• According to news from NZ, 'concern is growing' over the New Zealand Copyright (New Technologies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill. Reading this story has caused me to update/change/refine some of my comments in the post from yesterday on the TPM provisions.
  
  
• It is also being reported that 'China is tightening control over its online music and game industries, ordering distributors to submit all imported products for approval by official censors', in a move aiming 'to step up control over the Internet and other media, both to shield Chinese companies from competition and to suppress material deemed politically sensitive, violent or sexually graphic'. The US won't be happy. It is these rules regarding censorship and approval that, the US alleges, are used to hold up legitimate distribution of copyright material - thus further encouraging the counterfeit market, where this material tends to be available sooner (see the USTR material on China, including, in particular, the 2006 Report to Congress on China’s WTO Compliance);
  
  
• The Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest reports that Thailand has issued a compulsory license for a patented AIDS drug produced by Pharma coompany Merck. According to the report,

'The Thai ministry of public health authorised the Government Pharmaceutical Organisation to manufacture generic versions of the drug until 2011, and to import generics from India until domestic production comes on line. It specified that the medicines were to be used for the country's widely-praised national HIV/AIDS treatment programme. Bangkok stressed that the decision was in accordance with WTO rules on access to medicine, specifically citing the 2001 Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, which permits compulsory licensing for "emergency cases and public uses."'

This is particularly interesting, because the compulsory licensing provisions are used so rarely. It has of course provoked a reaction: the American Chamber of Commerce in Thailand said that Bangkok's decision to authorise the production of generic copies of Merck's patented drug would send a 'negative signal' to foreign investors (um - which investors exactly? Does Merck think that it won't, as a result of this decision, get sufficient return from the drug from other markets?) But the Bridges story notes the view expressed by expert Fred Abbott, who takes the view that Pharmaceutical companies may be focusing on Thai domestic legislation because they have no case under the TRIPS Agreement, or otherwise under WTO rules. Bangkok's decision appears to be in full compliance with the requirements for compulsory licences set out in WTO law.

Meanwhile, broader issues of access to medicine and encouraging research in developing country diseases have taken a new step forward with the first meeting Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property. the IGWG was established in May 2006 by the WHO's top decision-making body, the World Health Assembly (WHA). It was mandated to draw up a medium-term framework based on the findings of an earlier WHO Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation, and Public Health (CIPIH).

• Europe is apparently backing away from - or slowing down - reform to its private copying levy system, saying that it needs "more reflection'' on a complex issue, and denying that it is pulling the plan under pressure from the French government. It is not saying when the plan might re-emerge. I can't help but wonder whether the fact that Australia has, and the UK and NZ might, allow some free private copying is having an impact on these plans at all?