Global Governance of Genetic Resources

Global Governance of Genetic Resources: Access and Benefit Sharing after the Nagoya Protocol (Routledge Research in Global Environmental Governance) edited by Sebastian Oberthür and Kristin Rosendal is to be to be published 1st March 2013 by Routledge. Running to 272 pages, it analyses the status and prospects of the global governance of Access Benefit Sharing (ABS) following the 2010 Nagoya Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The CBD’s initial 1992 framework of global ABS governance established the objective of sharing the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources fairly between countries and communities. Since then, ABS has been a contested issue in international politics – not least due to the failure of effective implementation of the original CBD framework. The Nagoya Protocol therefore aims to improve and enhance this framework. Compared to the slow rate of progress on climate change, it has been considered a major achievement of global environmental governance, but it has also been coined a ‘masterpiece of ambiguity’. This book analyses the role of a variety of actors in the emergence of the Nagoya Protocol and provides an up-to-date assessment of the core features of the architecture of global ABS governance.

Sebastian Oberthür is Academic Director of the Institute for European Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium, and  Kristin Rosendal is a research Professor at Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Norway.

 

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)