Tag Archives: intellectual property

Latest Developments, September 20

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In the latest news and analysis…

Drones in paradise
The Wall Street Journal reports the US military will begin launching armed drones from the Seychelles as it steps up its campaign against perceived terror threats in East Africa.
“The U.S. has used the Seychelles base for flying surveillance drones, and for the first time will fly armed MQ-9 Reapers from the Indian Ocean site, supplementing strikes from a U.S. drone base in Djibouti.”

Radical corporate transparency
A new Publish What You Pay report on 10 major extractive industry companies details the extent to which they rely on subsidiaries in “secrecy jurisdictions” – 2,083 such subsidiaries between the corporations examined – to maximize profits and, according to PWYP, deprive poor countries of massive amounts of income.
“This is why, in order to combat this veil of secrecy, PWYP Norway believes every company should publish their full revenues, costs, profits, tax and the amount of natural resources it has used, written off and acquired in any given year in every country it operates. This is known as country-by-country reporting (CBCR).”

Resource extraction and indigenous rights
The UN’s top expert on the rights of indigenous peoples, James Anaya, has released the results of an extensive questionnaire-based study that suggests natural resource extraction and other major construction projects are having adverse effects on indigenous communities around the world.
“The vast majority of indigenous peoples’ responses, many of which stemmed from the direct experience of specific projects affecting their territories and communities, rather emphasized a common perception of disenfranchisement, ignorance of their rights and concerns on the part of States and businesses enterprises, and constant life insecurity in the face of encroaching extractive activities,” according to Anaya.

Taking the long view
Mongolian President Tsakhia Elbegdorj spoke to Reuters about a law that bans mining in his country’s river and forest areas.
“Half of the territory is covered by exploration licenses. I think that’s enough,” he said.
“We have to save our wealth (for) our next generation.”

Massive Chevron payout looming?
A US appeals court has overruled a lower court’s decision that prevented Ecuadoran plaintiffs from collecting billions in damages (awarded by an Ecuadoran judge) from oil giant Chevron over pollution in the Amazon rain forest.
“In February, a judge in Ecuador ruled that Chevron should pay to clean up contamination in the oil fields where Texaco, bought by Chevron in 2001, once worked. But the company persuaded a U.S. judge to block enforcement, arguing that the verdict was the result of fraud. Chevron even filed a criminal conspiracy case against the Ecuadorans.”

Fraud refund
The Institute for Accountability in Southern Africa’s Paul Hoffman draws attention to a legal precedent he thinks should be relevant to the inquest called last week by South African President Jacob Zuma into a 1999 arms deal that is alleged to have involved bribes from a number of foreign companies.
“These findings, still good law, on the effect of bribes on contracts are the key to obtaining the refund of purchase prices paid to arms dealers who allegedly bribed their way into contention in the arms deals. A R70bn [US$ 9 billion] bonanza for taxpayers is surely a worthwhile endeavour.”

Abetting repression
The BBC reports UK-based Gamma International is denying that it supplied software to the ousted Egyptian regime so that it could monitor online voice calls and emails.
“The files from the Egyptian secret police’s Electronic Penetration Division described Gamma’s product as “the only security system in the world” capable of bugging Skype phone conversations on the internet.
They detail a five-month trial by the Egyptian secret police which found the product had ‘proved to be an efficient electronic system for penetrating secure systems [which] accesses email boxes of Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail networks’.”

With friends like these…
Development consultant Ian Smillie says Western governments and the humanitarian organizations that serve as “fig leaves covering up the inattention” of the international community will have to start behaving very differently in Somalia if they want to help provide long-term solutions to the conflict-racked, famine-stricken country.
“None of the humanitarians, [the Canadian International Development Agency] included, has anything to say about the roller-coaster involvement of the West in Somalia, alternately arming, then aiding, then invading, then abandoning the country – then supporting an Ethiopian invasion that led to the rise of the extremist al-Shabaab militia and their brutal but entirely logical expulsion of Western aid workers.”

Intellectual property vs. cancer treatment
The Guardian’s Sarah Boseley writes that the UN conference on non-communicable diseases has focused almost exclusively on prevention rather than treatment, an outcome the US and EU lobbied hard to achieve.
“The pharmaceutical industry and its supporters in the EU and US where research and manufacturing takes place are very keen that nobody should get the idea that a declaration which allowed poor countries to bypass patents and obtain cheap copies of normally expensive Aids drugs should in any way be mentioned in the context of NCDs. That might open the doors to developing nations using the legislation to obtain new cancer and heart drugs – which make huge profits for the companies in the rich world.”

Patents around the world
The UN News Centre reports new figures showing the number of international trademark and patent application rose in 2010, though global distribution remains highly uneven.
“The top 10 patent offices accounted for approximately 87 per cent of all [trademark] applications in 2009, with the United States, Japan and China filing about 60 per cent of the total.”

Latest Developments, September 16

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Broken promises
The UN says donors are not living up to their promises in Haiti and around the world.
“There is a troubling distance between what we have promised and what we are actually doing to support the global partnership for development. And that gap is expected to widen,” according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Missing plutonium
Wired’s Danger Room reports on the difficulties encountered by the US, which has sold 17.5 tons of fissile material to other countries over the last 60 years, as it seeks to “secure all vulnerable nuclear material” worldwide.
“And there’s just one other problem. Subtracting all the nuke material that’s been accounted for and secured still leaves 2,700 kg — nearly three tons — outstanding. And that’s enough material to make dozens of nuclear weapons.”

The drug hemisphere
The White House’s new list of major drug producing or transit countries names 22 states, of which 17 are in the Americas.
“Pursuant to section 706(1) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 2003 (Public Law 107-228)(FRAA), I hereby identify the following countries as major drug transit or major illicit drug producing countries: Afghanistan, The Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Burma, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela.”

Corporate transparency
In a piece carrying the headline “Licence to Loot,” the Economist looks into international efforts to end the secrecy surrounding beneficial ownership of companies.
“Campaigners and, increasingly, criminal-justice agencies want the rules tightened—and not only in faraway islands. The case for this is highlighted in “The Money Laundry”, a new book by Jason Sharman, an Australian academic. As a test, he tried creating companies in various places without using a real (verified) ID. Of the 47 providers of registration services he approached in OECD countries, no fewer than 35 agreed to form shell companies without requiring proper documents. Some also helped to open bank accounts. Classic tax havens were on the whole much more rigorous.”

Anti-bribery legislation
Global Financial Integrity’s Tom Cardamone writes about a new paper entitled “Busting Bribery: Sustaining the Global Momentum of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act” authored by a pair of American law professors to counter the US Chamber of Commerce’s recent campaign against the anti-bribery legislation.
“To the idea that a company could be insulated from a charge of bribery if it had an anti-corruption program in place [Harvard’s David] Kennedy and [Northeastern’s Dan] Danielsen note that this would merely allow corporations to implement ‘fig leaf’ FCPA compliance programs in order to avoid criminal culpability.  Rather than leveling the playing field as the Chamber suggests, this provision could increase the incidents of bribery while reducing the likelihood of conviction.”

Democratizing the IMF
According to the findings of a Center for Global Development online survey, development workers in 81 countries overwhelmingly favour an end to Europe’s exclusive hold on the International Monetary Fund’s leadership.
“First, both European and non-European participants reject Europe’s traditional selection prerogative by large margins, with equally strong support for an open, transparent, competitive selection process. Agreement with an open process characterizes 92 percent of respondents from low-income countries, 90 percent from middle-income countries, and 84 percent from high-income countries.”

Bad food
Calling voluntary guidelines inadequate, a UN expert called on national governments to stand up to the food industry by imposing taxes and tougher regulations on unhealthy foods that kill about 3 million people per year worldwide.
“It is crucial for world leaders to counter food industry efforts to sell unbalanced processed products and ready-to-serve meals too rich in transfats and saturated fats, salt and sugars. Food advertising is proven to have a strong impact on children, and must be strictly regulated in order to avoid the development of bad eating habits early in life,” according to Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier De Schutter.

Expensive food
Mother Jones food and agriculture blogger Tom Philpott rejects the Wall Street line that soaring demand and relatively stagnant supply, rather than rampant speculative trading, explain the record food prices that have pushed millions into poverty and hunger around the globe.
“One way that investors morally justify the price surge they have set off is by arguing that while it might boost hunger in the short term, higher prices draw additional investment into agriculture, which will help “feed the world” going forward. But this, too, is hype. Indeed, commodities aren’t the only ag-related bubble now in the process of puffing up—prices of farmland, too, have exploded as investors search for new ways to cash in on Wall Street’s food pitch. And as investors snatch up farmland in places like Africa and Latin America for export crops, the amount of land devoted to feeding low-income residents of those places dwindles, and food insecurity rises.”

NCD generics
Intellectual Property Watch reports on concerns that next week’s UN summit on non-communicable diseases will concentrate on prevention to the exclusion of a much-needed debate on treatment as NCDs become a bigger problem in poor countries.
“But public health advocates see a coming crisis in treatment and want measures now to address it. For instance, Health Action International issued a briefing paper this week showing medicine prices are often too high for those on low wages, and urging the summit to ‘refocus on the attainable goal of universal access to essential medicines as a core priority for the treatment of NCDs.’

Ideology promotion
London School of Economics PhD student Karl Muth argues Carnegie Mellon University is set to “sow the seeds of African neoliberalism” with its announcement of a planned new campus in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali.
“However, liberal universities have a history of large influence in post-conflict zones, particularly in places recovering from internal conflict.  While the influence of the Chicago Boys after the 1973 Chilean coup is the most famous example, various neoliberal institutions have had more subtle effects, from encouraging the rapid evolution of economic policy in the Philippines to opposing minimum wage laws in post-handover Hong Kong.  The disorder of post-internal-conflict political reformation combined with the fact that incoming regimes are more likely to have military might than economic expertise allows foreign institutions to have disproportionately more influence.”

Latest Developments, July 22

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A new Médecins Sans Frontières report suggests a number of major pharmaceutical companies will no longer provide antiretrovirals at discounted prices to middle-income countries, including ones with large numbers of  people living with HIV, such India, Brazil and Thailand. And while Health Global Access Project’s Brook Baker praises Gilead Sciences for recently becoming the first drug-maker to join the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) that aims to improve access to affordable HIV/AIDS treatments in poor countries, he argues the move may not have been as philanthropic as it might seem. The agreement excludes many “middle-income countries with a high HIV-burden” and “of the 111 countries included in the geographical scope of the tenofovir MPP license, Gilead has patent applications pending or granted in only 2 of the licensed countries, India and Indonesia.”

In other patent news, World Intellectual Property Organization delegates have wrapped up a week of meetings without completing drafts of treaties to protect genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore. A representative of indigenous peoples expressed concern that their voices were not being sufficiently heard.

Britain’s Macmillan Publishers has agreed to a hefty fine for bribes its education division paid in Africa in the hopes of securing contracts. And a confidential government memo dating from 2008 has revealed Canada’s asbestos industry, which critics say endangers the health and lives of people in the handful of poor countries which still import the substance, may be on its last legs due to dwindling reserves.

Somalia’s Al-Shabab militants, who control much of the country, are still blocking a number of aid agencies despite a recent announcement to the contrary and have called the UN’s declaration of famine “pure propaganda” even though the international organization has laid out the specific criteria it uses to make such assessments. The UN secretary general has written a plea for the world community to help the Somali famine’s victims, “the vast majority of them women and children.” Indeed, the photo accompanying the LA Times piece notwithstanding, more than 80 percent of those fleeing Somalia are women and children. This fact has prompted Al Jazeera to ask where the men are, with some suggesting they are being forced to fight in the country’s civil war. Meanwhile, the Guardian’s John Vidal blames the famine, in part, on what he calls an “insidious war” against pastoralists who “produce more and better quality meat and generate more cash per hectare than “modern” Australian and US ranches” but are being squeezed out “by large-scale farming, the expansion of national parks, and game reserves and conservation.”

Al Jazeera also asks if this week’s UN Security Council statement on the threat to global security posed by climate change is “a real opportunity to achieve significant results or an attempt to divert attention from the root causes of the problem and away from the countries that cause global warming and distribute the burden evenly on world nations.”

Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass proposes a so-called “restoration” doctrine, by which he means “a U.S. foreign policy based on restoring this country’s strength and replenishing its resources—economic, human and physical.” He says the idea is very different from isolationism in that it involves carrying out an “active foreign policy.” But restoration would mean engaging in “fewer wars of choice” abroad, such as those fought in Vietnam, Iraq and Libya, and making smart cuts to discretionary spending at home. Haass sees restoration as a short-term objective that could lay the groundwork for what he believes should be America’s real foreign policy goal: “integration, which aims to develop rules and institutions to govern international relations and persuade other major powers to see that these rules are followed.”

Reflecting on a new report entitled “Resource Scarcity, Fair Shares and Development,” Oxfam’s Duncan Green argues that both the left and the right argue away the idea of resource limits in their own way. He also says there is an important distinction between the “new scarcity” of planetary capacity and the largely local and socially determined ‘old scarcity’ that has always left poor people on the outside looking in. In his view, most of the scarcities are primarily local and, as a result, “we should be careful about lumping them all together or going too global, especially when it comes to solutions.”

Latest Developments, July 18

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UN General Assembly president Joseph Deiss has urged reform of the Security Council’s size and membership, saying “any solution to the long-running debate on making the Council’s composition more representative ultimately lies with the 193 Member States of the world body.” Except that in realitiy, responsibility “ultimately lies” with the US, China, Russia, the UK and France who, as the five permanent members of the Security Council, enjoy veto power over charter changes. For example, even if a two-thirds majority voted to scrap Security Council vetoes, any of the five permanent members could trump those 130+ votes with a single “no” of their own.

Former UN assistant secretary general Ramesh Thakur argues the UN “remains our best and only hope for unity-in-diversity in addressing problems without passports that require solutions sans visas,” while conceding the organization has to work harder to meet what he terms the “legitimacy criterion” and the “performance criterion.” He calls for the reform of a number of UN bodies, including the Security Council, as well as “greater transparency, democracy and inclusiveness in decision-making.”

According to a new survey of British public views regarding UK foreign policy, the majority do not think ethics should play a role in international relations. “The government’s conception of security, linking spending on development with a direct enhancement of the security of British citizens, has yet to resonate with the public. Moreover, findings that show “the general public and opinion-formers consider aid largely irrelevant to Britain’s international reputation, and as playing only a small role in serving national interests” could make it tough for the government to stick to its commitment to raise aid levels to 0.7 percent of GDP, according to Chatham House researcher Rob Bailey.

In an editorial entitled “Human rights at home, too,” Canada’s Globe and Mail suggests the EU needs to do a little introspection if it wants to have a credible voice when criticizing human rights violations elsewhere in the world: “The EU is quick to wag fingers at other countries that fail to respect human rights. It’s time they had a look at the ramshackle dwellings and decrepit shacks the Roma inhabit in their own backyard.” To which one commenter responded: “And Canada should look at how it treats Aboriginal Canadians before we get to (sic) high and mighty about our position on racism and human rights.”

Former G7/G8 sherpa Gordon Smith frets about the future role for Canada, a country which accounts for roughly 0.5 percent of the global population, in international diplomatic power circles. As for what Canada’s current government has to offer the international community, Maclean’s Magazine’s Paul Wells argues now that the Conservatives finally have a majority government and a weak opposition means they can do more or less as they wish within parliament, they are adjusting their persecution complex to see the rest of the world as “an excellent substitute enemy.”

A new Bureau of Investigative Journalism piece disputes the US claim that drones have killed no civilians in Pakistan for nearly a year. The report comes right on the heels of efforts to seek the arrest of ex-CIA general counsel John Rizzo for his role in approving drone targets.

The international community is looking to regulate the conventional arms trade next summer but may yet leave off riot-control equipment, which some critics refer to as “weapons of repression.”

The Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting declares South Sudan “the biggest development challenge in the world.” She writes: “What faces South Sudan is daunting: it needs help on the scale of a Marshall Plan for one country. It’s an unprecedented development challenge and, so far, there has been more goodwill than action or sense of urgency.” Meanwhile, the last country to bear that distinction, Haiti, still has 600,000-700,000 people living in tents, most of its destroyed infrastructure has not been rebuilt and most of the rubble has not been removed 18 months after the earthquake, according to physician and longtime Haiti advocate Paul Farmer.

Also writing for the Guardian, Nicholas Watt describes the “new Scramble for Africa,” which, he says, China appears to be winning. Africa also has Google scrambling, as it tries to provide more local content in local languages, in order to get into a largely untapped market.

World Trade Organization chief Pascal Lamy kicked off a conference to review the Aid for Trade initiative – intended to provide poor countries with the tools and expertise needed to boost trade – with words of praise for the six year-old program: “Results range from increased export volumes to more employment, to faster customs clearance times and impacts on poverty.” Note the language: “increased export volumes,” “more employment” and “faster customs clearance times” but no modifier for “impacts on poverty.” The same conference saw the unveiling of the Transparency in Trade Initiative, described by one UN agency as a “project aiming to eliminate the transparency gap resulting from the lack of access to data on country-specific trade policies”

And finally, Monday also saw the beginning of a week-long conference on intellectual property and genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore.

Latest Developments, July 12

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There was a big step forward in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, as US-based Gilead Sciences became the first pharmaceutical company to agree to place the intellectual property rights for some of its products in the Medicines Patent Pool that will allow generic drug makers to copy them on the cheap. “This is not just a one-off. The whole field is changing … there will be more to follow,” according to Ellen ‘t Hoen, the pool’s executive director.

Unfortunately, the pool only works for drugs that have already been developed, leaving the problem of incentivizing research into illnesses that do not significantly affect wealthy markets. Not to mention the fact that tobacco remains by far the biggest killer worldwide and the possibility that CIA dodginess in Pakistan could fuel the kinds of rumours that hampered polio eradication efforts a few years ago.

US Senator Carl Levin has introduced the “Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act” in the upper house. The proposed law includes a country-by-country reporting provision that would “help anti-corruption and economic development efforts in developing countries by creating more transparency and accountability in the business dealings between multinational companies and governments,” according to Global Financial Integrity director Raymond Baker.

Senator Levin’s proposal follows in the tradition of the Dodd-Frank Act which passed into law last year and is now in the hands of the Securities and Exchange Commission for the formulation of compliance enforcement rules. “In the ongoing rule-making process, the SEC has an opportunity to demonstrate that the United States takes transparency and accountability seriously and intends to act as a global leader in fostering secure, equitable, long-term resource partnerships with developing nations,” according to Oxfam’s Kathryn Martorana.

Speaking at the Open Government Partnership high-level meeting, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared: “I think we can say without fear of contradiction that there is an undeniable connection between how a government operates and whether its people flourish. When a government invites its people to participate, when it is open as to how it makes decisions and allocates resources, when it administers justice equally and transparently, and when it takes a firm stance against corruption of all kinds, that government is, in the modern world, far more likely to succeed in designing and implementing effective policies and services.” Meanwhile, the UN special rapporteur on torture has complained US authorities refuse to grant him unmonitored access to alleged WikiLeaker Bradley Manning.

UK International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell told a London School of Economics audience “this Coalition Government is working to make it easier for companies to do business in Africa – so creating more opportunities for poor people. We are absolutely determined to make this the defining message of the Coalition Government in this area.” With Africa’s share of global manufacturing currently sitting at one percent, there is undoubtedly room for growth.

A Guardian piece celebrates the promotion of a handful of countries from the World Bank’s low-income to lower middle-income designation as evidence it is possible to escape the poverty trap. At the same time, the authors recognize the contribution of cyclical commodity prices to recent income increases in certain African countries, the fact that the African graduates are offtrack on their MDG commitments, and the limitations of a ranking based solely on gross national income (GNI). In fact, one of the promoted countries, Zambia, still sits 153rd out of 172 countries on the UN’s more nuanced Human Development Index, five places behind Haiti.

For those countries that manage to escape the aforementioned poverty trap, a World Bank VP has advice on avoiding “middle-income trap” and “maintaining high growth in developing countries.” Whereas a new World Bank blog post waxes enthusiastic about car-sharing’s potential to take advantage of excess capacity and avoid unnecessary use of non-renewable resources. What the author neglects to consider is that such enterprises are bad for growth and GNI.

The UN Security Council has unanimously adopted a resolution to protect schools and hospitals from becoming military targets. UNICEF executive director Anthony Lake welcomed the news but stressed monitoring, denunciation and sanctions were insufficient to bring about real change. “We also have to find practical new ways to prevent these acts from occurring,” he said.

Transparency International’s Tobias Bock issues a plea for the Arms Trade Treaty currently under negotiation to include anti-corruption provisions, arguing that the massive corruption of the weapons trade can have a major impact on sustainable development. He also points out that while “there are international treaties to control the sale of many goods, from dinosaur bones to postage stamps, there is no such treaty to control the trade in weapons worldwide.”

And for the second straight year, Luanda, Angola and N’Djamena, Chad sit first and third respectively atop the list of the most expensive cities for expatriate workers. Tokyo sits in second spot, sandwiched between the capitals of two of the world’s poorest countries.