Open COVID Pledge
The fight against the coronavirus pandemic shows us every day the importance of open access to knowledge and innovations that help save lives. Especially important are educational materials, designs of protective equipment and patents on drugs, for instance. While intellectual property rights are, under normal circumstances, generally useful for the development of our society, they can have a negative wider impact in the current situation. An international coalition of scientists, lawyers and engineers are thus inviting the right holders of intellectual property rights to give free access to their rights in these times of crisis.
Open COVID Pledge has created different voluntary licences that are available to right holders:
– OCL-PC v1.0 (This license grants permission to the worldwide public to exercise all of the pledgor’s patent rights and copyrights, royalty free. This license starts on December 1, 2019, and ends one year after the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declares an end to the COVID-19 pandemic.)
– OCL-PC v1.1 (This license grants permission to the worldwide public to exercise all of the pledgor’s patent rights and copyrights, royalty free. This license starts on December 1, 2019, and ends at the WHO declaration that the COVID-19 pandemic has ended, or January 1, 2023, whichever happens first. The pledgor may grant an extension of that final date)
– OCL-P v1.1 (This license grants permission to the worldwide public to exercise all of the pledgor’s patent rights, royalty free. This license starts on December 1, 2019, and ends at the WHO declaration that the COVID-19 pandemic has ended, or January 1, 2023, whichever happens first. The pledgor may grant an extension of that final date)
In addition to the listed licences, compatible licenses are available, such as the CC BY 4.0 International Licence, CC 1.0 Public Domain Dedication and Intel’s licence.
Open COVID Pledge has been a great success and has been widely supported. The founding adopters of the pledge are United Patents, Fabricatorz Foundation, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, Sadia National Laboratories, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft.
The Intellectual Property Institute is a supporter of the Open COVID Pledge. We have translated into Slovenian the following content:
– Open COVID Pledge
– Making and Implementing the Open COVID Pledge
– Support the Open COVID Pledge
“The privacy of individuals means limiting government or corporate power: the more someone knows about you, the more power they have over you, therefore it is not always worth selling it for a penny of apparent or real convenience,” pointed out dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič in an interview with Finance Manager.
In March, 2021, more than 250 organizations from all around the world, including the IPI, called on all WTO members to waive certain provisions of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), including copyright provisions, to more effectively prevent, contain and treat COVID-19. Calls for the suspension of certain TRIPS provisions due to COVID-19 have been successful. The US was the first to take an important step. When will the EU act properly?
Today we celebrate World Intellectual Property Day. The Intellectual Property Institute (IPI) celebrates it by publishing a collection of answer questions that we have received regarding copyright in education from the teachers for whom we have organized the project “Copyright in Education”.
