[Ip-health] USTR Ron Kirk's September 30, 2009 Speech on Intellectual Property

[Malini Aisola]

http://keionline.org/node/642
USTR Ron Kirk's September 30, 2009 Speech on Intellectual Property
By James Love
5 Oct 2009

USTR head Ambassador Ron Kirk made another speech on intellectual
property on September 30, 2009. The text of his speech is here [1].
Below are a few relevant quotes.

On access to medicine:

        As we work to overhaul the health care system, innovators can
        help us succeed by finding new ways to streamline health
        records, new medicines and devices to treat disease, and new
        ideas to help us confront growing health care demands. Reform of
        the health care system will ensure those innovations have the
        greatest possible impact.

        We need to focus our innovative energies on developing solutions
        to meet the growing needs of the world's population - from
        wellness to food to energy - and to develop new ways to meet
        those demands. If we do so, we can create a more sustainable
        world, a more prosperous economy, and a better quality of life
        for the American people.

        We need a trade policy that contributes to and reinforces goals
        in areas like health care and the environment. We must find ways
        to work together on issues like access to medicines and climate
        change.

        Last year Chairman Baucus at a hearing of the Senate Finance
        Committee asked the CEO of Pfizer and the late Prof. John Barton
        of Stanford University to begin a process of trying to find
        common ground among different viewpoints on access to medicines.
        Sadly Prof. Barton recently passed away, depriving America of a
        thoughtful voice in the discussion. But we should not let his
        passing end the effort to build bridges. On the contrary, we
        should continue and seek to broaden the constructive
        conversation Professor Barton helped to start. I offer my
        support to both the public health community and the public
        health industry to help carry that effort forward.


Professor Barton has made many friends over the years, and has done much
good. However, the Pfizer/Baucus/Barton discussions were not among the
high points of his career. Held in secrecy between U.S. government
officials, Senator Baucus's staff, and pharmaceutical lobbyists, and
basic thrust was a proposal to press "middle income" developing
countries to pay higher prices for medicines, in return for some very
limited pricing concessions to public sector entities, with rationales
based upon well known and often empirically challenged industry talking
points.

On ACTA, the secret trade agreement, Kirk had this to say:

        Every economy stands to benefit when partners play by trade
        rules. And the rules on intellectual property are clear: pirates
        and copycats are not to be tolerated. They say imitation is the
        sincerest form of flattery. But we're not talking about
        flattery. We're talking about theft. And that theft doesn't just
        hurt American creators and inventors. It can also harm the
        unwitting consumers of potentially harmful counterfeit goods.

        Others should be as interested in protecting their creators,
        innovators, and consumers as Americans are in protecting ours.
        So, we are working together with key partners to forge an
        Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement by 2010.

        That agreement and other intellectual property safeguards will
        ensure lawful access for more consumers in more countries to
        original, high-quality American products, rather than
        counterfeit or pirated black-market goods.


It is hard to debate the merits of an agreement that Ambassador Kirk has
cloaked with secrecy [2], by asserting the national security of the
United States would be harmed by providing the public access to the
negotiating texts -- even as those documents are provided to hundreds of
corporate lobbyists.


________________________________________________________________________
Links:
[1]
http://www.ustr.gov/about-us/press-office/speeches/transcripts/2009/september/remarks-ambassador-ron-kirk-global-intelle
[2] http://keionline.org/foia/ustr



--
Malini Aisola
Knowledge Ecology International
1621 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 500, Washington DC 20009
malini.aisola@keionline.org|Tel: +1.202.332.2670|Fax: +1.202.332.2673