Bay.

The essay argues that anti-suit injunctions granted in disputes on standard-essential patents are inconsistent with the general standards governing anti-suit injunctions. The section on anti-suit injunction demonstrates that the case law on anti-suit injunctions is not comparable to disputes over standard essential patents. In contrast, anti-anti-suit injunctions are a legitimate response to an extraterritorial assertion of jurisdiction by foreign courts. Under EU law, the courts of member states might even be required to issue anti-anti-suit injunctions to protect their exclusive jurisdiction over patents.

This article examines the legal status of nomenclature codes and their application to denomination in certain forms of intellectual property, in particular plant breeder's rights and patents for micro-organisms. Its objective is to show how rigidity and the absence of appeals against nomenclature decisions can have adverse effects on the rights and even earning potential of applicants.

The rendezvous between intellectual property rights and human rights has awakened slumbering legal spirits. Miscellaneous legal phenomena are now nestled in the intersection between intellectual property rights and human rights. However, the interplay between human rights and intellectual property rights is bizarrely characterized by amity and hostility. Naturally, therefore, situating indigenous intellectual property at the intersection of intellectual property and human rights becomes a daunting task. However, the dilemma is often overstated especially from the point of view of conventional intellectual property rights. At the outset of this Article, I shall be exploring the history and the development of the relationship between human rights and intellectual property rights. In the followng section, I shall be examining the extent to which intellectual property rights are entrenched in the international human rights instruments. The last section shall be devoted to exploring the phenomenon of locating indigenous peoples' rights at the interface between intellectual property rights and human rights and reflecting on the ensuing issues—an aspect which has seldom been considered in the existing literature.

The importance of plants in almost all fields yields for a continuous international effort to determine the protection of innovations in plants, especially with the tendency of countries to make huge investments in this area. Though, most of the world's countries agreed to set-up effective protection for new plant varieties, they differ over the type and nature of proper legal protection. This discrepancy in international positions on legal protection frameworks leads the researchers to investigate the most appropriate legal adaptations of innovative new plant varieties; are they inventions or an independent intellectual property right? And what are the suitable ways to protect it? Thereby, a comparative analysis of the national texts with some foreign legislation has been conducted. The study structure is twofold. The first section dealt with the legal protection of plant varieties within an independent legal system: a study in the Algerian law, while the second one presented the possibility of protecting a new plant variety under a patent: a study in the American legislation. The results showed that the adoption of a patent protection system is of great importance. It is, thus, preferable for the legislator to approve the dual protection of new plant varieties.

It is arguable that the most significant feature of the maiden Paris Convention is the creation of a remarkably broad national policy space which allowed Union members to balance the implementation of required obligations with the need to occasionally attend to national exigencies. Thus, a member may choose not to offer industrial property protection if national interests would be best served by doing so. While subsequent revisions to the Paris Convention chipped away at national flexibilities, the most strident attack to national flexibilities occurs under the Agreement for the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and the period after it. This paper puts the almost-unnoticed whittling down of national flexibilities in international patent agreements in historical perspective. It subsequently discusses four ways through which this development could exacerbate access-to-medicines in low-and-middle-income-countries.