The Commission's Working Group VI (Security Interests) has been working towards this draft since 2007, recognizing that States need guidance as to how the recommendations of the Guide apply to IP and as to the adjustments they must make in order to avoid inconsistencies between secured transactions law and law relating to intellectual property. The Working Group, after five one-week sessions, completed its work in February 2010 and the Commission, at its forty-third session, finalized and adopted the Supplement. According to the press release
"The overall objective of the Guide is to promote low-cost credit by promoting access to secured credit. In line with this objective, the Supplement is intended to make secured credit more available and at lower cost to intellectual property owners and other intellectual property right holders, thus enhancing the value of intellectual property rights as security for credit. The Supplement, however, seeks to achieve this objective without interfering with fundamental policies of law relating to intellectual property. States are recommended to utilize the Guide and the Supplement to assess the economic efficiency of their secured transactions regimes as well as their intellectual property regimes and to give favourable consideration to the Guide and the Supplement when revising or adopting legislation relevant to secured transactions and intellectual property ...".I've not yet read this Supplement, but wonder if anyone who has read it might be able to shed any light on its content and on whether it has addressed the anxieties that IP owners have consistently expressed in the recent past over the apparent mismatch between lenders' and IP-ers' interests. A 17 March draft is available on the UNCITRAL website here, and it has various appendices which are listed here, together with comments by governments and international organisations (including WIPO), but I don't know if these represent the final form of the Supplement. Can any reader please advise?
