News Bulletin

South Centre Research Paper No. 70

Author: Carlos M. Correa

The incorporation of intellectual property into trade agreements has not proven to bring about the promised benefits. The premises that have underpinned the global strengthening and expansion of intellectual property through such agreements – namely that the same standards of protection are suitable for countries with different levels of development and that innovation will be boosted – do not match the reality.

Technology has become essential for education. Many countries around the world have started to incorporate technology in the educational environment, thereby changing the educational process in order to give 21st-century learners the new abilities they need.

Speaking at the National Council for the Blind of Ireland, the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Ms Mary Mitchell-O’Connor TD, today announced the long-promised Government approval for the drafting of a General Scheme of Bill entitled the Copyright and Related Rights (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2016. The Bill is in response to the Modernising Copyright Report published in October 2013, compiled by the Copyright Review Committee appointed in 2011. But the response does not cover all of the issues in the Report. Instead, the main issues covered the Heads will include:

By  Anna Mazgal

The education exception benefits teachers, students, and researchers who need access to all types of educational and informational resources that are often protected by copyright. This exception balances the right to education with the rights of authors. Maintaining the balance is never easy, and some issues still await their interpretation in Estonia. Still, Estonia enjoys the widest education exception provisions among all EU member states.

The European Commission is currently canvassing opinion on two interesting copyright issues: neighbouring rights and the panorama exception.

Actually, the panorama exception isn't that interesting at all - it's a pointless bit of chin-stroking. The Commission is wondering whether people should be allowed to take photos of public buildings and distribute them without the permission of the architect.

Of course they should. Let's all move on.

Neighbouring rights, however, is a thornier matter.

By Amanda Staller

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is making his voice heard in the quest for open access of vital scientific research.

After losing his son to cancer in May of 2015, Biden has been on a mission to accelerate cancer research in search of a cure. In order to make those leaps and bounds in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, Biden is now pushing for an open access database to gain better understanding of the disease and advance innovation.

by Glyn Moody

We paid for the research with taxes, and Internet sharing is easy. What's the hold-up?

But this shift towards hybrid open access brought with it an unexpected problem. In March 2014, the Wellcome Trust published a report looking at the cost of open access publishing. One worrying trend it noted was "the high cost of hybrid open access publishing, which we have found to be nearly twice that of born-digital fully open access journals.

By Chandra R Srikanth

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has backed the principle of net neutrality, even as he admitted it was a complicated topic and that getting access to knowledge for poor people is equally important.

by Woody Hibbard

Uruguay is in the process of updating its copyright law, and in April a bill was preliminarily approved in the Senate. The law introduces changes that would benefit students, librarians, researchers, and the general public by legalizing commonplace digital practices, adding orphan works exceptions, and removing criminal penalties for minor copyright infringements. University students were the original proponents of the limitations and exceptions bill.

By Martin Paul Eve

The title here is a little deceptive. Because, clearly, I do know what we mean when we call scholarly communications platforms ‘sustainable’. We mean that they will, through one business model or another, manage to maintain themselves without research funders ploughing endless cash into them. Yet, I’ve been thinking about this recently and it comes with several pre-assumptions that are quite tricky to unpick.