IP protection

Innovation Council submitted these perspectives to the ITC investigation of COVID-19 Diagnostics and Therapeutics and Flexibilites under the TRIPS Agreement.

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.

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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.

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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.

Innovation Council has created a running list of resources on various issues related to Gender and IP, based on work by Morgan Schreur. 

Click here to see the reading list.

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.

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. 

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Heated debates have taken place at the WTO TRIPS Council over Covid-19 vaccine patents and IP rights, with ongoing discussions still taking place among diplomats from the US, India, South Africa, and the EU. For vaccine researchers, manufacturers, and public experts, though, the focus may have moved on some time ago, says Alan Beattie in a new “trade secrets” posting for the FT. Governments seem also to be shifting focus to emphasize practical efforts to extend  manufacturing and distribution capacity globally; by way of example, the EU recently announced a €1bn contribution to finance the German company BioNTech to set up a mobile vaccine manufacturing plant in Africa assembled from kits.

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