Author: Amicus Curious

8th EGA Legal Affairs Forum

The European Generics Association will be hosting the 8th EGA Legal Affairs Forum between the 22 and 23 March 2012 in Brussels.

It will feature an interesting programme including:

Recent developments on SPCs:
• SPCs caselaw and legislation update

  • – The galanthamine and the memantine decisions
  • – The Medeva and the Georgetown references to the CJEU
  • – Paediatric extensions: negative term SPCs

• Combination products in the pipeline

  • – the effect of the Medeva judgment

• Litigating SPCs around Europe – escitalopram case study

  • – What is the product/active ingredient? Regulatory and litigation strategies

• Roundtable presentations on national escitalopram SPC cases: Germany, France, The Netherlands, Belgium
Maximising legal professional privilege:
• Privilege in litigation in Europe
(General overview, comparing approach in different Member States)
• Privilege and European Commission investigations/patent settlement cases
(The Akzo Nobel case, practical issues arising from investigations – privilege and disclosure, update on the Commission’s investigations into patent settlements)
Patent enforcement in Europe:

  • Views on the review of Directive 2004/48/EC on the enforcement of IP rights
  • Views on the changes in the EU patent system: single court and patent with unitary effect
  • Update on court cases that impact the industry

The Full Programme can be found here and it starts with a welcome buffet lunch sponsored by Bird & Bird.

Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property

Johanna Gibson’s “Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property: Law and Practice” won’t be released by the OUP until July, but at 704 pages, it looks well worth the wait. What will be in it? Topics promised include benefit-sharing, ownership, creation of intellectual property rights, disclosure of origin, coherence and consistency with international intellectual property regimes. For those who already have “Community Resources: Intellectual Property, International Trade and Protection of Traditional Knowledge”, 2005, ISBN: 0754644367, this work promises much.

Johanna Gibson is Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law and Director of the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute (QMIPRI) and many of us will know her past contributions to the excellent IPKat blog (IPKat is a registered Community Trade Mark 🙂

Is the Value of Bioprospecting Contracts too low?

This is a challenging question indeed, which is addressed in the current issue of  The International Journal of Ecological Economics and Statistics (Vol. 26, Issue No.3, 2012) in its special volume titled “Socioeconomics and Management of Bioprospecting“.
The question of “Is the Value of Bioprospecting Contracts Too Low?” is the title of the Markanya and Nunes paper. As they say:

“In this paper we seek to understand better how a biodiversity resource use value in production is determined, and how the real value is obscured by the fact that the resource is largely open access. We attempt to analyse how  special arrangements, set on top of a basic framework in which the resource open access is limited in what it can achieve and in the ‘price’ that will emerge from any transaction between the buyers of the rights and the sellers of the rights. The whole volume allows us to read the  ideas presented at last October’s CBD conference in Nagoya.”

There is of course a lot more to read:

“This volume is therefore characterized by a selection of papers that address issues such as: incentives for R&D in the economic sectors that use products of bioprospecting; implications of recent legal changes on access to genetic resources on sharing of knowledge; understanding better the nature of partnerships for access and benefit sharing in diverse sectors that use genetic materials; the nature of special agreements for access and benefit sharing and why they result in a low market price for the ‘owners’ of the resources;”Yoy

If not immediately reading the whole text, the abstracts are available at: The International Journal of Ecological Economics and Statistics (Vol. 26, Issue No.3, 2012)

6th Panafrican Workshop on Access to genetic resources and sharing of the benefits (ABS)

30th January this year will be a busy day for CBD and ABS workshops. Taking place on the same day are the

APA African Initiative: 6th Panafrican Workshop on Access to genetic resources and sharing of the benefits (ABS), Limbé, Cameroun
and the
SCBD: Sub-Regional Workshop for Central, South and East Africa on Capacity-building for Implementation of the CBD Programme of Work on Protected Areas; Cape Town, South Africa

More details of both these workshops can be had from the Executive Secretariat of COMIFAC (comifac@comifac.org)

Nagoya Protocol – Guinea and Morocco sign

The latest signatories to the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are Guinea and Morocco on 9 December 2011. The total number of signatories is now 70. The Nagoya Protocol was opened for signature in February 2011. 90 days after deposit of the 50th instrument of ratification, the Nagoya Protocol will enter into force.