Post Tagged with: "Intellectual Property"

U.S. Trade Policy and IP

Last week the U.S. and South Korea agreed on a major free trade agreement. The deal hasn't attracted much attention (though Canadian coverage has commented that a Canada – South Korea deal may now be on the way), but the extensive intellectual property provisions are worth noting, since they illustrate […]

April 11, 2007 — 2 comments — News

Competition Policy and IP

While response to last week's federal budget unsurprisingly focused on new spending, it also included a commitment to create an expert independent panel to conduct a review of Canadian competition policy. Given that the Minister of Industry envisions a broad mandate to "review anything under the federal umbrella that affects […]

March 28, 2007 — Comments are Disabled — News

USPTO on the U.S. IP System

A reader points to comments from John Dudas, the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), doing his best IIPA impression on how the U.S. IP system is perceived worldwide: "I have traveled around the world, and every nation […]

February 28, 2007 — 3 comments — News

IP in QP

Intellectual property was raised in the House of Commons yesterday, though both the question and the answer are a little difficult to understand: Mr. Robert Vincent (Shefford, BQ): Mr. Speaker, copyright infringement costs between $20 billion and $30 billion annually in losses to our businesses. For example, Polyform in […]

February 27, 2007 — 1 comment — News

U.S. Copyright Lobby Out of Touch With the Rest of the World

Given that it has been picked up by Slashdot, BoingBoing, and Wired, I'm a bit behind in pointing to a column (BBC version, homepage version) I wrote for the BBC on the recent IIPA intellectual property protection submission to the USTR. The column picks up on many of the points I made in a posting about the submission last week. In the column I argue that what is most noteworthy about the IIPA effort is that dozens of countries – indeed most of the major global economies in the developed and developing world – are subjected to criticism. The IIPA recommendations are designed to highlight the inadequacies of IP protection around the world, yet the lobby group ultimately shines the spotlight on how U.S. copyright policy has become out-of-touch and isolated from much of the rest of the globe.

The IIPA criticisms fall into three broad categories.

February 20, 2007 — 7 comments — Columns