IPTango

Wednesday, 14 February 2018

Chile: Rechazan recurso por lanzamiento de discos compactos de patrimonio Kawésqar

Rodrigo Ramirez Herrera @ramahr February 14, 2018 No comments:

Los kawésqar, kawashkar, alacalufes o alakalufes son un grupo nómada indígena de la zona Austral de Chile, que recorrían en canoa los canales de la Patagonia occidental y por los canales que forman las islas ubicadas al oeste de la Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego y al sur del estrecho de Magallanes. Su lengua es el kawésqar.

En el año 1971 se recopilaron cantos y relatos de este pueblo originario respecto de cuya propiedad intelectual se interpuso un recurso de protección constitucional en la Corte de Apelaciones de Punta Arenas en contra de la productora Etnomedia y Consultora Limitada, el Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes de Magallanes y académico del Departamento de Antropología de la Universidad de Chile por la difusión de dicho material. El recurso fue rechazado de forma unánime porque la recurrente (Margarita Vargas) no posee un derecho indubitado sobre el material difundido.

Según resuelve la Corte, la recurrente no tiene ese derecho pues la recurrente no lo señala y aun entendiendo que el derecho respectivo sea el de propiedad intelectual del material utilizado, éste se encuentra controvertido, puesto que los recurridos sostienen que se trata de un derecho de propiedad sobre el patrimonio cultural inmaterial que le pertenece a todo el Pueblo Kawésqar, no pudiendo ejercitarse un derecho de autor sobre éste en forma individual, el que, a mayor abundamiento, pertenece a la Universidad de Chile que lo adquirió por donación de los familiares de la antropóloga Dra. Grebe, sin que se acredite, además, que la recurrente tenga un poder para representar a la familia Kawésqar.

La sentencia agrega que, atendida la naturaleza del recurso de protección no es la vía idónea para resolver una situación jurídica relativa a la propiedad del material correspondiente al Pueblo Kawésqar, como igualmente si la recurrente es o no titular de la misma, ni menos aún acerca de su naturaleza, dilucidando si es un derecho de propiedad sobre el patrimonio cultural inmaterial de la comunidad antes mencionada.

En consecuencia, como no puede ejercitarse un derecho de autor sobre el material en forma individual y no existe en el asunto planteado un derecho indubitado, deberá recurrirse a la vía ordinaria que corresponda, en un procedimiento de lato conocimiento, en donde existe una etapa de discusión y prueba, en el que habrá de discutirse los aspectos antes señalados.

Fuente: Poder Judicial Corte de Apelaciones de Punta Arenas rol 737 - 2017

Perú y Australia suscriben TLC

Gilberto Macias (@gmaciasb) February 14, 2018 No comments:

Gracias a nuestros amigos de Clarke, Modet & Cº, nos enteramos que el pasado 12 de febrero Perú y Australia han suscrito un tratado de libre comercio que eliminará aranceles entre ambos países. El acuerdo ha sido denominado como el acuerdo bilateral más “ambicioso” que ha firmado Perú.

Además del evidente impacto tributario, el tratado aborda los siguientes asuntos en materia de Propiedad Intelectual:

La promoción de la protección eficiente, adecuada y balanceada, así como la ejecución de los derechos de Propiedad Intelectual.
El trato nacional, que asegura que los propietarios de derechos de ambos países reciban el mismo trato que los nacionales peruanos y australianos.
El establecimiento de mecanismos para facilitar la cooperación entre Australia y el Perú, en relación con la protección y ejecución de la propiedad intelectual.
La promoción de transparencia de los sistemas de propiedad intelectual, facilitando a los agentes económicos para obtener información sobre derechos existentes.
El reforzamiento de la centralidad del Acuerdo sobre los Aspectos de los Derechos de Propiedad Intelectual relacionados con el Comercio (ADPIC) y los tratados de la Organización Mundial de la Propiedad Intelectual.

El tratado entrará en vigor 60 días luego de que las partes intercambien notificaciones certificando que han completado los procedimientos legales respectivos o en cualquier intercambio de notificaciones que las partes acuerden.

El texto completo del acuerdo se puede consultar aquí.

China and Brazil: taking the highway?

Patricia Covarrubia February 12, 2018 No comments:

February 1st saw the launch of the Instituto Nacional da Propiedad Industrial (INPI)'s Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) pilot project with the State Intellectual Property Institute of China (SIPO). The project will last two years and the application are capped up to 200. The rules of this PPH are found in Resolution 209/2018.

Speeding the process: cake in the staff common room.

Both parties will be able to use the result of the examination of the patent application and so, accelerating the assessment process in the other office. The PPH is a fast-track examination agreement; this is so, because the parties involved enable work-sharing. At first instance, the applicant whose claims have been found to be patentable by either the INPI or SIPO may ask for accelerated processing of their equivalent application that is pending before the other office.

Brazil also has a PPH with the European Patent Office signed back in November 2017. This project will run for two years and will start early 2018 (more information here and here). The EPO only had a PPH with one Latin America country i.e. Mexico. Brazil has three more PPH agreements: United States - until June, 2018 (reported here), Japan, and with the countries members of PROSUR - running from four years and with the probability to be extended (here).

Source INPI.

Brazil’s IPO backlog

Patricia Covarrubia February 10, 2018 No comments:

According to the Instituto Nacional da Propiedade Industrial (INPI) its backlog was reduced in 2017. These is counting all applications ie patents (by 7.6%), trade marks (by 14,9%) and industrial designs (by 26%). In fact, in 2017 INPI was deciding more cases that what they were receiving.

Could be my office :(

This was the result of increasing labour by 26% working in the office (public servants) plus improving INPI’s e-system. By 2018, there is even more plans to keep reducing the backlog. There is an investment of R $ 20 million in the Institute funded by the Brazilian Agency for Industrial Development.

More information here (statistic are in English and Portuguese). Source INPI.

Stop the Press: Decree encouraging innovation and scientific research is out

Patricia Covarrubia February 09, 2018 No comments:

Brazil. Yesterday (08/02/2018) the Official Gazette published Decree No. 9,283, of February 7, 2018, which establishes measures to encourage innovation, scientific and technological (ICT) research in the productive environment. This Decree regulates the Law of Innovation (no. 10,973).

In regards to intellectual property it establishes that the parties shall, in a specific legal instrument, set up the following:

ownership of IP;
participation in the results of the commercial exploitation of the creations resulting from the partnership;
status of commissioned works;
assignment of IP rights, licensing and technology transfer (TT);
if there are human resources training, IP rights should also be established.

In the case of public ICT Institutions, they should report annually to the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications on their IP policy – including works developed and the protection required, granted, licensed or if there has been TT licences agreement, among others.

Source INPI.

Make-up: a copyright affair – Argentina says YES!

Patricia Covarrubia February 08, 2018 No comments:

At the moment I am teaching my students copyright: the subject matter of protection. One of the big issues and moot questions we cover are tattoos, graffiti, make-up, an ice sculpture and the likes.

Today I was reading an interesting case decided in Argentina back in November 2017 which covers whether make-up is subject matter of protection. Is make-up a painting? In the UK a make-up is not copyright protected. According to the Merchandising Corporation of America Inc. and Others v Harpbond Ltd and Others case, make-up does NOT fit into the dictionary as a painting and, painting: must be on a surface – ‘a face is NOT a surface’. But these does not fit in our era anymore, does it? Is skin a surface? For example, exactly a year ago the BBC reported ‘The man who sold his back to an art dealer’ – the man’s back tattoo was designed by a famous artist and it was sold to a German art collector. So, in this case can we agreed that [whether we like it or not] skin was treated as a canvas/surface. Moreover, if we go over the issue of fixation which is a requirement under UK law, tattoos are meant to be permanent, although they can be removed by laser but in any case a painting in a canvas can also be removed and or deteriorated.

before and after the decision?

In Argentina, Law No. 11.723 of September 28, 1933, on Legal Intellectual Property Regime (Copyright Law, as amended up to Law No. 26.570 of November 25, 2009), Article 1 protects “… scientific, literary and artistic works shall comprise writings of all types and scope, and include source and object computer programs; compilations of data or other materials; dramatic works, musical compositions and dramatic-musical works; cinematographic, choreographic and pantomime works; works of drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture; models and works of art or science applied to trade or industry; printed matter, plans and maps; plastics, photographs, recordings and phonograms; and finally any scientific, literary, artistic or didactic production, irrespective of its reproduction procedure”. It continues “Copyright protection shall cover the expression of ideas, procedures, methods of operation and mathematical concepts, but not those ideas, procedures, methods and concepts per se.”

The Argentinean case – Background
A make-up artist was invited by a designer to participate in a production of photographs of models for the Magazine "N". The make-up artist paid actually to the magazine for her participation. She was then invited to the designer’s fashion show (Buenos Aires Alta Moda). To her surprise the catalogue handed on the night contained three of the photos in which she put make-up on the photographed model. And guess what…the name given to the make-up artist was not hers.
She brought a case due to copyright infringement, both economic rights and moral rights. In the first instance, the court dismissed the claim on the grounds that there was no "artistic work".
The appeal
The judgment of second instance, CAMARA CIVIL - SALA J (Civil Chamber), revoked the previous sentence. It established that the first instance court examined the make-up was not ‘a true artistic expression that deserved protection in light of what is regulated by law 11,723, a circumstance’. The ruling stated that the make-up applied to the models was not a work, but only an idea. Therefore, it is not an ‘intellectual creation’ and as such does not enjoy legal protection. In other words, the work was not ‘original’.
The second instance court, understood the contrary. The creator of the make-up and its work was a ‘meritorious activity’ and so worthy of protection. It sanctioned the defendant $100,000: 50, 000 for moral rights (paternity right) and 50,000 for economic rights.
To learn -still a moot question
The subject matter of protection is any work of the mind. In the EU, originality is to be understood as ‘intellectual creation’ (Infopak), involving ‘creative freedom’, a ‘personal touch’ (Painer) and ‘free and creative choices’ (Football Dataco). [see Elanora Rosati].
The issue that can come forward when covering make-up would be the issue of fixation; but does fixation mean to be permanent? When covering artistic works actually the national legislation in the UK does not mentions fixation, so it appears to be implied. And talking about fixation, well... what about broadcast: the most intangible of all forms of IP!

Source here and here.

Modernización del TLCUEM y la protección de las Indicaciones Geográficas.

Gilberto Macias (@gmaciasb) December 18, 2017 No comments:

En el marco de la Modernización del Tratado de Libre Comercio entre México y la Unión Europea (TLCUEM), se desarrolla la negociación de un capítulo de Propiedad Intelectual, en el cual se busca el reconocimiento y protección de las Indicaciones Geográficas.

La Unión Europea propuso a México una lista de 354 nombres de productos en los que busca el reconocimiento y protección como indicaciones geográficas, algunas de las cuales ya han sido objetadas en otras jurisdicciones, por ejemplo, en los Estados Unidos.

La controversia empezó prácticamente desde la fecha de publicación de dicha lista, pero en las últimas semanas se le está dando mucho bombo al tema en diversos medios de prensa mexicanos.

De los nombres incluidos en la lista, 67 han recibido oposición de parte del sector privado mexicano, principalmente del sector lácteo, pero de momento la Unión Europea sólo ha aceptado excluir 5 nombres de los productos incluidos en su lista.

Además de las citadas oposiciones, México ha propuesto a la UE especificar más los nombres de algunas indicaciones geográficas para ser aprobadas por el Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial (IMPI).

Esta misma semana se están manteniendo en Bruselas diversas reuniones con el fin de alcanzar un acuerdo y cerrar las negociaciones. Estaremos pendiente de los resultados, pues sin duda alguna se trata de un tema muy interesado tanto del punto de vista comercial como del de la propiedad intelectual.

Food for thought

Patricia Covarrubia December 11, 2017 No comments:

Last month we advertised a conference i.e. Heritage Across Borders. This was now extended to 31st of December, 2017.

Under the session Tangible and Intangible and under the title: 'Intellectual Property and the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage: Emerging Themes and Challenges in Transboundary and Diaspora Contexts' I submitted a proposal that may be of interest to you [and I definitely will need your help with this paper]. In this proposal I am linking Intangible Heritage, Intellectual Property and Latin America.

You perhaps have heard that back in 2009, UNESCO supported the project to safeguard the intangible cultural heritage of the ‘Aymara’ communities of Bolivia, Chile and Peru. This was to be a 5 year project and I have not heard much about how did it go i.e. has this improved Aymara’s TK?
The Decision of the Intergovernmental Committee 4.COM 15B here, aimed to identify and prepare a catalogue of the Aymara’s TK [excited to read this catalogue (anyone?)]; it also involved to promote and disseminate Aymara’s oral and musical expressions, and moreover to support TK on the production of textile arts.

Here you have then an idea of what a proposal looks like or at least starts as…just put your minds to work and hopefully I will see you in China.

Original post here.

Parliament standards: submitting plagiarised documents

Patricia Covarrubia November 23, 2017 No comments:

Yesterday the Chilean Chamber of Deputies and the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Mathematics of the University of Chile has signed a collaboration agreement to avoid plagiarism in documents.

This comes as no surprise since between 2014 and 2016, there were at least 40 deputies who paid for reports which were plagiarized by either showing verbatim copies taken from the Internet or without citing sources. The Congress therefore resorted to use an anti-plagiarism tool created by the University of Chile known as DOCODE. The software program has been created by the Web Intelligence Center of the Department of Industrial Civil Engineering of the University of Chile (WIC). The software “allows the detection of plagiarism based on technologies of text mining and natural language processing. The tool analyzes the documents that users upload and compares them with all documents indexed on the web and / or a repository of documents created by them. Then, it gives as a result a report of plagiarism in which the different sources of extraction of the document can be reviewed, being able to visit them for their reading.” According to the publication, the Chilean Chamber of Deputies would be “the only legislative body in Latin America ‘that applies a model of this type’”.

The Speaker of the House, noted that the collaboration agreements “is of enormous importance to raise Parliament's standards in terms of submitting documents such as bills, external consultancies, commission reports, etc.”. The parliamentarian also stressed that the use of this tool will place the Chamber of Deputies as the only legislative body in Latin America "that applies a model of this type, where all the works will be part of a comprehensive review process."

Heritage Across Borders

Patricia Covarrubia November 14, 2017 No comments:

The above conference has been advertised by the UK Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) as well as other forums.

I would like to further up upon this since I am co-ordinating three sub-sessions in this exciting Conference taking place in China. They are under the session Tangible and Intangible. The invitation is as follow:

Intellectual Property and the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage: Emerging Themes and Challenges in Transboundary and Diaspora Contexts
Since the Intangible Heritage Convention was adopted by UNESCO in 2003, intangible cultural heritage (ICH) and its parallel concepts such as traditional knowledge (TK) and traditional cultural expressions (TCEs) have been increasingly important subjects of debate in several other international forums, such as WIPO, CBD (including its Nagoya Protocol), WHO, and the WTO. As more countries implement the Convention, national policy-makers and communities of practice have been exploring the use of intellectual property (IP) protection to achieve ICH safeguarding outcomes (as well as other political and economic goals). For example, inscription of ways to make food and craft products on the Lists of the Convention is often associated with efforts to register geographical indications to protect use of the names of those products.

The intersection between ICH safeguarding and IP protection raises questions about the nature of ownership or stewardship over ICH, the appropriate nature of any kind of IP protection, and its likely effects. Many of these issues have been discussed in the context of the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on Genetic Resources, TK and TCEs, but there has been relatively little debate about protecting IP rights in transboundary heritage, especially concerning safeguarding under the UNESCO Convention. Much ICH is shared (and contested) across national borders, and can easily be translated to and practised in new locations, which poses challenges for protecting IP rights, especially in the absence of widely-ratified international agreements.

This session will consider various strategies (legislative or otherwise) to establish and/or protect IP rights over ICH in transboundary and diaspora contexts, and how they might affect efforts to maintain practice and transmission (safeguarding) of that ICH. Session papers may present case studies of IP protection regarding transboundary ICH, and/or the role of measures such as provisions for mutual recognition and national treatment, IP chapters in international, regional or bilateral trade agreements, contractual agreements under the Nagoya Protocol, and ethical guidelines and dispute resolution mechanisms. Papers may include references to all forms of intellectual property, including patents, copyright, design rights, trademarks (certification marks and collective marks), geographical indications, and sui generis rights.

The session will involve a triple session (two speaker sessions and one panel session). The speaker’s session will consist of 4 people each, and the panel session (single session) will consist of 8 speakers with a special focus on food heritage and IP protection.

Deadline for submissions: Thursday 30 November 2017

Let me know if you need more information. You can communicate to me informally about any project you feel will be suitable to the conference (or anything else – IP related of course :0).

More information here.