The Asia-Pacific Centre for Environmental Law (APCEL) of the Faculty of Law (National University of Singapore), together with the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL), the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) and the Intellectual Property Academy, is organizing a conference on "Intellectual Property and Biological Resources" from 1 to 3 December 2003 at the Pan Pacific Hotel. Other partner institutions who are collaborating with us on this conference include the IUCN (World Conservation Union) Commission on Environmental Law, the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law, the Macquarie University Centre for Environmental Law and the Japan Bioindustry Association.
We hope to bring together judges, leading academics, practitioners and policy-makers from around the world to share their views on the legal and ethical controversies that have arisen from the global biotechnology revolution, with particular emphasis on the compatibility of intellectual property rights with the biological wealth that resides in the flora and fauna of developing countries. Invited speakers will present papers on the legal, ethical, sociological and environmental implications of the expansion of traditional intellectual property rights, and the development of alternative models of legal protection, to encompass non-human biological products and all genetic resources extracted from Nature.
The broad topics that we shall explore at this conference include:
The Ownership of
Intellectual Property in Modified-Living Things and other
Bio-inventions.
The consistency of the
provisions of the TRIPS Agreement with the Convention on
Biological Diversity (CBD).
The importance of patent
rights to the growth of the bio-pharmaceutical and
agrotechnological industries.
The impact of
intellectual property rights over biological resources on
developing nations, local and indigenous communities.