Human Rights, IP, Paradox and a bit of competition

Charlotte Waelde and Abbe Brown presented a joint paper at the excellent CIER Utrecht conference "The Human Rights Paradox in Intellectual Property" on 3-4 July. The conference included delegates from all over the world, with a good cross section of commercial, IP and human rights perspectives. Particularly interesting were the contributions of Cees Flinterman and Rosemary Coombe - and their reminders that human rights exist, and should be respected, beyond the confines of legislation, courts and national law.

Given the focus of our project, it was interesting to observe some delegates as they embraced the new challenges of human rights or IP. Building on that, our addition of competition, particularly as a possible means of obtaining a practical result (we developed one of the case studies from our March meeting) provoked helpful comment.

We will be preparing our paper for publication in the next Molengraff edition. Many thanks to Willem Grosheide Lucky Belder and Jerzy Koopman - we look forward to many more.