Watch List

The United States Trade Representative has just released its 2010 Special 301 Report, which is an annual report card for how strongly other countries enforce the intellectual property rights of United States rights holders - rather like the converse of our IP Watchlist, which was released last week and focuses on how well a country's copyrightⁱ laws advance the interests of consumers.

3D Trade-Human Rights-Equitable Economy, a Geneva-based NGO, and IBON Foundation submitted a paper entitled The Philippines: Impact of copyrightⁱ rules on access to education to the Pre-Sessional Working Group of the Committee on the Rights of the Child last June 2009.

Consumers International's inaugural IPⁱ Watch List, released this week, revealed that there are a number of less developed countries providing an example for the rest of the world of how to balance copyrightⁱ owners' interests with consumers' access to knowledge.  But judging from the latest United States' Special 301 Report, also just released, this is an insight that US policy makers still lack.

Consumers International (CIⁱ) today released the results of its inaugural Intellectual Property (IP) Watch List: a global snapshot of how national IP and copyrightⁱ laws serve or subvert consumer interests.

The launch of the IPⁱ Watch List is to be held in conjunction with the upcoming Unlocking IP conference held by the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre of UNSW. However you don't need to register to attend the conference in order to attend just the launch, so long as you RSVP to let the organisers know you are coming by emailing Sophia Christou.

The address is:

Law Faculty
University of New South Wales Kensington Campus
Sydney NSW

The summary report of the 2009 IPⁱ Watch List may be downloaded in PDF format in English or Spanish below.

Current activities

• This Web site is part of the Global Consumer Dialog and Public Education Network on Access to Knowledge (A2Kⁱ) Issues funded by Ford Foundation. Through regional meetings and online dialogue, the Global Consumer Dialogue will identify problems consumers face in accessing and using copyrightⁱ protected materials, highlighting access barriers that require further investigation, identifying the legitimate needs of artists and content creators, and reframing enforcement debates to advance member groups’ economic, political, and cultural in

The Consumers International IP Watch List identifies countries whose IP policies and practices are harmful to consumers. This Watch List is used as a counterbalance to the United States' Special 301 Report, which is an annual report highlighting those countries that supposedly do not provide strong enough protection for the interests of US intellectual property owners.

The 2009 and 2010 IP Watchlist Reports are available now. Future Watchlists are not yet under development, but keep watching this page. All country reports contributed to the 2010 IP Watch List are shown below.

The guidebook used in the completion of the 2010 reports is available. A blank template containing the 2010 IP Watch List criteria is also attached below, for historical interest.