[Ecommerce] Re: [Hague-jur-commercial-law] Roundtable on the Hague Dec 23 at 10 AM

[James Love]

Miriam Nisbet wrote:
> negotiated and non-negotiated contracts, would that help?  Peter and 
> Jeff also asked whether taking contracts for copyrighted materials out 
> of the treaty would solve the problem.  Manon Ress and Jamie Love 
> pointed out that that would still leave contracts dealing with genetic 
> resources, traditional knowledge, and biotechnology, which would be a 
> problem. 


To elaborate a bit on this.  There are a number of sui generis IP regimes, 
and new ones being created all the time.  Among the new sui generis regimes 
would be the European laws creating sui generis rights in data not protected 
under US doctrines for copyright, and various proposals for sui generis IP 
regimes involving access to genetic resources, traditional knowledge and 
folklore (GRTKF).  These are novel and complex areas, which in some 
proposals would have significant negative consequences on the public domain. 
  CPTech's position on the various "GRTKF" proposals are in developoment, 
and we support some proposals for benefit sharing on the commercialization 
of certain GRTKF resources, would oppose others, depending upon the details 
of specific proposals.  In any case, however, the  broader issue of the 
application of the Hague Convention to sui generic IP regimes deserves 
careful analysis, in part because some of these regimes are not subject to 
the same type of norm setting and harmonization that exists for other IP 
regimes, and also because of the growing use of the EU sui generis database 
laws to assert rights over hypertext linking and other Internet related uses.

   Jamie

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James Love, Consumer Project on Technology
http://www.cptech.org, mailto:love@cptech.org
voice: 1.202.387.8030; mobile 1.202.361.3040