IP protection
USPTO’s First National Strategy for Inclusive Innovation
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has just released it’s first-ever National Strategy for Inclusive Innovation in 2024, with support from the Council for Inclusive Innovation (CI2 ). The study includes a comprehensive review of the state of U.S. inclusiveness, highlights existing disparities, and explores opportunities to expand U.S. innovation in an equitable way. This strategy focuses primarily on innovation in STEM fields and the role of the patent system in the constitutional aim of incentivizing innovation and bringing that innovation to impact.
Click here for the full USPTO’s national strategy.
Innovation Council submission to the ITC investigation on the TRIPS Agreement
Innovation Council submitted these perspectives to the ITC investigation of COVID-19 Diagnostics and Therapeutics and Flexibilites under the TRIPS Agreement.
There are many actions that could help to improve the availability of COVID therapeutics and diagnostics; setting aside IP protection is not one of them. Based on experience, we expect this will not help in establishing further manufacturing capacity – and, in fact, weaker IP could make this likely to succeed. IP protection supports the extension of global biomanufacturing capacity, by making tech transfer more legally certain, and support innovation and commercialization of new solutions in this sector.
https://innovationcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Innovation-Council-ITC-Submission.pdf
Moderated Discussion with Geneva Delegates: Insights from Biomanufacturing Experts
Innovation Council recently hosted an insightful webinar with leaders in biologics manufacturing and R&D from emerging markets.
The speakers, Syed Ahmed from TechInvention, Charlie Nemugumoni from AVMI and Rajinder Suri from DCVMN drew on lessons from COVID-19 and practical experience to discuss how to reinforce global biomanufacturing R&D networks for overall healthcare delivery as well as pandemic preparedness.
Thank you to the speakers for an informative and exciting discussion!
Why Voluntary Licensing is Best for Increasing Access to Medicines
The Geneva Network recently published analysis about the benefits from voluntarily licensing in the health space. The author argues that voluntary licensing was crucial during COVID-19, aiding the quick and large scale production of vaccines and therapeutics. Overall, it is noted that voluntary licensing can enable long term knowledge transfer, cooperation between companies, and increased flexibility and speed in the innovation process.
Click here to read the full story.
IP Protection for Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is rapidly evolving to provide accurate information and solutions to problems. AI solutions can be extremely useful in many fields of endeavor.
There are various components and aspects of such systems. Currently, there is some uncertainty – especially with respect to patent protection – as to how intellectual property (IP) rights can be used to protect those components along with the outputs of AI systems.
Click here to read more.
Slideshow: Innovation and the COVID-19 Response
On 26 November 2021 the new research report about the role that intellectual property played in the development, manufacturing, and global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics was launched in Geneva. The report was co-authored by Innovation Council’s very own Jennifer Brant, and Prof. Mark Schultz.
The report is available here, along with a slideshow of the research project.
Gender and IP Literature
Innovation Council has created a running list of resources on various issues related to Gender and IP, based on work by Morgan Schreur
Slideshow: Measuring the Gender Gap in Innovation
Monitoring the share of women inventing, creating, and innovating is essential to develop appropriate policy responses to the innovation-related gender participation gap. Yet, several national and international innovation and IP data sources lack any type of gender breakdown.
This slideshow reviews the different ways to get innovation and IP data with gender breakdown.
EU launches WTO dispute against China over 5G IP
On February 18, the European Union launched a legal challenge against China at the World Trade Organization, arguing that Chinese courts were preventing European companies from protecting their cellular technology patents. The EU considers that China is violating the WTO TRIPS Agreement, as Chinese courts continue to issue broad anti-suit injunctions (ASIs), thus deterring owners of cellular standard essential patents (SEPs) from litigating patent licensing disputes outside of China. Alongside the broad ASIs, it has been asserted that the Chinese courts are setting unduly low global licensing rates in their rulings. While the EU case focuses on ASIs, industry experts point out that it is the combination strategy that harms the position of European and other SEP owners. The European Commission filed the challenge on behalf of the 27 EU members, and other WTO members, such as Australia and the UK, have already joined the case. The next step is consultations.