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
On Wednesday 25 November European Commission published an extensive Final Report on Trends and Developments in Artificial Intelligence in the EU.
Center for Intellectual Property Policy and Management (CIPPM), established under the auspices of University of Bournemouth, will hold several online events in the following weeks, including events relating to the implementation of the new Directive 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive).
The Global Partnership for AI Data Governance Working Group, co-chaired by dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič, has in August presented its first two projects. One of these two projects is the draft of the Data Governance Framework, currently still in its “beta” version. In order to improve the Framework, the Working Group calls for comments and suggestions.
After MEPs first discussed the draft report of rules for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in may, they have already adopted a first set of EU rules for AI regulation at yesterday’s plenary session.