Re: Helping Developing Countries with IP issues

On 05/06/97, James Love <love[_at_]cptech.org> wrote:
>
> I am working with a number of developing countries, who occasionally need
> some legal advice on matters concerning intellectual property laws. For
> example, South Africa is currently debating legislation which would permit
> (or outlaw) parallel imports of pharmaceutical drugs. The South African
> government received very misleading (I'm being gentle) legal advice from
> attorneys representing the large pharmaceutical companies. Many South
> American countries were astounded to learn that U.S. antitrust authorities
> or courts often impose compulsory licensing of copyrights or patents, and
> are struggling to find out what discretion they have in this area under
> existing GATT/WTO and NAFTA agreements. (As are Bangladesh, Nepal, India,
> Sri ka, Pakistan and many other countries). Courts in Guatemala recently
> threw out a national ban on the use of the Gerber baby (and similar ads)
> to market infant formula to illiterate mothers, because Sandoz claimed
> this violated international law, namely the GATT protections of trademark
> provisions. Many developing countries are not familiar with U.S. concepts
> of Fair Use.
>
> In some cases, the interested groups are government officials, in other
> cases, they are NGOs or trade associations. I would be grateful to know
> the names of persons who would be willing offer some pro bono legal help
> in these cases, from time to time.

I am a course leader of a LLM in Intellectual Property in the United Kingdom. We currently have several students from African and Asian nations studying on the programme, who plan to take their knowledge back to their countries when they finish study. I am often horrified by some of their stories concerning big business organisations exploiting ignorance of IP rights in their home countries for commercial gain. We have several staff working in the IP and international trade area. A particular specialism is EU and national european laws, though we do have a US attorney specialising in IP also. I will need to discuss this with my Dean of Faculty, but in principle I would be delighted to help.

Would you be interested ?

Mark Wing, Law Faculty Southampton Institute. http://www.solent.ac.uk/law
<mark.wing[_at_]solent.ac.uk> Received on Fri Jun 06 1997 - 15:14:56 GMT