NIPC News Roundup 4 Oct 2017









Brexit

 Despite Mrs May's conciliatory speech in Florence, the two sides in the withdrawal agreement negotiations seem to be no closer on the one issue that matters, namely, how can the British government's commitments to such an agreement be guaranteed if the UK will not accept the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice after March 2019 (see Jane Lambert Brexit Briefing - September 2017 3 Oct 2017 NIPC Brexit).

Despite her warm words, Mrs May reaffirms that no deal is better than a bad deal and, of course, she is right. But the same is true for the 27 states that remain in the EU. A deal that does not guarantee Britain's commitments to the withdrawal agreement to the same extent as they would be bound would be a bad deal for them.  They cannot be expected to agree to it. That is why the European Parliament overwhelmingly concluded that insufficient progress had been made in the withdrawal agreement talks to enable the negotiators to move on to trade (see the European Parliament's press release: Brexit: tangible progress still needed on withdrawal terms 4 Oct 2017).

Dr Francis Gurry on the Future of IP

 In an interview with the WIPO Magazine entitled Francis Gurry on the future of intellectual property: opportunities and challenges, the Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") said that new technologies that will have a radical impact on the existing IP landscape though we do not yet understand their full dimensions and that huge differences in technological capacity that exist between advanced countries and the rest of the world will present significant development challenges.

The advances in technology will result in massive demand for patents and other IP rights that threaten to overwhelm the world's IP offices. Some technical advances such as artificial intelligence and gene editing will give rise to economic, ethical, political and social as well as IP issues.  As for the gap in technological capability between the advanced countries and the rest, the major challenge is to ensure that all countries benefit from the rapid diffusion of those technologies.  Many of those issues are multidimensional in nature and pose a huge governance challenge. Dr Gurry acknowledged the possibility that new institutions would be required to deal with them though they should be established only where there was a proven need.

Asked whether he was optimistic about the future, Dr Gurry replied: "In general yes. The stakes are high. We need to hone our risk management techniques."

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