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 Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that maintains the Open Library, a digital library index, and is dedicated to preserving knowledge. As many of the works in the Internet Archive are under copyright, the Archive uses a system of controlled digital lending based on digital rights management to prevent unauthorized downloading or copying of copyrighted books. In March 2020, due to the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet Archive established the National Emergency Library, eliminating the waiting lists used in the Open Library and expanding access to books for all readers. In June 2020, the Emergency National Library faced a lawsuit from four book publishers and was ultimately closed.
The 43rd session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (hereinafter SCCR) made substantial progress on the issues advocated by the A2K Coalition (Access to Knowledge Coalition), which IPI is a member of. This year’s session was the most productive on the issues of exceptions and limitations. James Love (Knowledge Ecology International), a long-time observer at WIPO, described the outcome and the impact of the public interest community as the strongest since the conclusion of the Marrakech Treaty, which brought global copyright exceptions for the benefit of the blind and visually impaired.
Today, March 17, 2023, a symposium on law in the information society is taking place in the golden lecture hall of the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana. Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič will present copyright aspects of artificial intelligence at the symposium.
The third day of the 43rd session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is intended for discussion on the topic of exceptions and limitations to copyright, especially in connection with the right to research.