Posts Tagged: "international trade"

President-Elect Donald Trump has announced that he will withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement on his first day in office. So ends more than five years of often heated negotiations led by President Barack Obama’s administration as part of an overall strategy to strengthen the US position in the Pacific Rim region… Pulling out of the TPP is a missed opportunity for the US to pursue its IPR agenda in the Pacific Rim economies.

If the UN Secretary General and the members of his “High Level Panel on Access to Medicines” thought the State Department was bluffing when it warned against their attempt to make intellectual property the fall guy for the lack of health care in poor countries, they were rudely awakened Friday afternoon. Disdaining diplomatic niceties, less than two days after the UN report issued, State bluntly replied in a statement titled “U.S. Disappointed Over Fundamentally Flawed Report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines.” Compounding the pain, the same day five prominent university associations issued a joint paper taking the report apart. Being directly and publicly rebuked in this manner is a new experience for the Secretary General and his minions– but one they richly deserve.

As the world continues to grow and international trade on a multi-continent level has become the norm, protecting a company’s name is one of the most important things a company can do, regardless of their size or international standing. Due to what has become almost “organic” international growth for most companies, the use of trademarks owned by U.S. Companies within Europe has grown exponentially in the last 5 years. Consequently, the use of distribution licenses across Europe has also expanded massively.