23 April 2025
Patents and the Right to a Healthy Environment
How may patent law contribute to or hinder the technologies and innovation needed to conserve a healthy environment? This brief contribution seeks to make two points in this respect. The first is that the role patent law can play on its own should not be overestimated. The second is that future studies in this direction should take an innovation systems approach. While neither point is new, I believe connecting them and building on key publications that first expressed them serves as a useful agenda for future research in this field. Continue reading >>
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31 October 2021
From Charity to Justice in the Pandemic
Waiving intellectual property rights is not a panacea in the current pandemic, but it may remove obstacles and, importantly, would send the right message. Germany should therefore change its position and support a decision in the World Trade Organization (WTO) to that effect. Donations are good and necessary in the short-term, but they must not be mistaken for acts justice in international relations. Continue reading >>10 May 2021
The World Turned Upside Down
Gates’ charitable foundation and the World Health Organization launched the app ‘GoGiveOne’ where individuals can donate money to ensure ‘vaccines for everyone, everywhere’. It sounds like an opportunity to respond to the crisis. But individualizing a structural problem prevents any real solution to it. Continue reading >>31 December 2020
Speaking of Solidarity
Today the official deadline for members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to submit a report to its General Council on a waiver proposal expires. This waiver would allow WTO members not to comply with certain obligations of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) for a limited amount of time in order to be able to effectively prevent, contain and treat COVID-19. For now, members have failed to take this first step towards a temporary suspension of TRIPS obligations but they agreed to continue the discussions beyond today's deadline. Nonetheless, the proposal highlights that intellectual property rights can not only act as an obstacle to global and just access to vaccines and medical equipment but also that the exisiting legal framework is inadequate to tackle crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. Continue reading >>
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