Republished with permission from Geneva-based IP Watch
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – With protests against draft US legislation like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act ongoing and the European Parliament voting on 17 November for a resolution to request that the United States should be “refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names,” politicians are talking a lot about technology for the internet domain name system. But at the same time, engineers are getting more political and are intensively discussing technology providing the tools for blocking – by governments and private parties.
For the community that cares for the functioning of the domain name system (DNS), it came as a shock when Paul Vixie, founder of the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), said that the BIND software would allow the filtering out of sites with a bad “reputation” – like listed malware sites – and also the “rewriting” of DNS answers – manipulating what people get to see when asking for domain names.
Vixie is a guru of the DNS and one of the authors of the letter by well-known experts against DNS blocking in the Protect IP Act. But he is perhaps best-known for being the father of BIND, which has for a decade been the open source tool that makes the DNS work.
More Filter-Friendly DNS Software
Jim Reid, one of the chairs of the DNS working group at the Réseaux IP Europeéns, said during a recent debate about principles that he was “rather saddened” by ISC’s decision to allow the rewriting. “We’re giving the bad guys tools,” Reid warned.
The rewriting – which sends back a “lie” upon a request to the DNS from someone looking for a website – “also sends a rather nasty message saying it’s okay to do this kind of thing.” What is worse from the engineers’ standpoint with the rewriting is that it breaks new measures to secure the DNS, because the “lies” are detected and dropped without users knowing what happened.
The ‘lying” is currently happening for domains seized by the US government agency ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement), some of them legal in their country of origin, like the Spanish RojaDirecta.com (a case discussed intensively by the experts). When typing RojaDirecta.com, users do not get to that site, but to a warning/blocking site by the ICE.
It is this kind of case that has stirred up debate in the European Parliament, pushed by the European Digital Right initiative (EDRi). Read more…
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Supermarket chain Migros is doing its bit to make Switzerland more habitable for endangered hares, birds and plants by empowering Facebook users to help support TerraSuisse financially. Migros will supple enough seeds for an IP (integrated production) Suisse farmer working with the TerraSuisse programme to plant one square metre of wildflowers in 2012 for each Facebook user who “likes” the Terrasuisse FB page.
TerraSuisse is Migros’s sustainable development label. Farmers who apply integrated production methods, which are close to organic, make a commitment to provide small habitats, or safe spaces, within larger fields and orchards, for wild flora and fauna.
(video) Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Data released 16 September by Wipo, the World Intellectual Property Organization based in Geneva, shows a slowdown in IP registrations in 2008 and, based on partial data, in 2009, but the global picture is mixed. IP registrations include patent, trademark and industrial design applications, with industrial design applications suffering less from the glocal economic downturn than the other two categories.
The one country that bucked the mostly downward trend was China, although it accounted for an overall fall in trademark applications in 2008 while remaining the country with the largest number of trademark requests, 670,000.
The figures are part of the World Intellectual Property Indicators 2010, published by Wipo, with figures mainly from 2008-09.
Patents: applications, grants down
The number of patents granted in 2008 is estimated to have fallen by 0.6 percent, to 780,000 for the year. South Korea alone had a 32.5 percent drop and the overall figure was saved from showing a serious global contraction by China’s growth in patent grants. The fastest growing area was in demand for energy-related patents: fuel cells, solar, wind and geothermal energy. Patent applications filed for those technologies increased in nine years nearly seven-fold, from 584 applications in 2000 to 3,424 applications in 2009.
Applications for patents fell in virtually every country in 2009, preliminary data show, down 10 percent in Japan and down 5 percent in South Korea, but China’s applications rose by 8 percent.
Some 6.7 million patents were in force worldwide in 2008, a 5.3 percent increase over 2007. Patents in force in China and the Republic of Korea saw double-digit growth at 24 percent and 10.1 percent, respectively.
Residents of Japan and the US owned around 48% of total patents in force in 2008.
Trademarks: Bric nations, 30% of applications
The Bric (Brazil, Russian Federation, India and China) countries accounted for 30 percent of all trademark applications in 2008, far above their combined share in patents. Overall, trademark applications fell by 0.9 percent in 2008, the first decrease since 2001. They rose again in 2009, first figures show, but only in some countries: China and France recorded considerable growth in trademarks filings, while Germany, Japan and the US reported a drop.
In 2008, approximately 2.37 million trademarks were registered across the world, 7 for percent growth compared to 2007. China accounted for around 90 percent of the worldwide growth in trademark registrations. It also recorded the highest growth in these registrations (+56.8 percent), followed by the UK (+23.6) and the Russian Federation (+21.7).
Industrial design registrations led by China
China saw a 17 percent increase in industrial design applications in 2008, accounting for much of the world’s total growth of 5.7 percent in this area. France in 2008 remained the country holding the largest number of these patents, some 400,000, but China is expected to overtake France in 2009.
Video, presentation of the World Indicators by Francis Gurry, head of Wipo in Geneva
Excerpt reprinted with permission from Intellectual Property Watch (full article)
WTO TRIPS Council considers workshop On public health amendment
By Kaitlin Mara
The World Trade Organization group on intellectual property rights met 2 March and ended early, discussing a potential workshop on an amendment intended to ease access to cheaper generic medicines in countries without a pharmaceutical manufacturing sector, a new proposal from Bolivia, and three separate longstanding IP [intellectual property] issues with no major changes.
Countries were unable to agree to hold a workshop on the so-called “paragraph 6” agreement, which allow countries to issue a compulsory license on drugs primarily intended for export to developing countries in need of cheaper generic versions and unable to manufacture them themselves.
Instead, the chair of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Council said he will hold informal consultations on the issue, though the details of when and how they will be conducted are not yet decided. The United States appears to be the main opponent of holding a workshop, according to several sources. For more background on this issue, see (IPW, WTO/TRIPS, 1 March 2010).
Reprinted in GenevaLunch with permission from IP Watch. IP Watch is a Geneva-based newsletter covering intellectual property issues.
By William New, editor, IP Watch
The United States Department of Justice yesterday told the US District Court for the Southern District of New York that progress had been made on its concerns in the settlement allowing internet search giant Google to scan millions of books into a searchable database. But the government lawyers continue to have doubts on copyright, class certification and antitrust issues, they said.
Justice made its views known in a 31-page filing [pdf] filed with the court on 4 February. While it praised efforts so far, the department said, “the amended settlement agreement suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the court in this litigation.”
In The Authors Guild Inc. et al. v. Google Inc. case, the district court is scheduled to hold a hearing on the proposed amended settlement agreement on 18 February.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Least Developed Countries (LDCs) will begin to work more closely with the World Intellectual Property Organization (Wipo) to incorporate intellectual propety into development strategies, following their signing of a ministerial declaration Friday 24 July in Geneva. The declaration focuses on using IP to protect resources and encourage innovation; exceptions and copyright limitations are not highlighted.
The declaration “‘will be the ‘blueprint for expanding and strengthening Wipo’s future cooperation with LDCs,’” Narendra Sabharwal, Wipo deputy director general on cooperation for development told Intellectual Property Watch, a Geneva-based newsletter that closely tracks IP developments.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Francis Gurry of Australia was elected the new director general of Wipo (World Intellectual Property Organization) by acclamation Tuesday, as the organization began its week-long annual meeting. In his first speech as head of the group he pointed to digital technologies as posing the greatest threat to IP rights today.
