James Love (NGO director)

Education and early career

Love was born in 1950, and grew up in Bellevue, Washington, and after finishing high school, went to work in the Alaskan fisheries.

Before graduate school, Love lived and worked in Alaska for 13 years. In addition to working as a commercial fisherman, cannery worker, and longshoreman, Love founded two non-profit organizations; the Open Door Clinic, a free medical clinic located in Anchorage, Alaska, and the Alaska Public Interest Research Group (AkPIRG). Love was a member of the State of Alaska Investment Advisory Committee when the Alaska Permanent Fund was created, and played an important role in persuading the State of Alaska to use profit share leasing methods for the 1979 Beaufort Sea oil and gas lease sale.

Love was later Senior Economist for the Frank Russell Company, a Lecturer at Rutgers University, and a researcher on international finance at Princeton University. He received a Masters of Public Administration from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and a Masters in Public Affairs from the Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

As a graduate student at Princeton, Love worked with Joseph Stiglitz.

At the Frank Russell Company, Love was a developer of a return attribution system for the DEC pension fund, a co-developer of a portfolio reporting system for the IBM pension fund, and worked with the Ford Foundation to evaluate social investing by state investment funds.

Public interest career

From 1990 to 2006, Love worked for Ralph Nader's Center for Study of Responsive Law, where among other things, he led an early effort to expand public access to U.S. government funded databases. One element of this involved the "Crown Jewels Campaign," which targeted public access to the most important and valuable federal databases, including those involving United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings, patents, bills pending before the Congress, medical abstracts and court opinions and statutes, among others.

In 1994, Love began working on the international trade aspects of intellectual property rights, particularly as they related to medical technologies.

In 1996, Love worked with Richard Stallman to create the Union for the Public Domain, which focused its attention on defeating a proposal at a WIPO diplomatic conference to adopt a treaty for the protection of non-copyrighted elements of databases.

In 1997, Robert Weissman and Love worked with the South Africa group to push back against trade pressures from the Clinton Administration, and Vice-President Al Gore, Jr. in particular, on issues concerning patents rights on pharmaceutical drugs. Love worked with the South African Health authorities when the South Africa Medicines Act was revised in 1997.

In 1997, Love worked with Ralph Nader to push the U.S. Department of Justice to bring an antitrust case against Microsoft for anti-competitive conduct relating to web browsers and other software products running on Windows. Nader and Love later asked several computer manufacturers to offer consumers the choice of Linux or other operating systems, and pressed OMB to consider using its procurement power to require Microsoft and others to use open data formats.

In 1999, Love and several AIDS activists and public health group such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Health Action International (HAI) and Act Up launched a global campaign to promote the compulsory licensing of patents on medicines for AIDS and other illnesses.

In 2001, Love negotiated with Yusuf Hamied, head of Cipla, a leading Indian generic drug manufacturer, a $1 per day price for the AIDS treatment regime NVP+D4T+3TC. The "Cipla Offer" made headlines all over the world and motivated Kofi Annan and others to call for the creation of the Global Fund for HIV, TB and Malaria. The negotiations over the $1 per day AIDS drug price was later the subject the documentary film of access to AIDS drugs, Fire in the Blood. In November 2001, a Wall Street Journal editorial singled out the Consumer Project on Technology for pushing the World Trade Organization to adopt the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health.

In 2002, at the Barcelona International AIDS conference Love called for the creation of a patent pool for patents on HIV and other essential medicines. In the fall of 2002, Tim Hubbard and Love participated in a radical scenario planning exercise organized by Aventis, the pharmaceutical and life sciences company, and developed proposals to eliminate legal monopolies on new medicines, and to expand support for open science projects. Among the Radical Pharma Scenario proposals were to replace intellectual property obligations in the WTO TRIPS accord and trade agreements with multilateral agreements on funding medical R&D, and to reform the incentive systems by replacing patent monopolies with cash prizes. Love and Hubbard and also proposed systems of "competitive intermediaries" to manage funding for open science projects. Working with artists and activists such as Ted Byfield, Alan Toner, and Jamie King, in 2002 Love proposed the Blur/Banff model for supporting artists who recorded music.

In 2003, Love encouraged colleagues to consider the reform of WIPO, the UN specialized agency for intellectual property. From 2003 to 2007, the WIPO mission and work program were significantly reshaped, as WIPO adopted a new "Development Agenda," blocked progress on a treaty for broadcasting organizations and launched new work programs on limitations and exceptions to copyrights and patents. Also in 2003, Love worked with several developing country governments, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Zambia and Mozambique on the granting of compulsory licenses on patents for antimalarial drugs. In 2003, the South Africa Competition Commission hired Love and the Consumer Project on Technology to evaluate a compulsory licensing request by Hazel Tau and the South Africa Treatment Access Campaign (TAC). The Competition Commission staff found that GSK and Boehringer were in violation of three sections of South Africa competition laws, leading to licenses on patents for several suppliers of generic AIDS drugs.

In 2004, working with the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), Love organized meeting on access to knowledge for essential learning tools and on the Future of WIPO. During this period, love coined the term a2k, as a community brand for the eclectic Access for Knowledge movement that had been built out of the WIPO reform efforts.

In 2005, Love worked with Tim Hubbard and others on two separate initiatives to propose new treaty paradigms for intellectual property and innovation. The first was a proposal for a global treaty on medical research and development that would replace blinding norms on patents and other intellectual property rights for medicines. The second was a comprehensive access to knowledge treaty. In 2005, Representative Bernie Sanders introduced the first of several "Medical Innovation Prize Fund" bills designed to eliminate drug monopolies, one of the reforms coming out of the 2002 Aventis scenario sessions. The 2005 prize fund bill, which was drafted in 2004, created a large fund, set at 50 basis points of US GDP, to reward developers of new drugs, on the basis of "the incremental therapeutic benefit" of a product, benchmarked against existing therapies, subject to set asides in the fund for orphan drugs and national and global public health priorities.

In 2005, Love authored a World Health Organization (WHO) and UNDP joint publication titled "Remuneration Guidelines for Non-Voluntary Use of a Patent". The 2005 Remuneration Guidelines introduced the Tiered Royalty Method (TRM), an approach that takes into account differences in incomes between countries, and sets royalties independent of the generic price of product.

In 2007, during discussions with MSF on a possible large prize for the development of a new low cost point of care diagnostic tool for tuberculosis, Love proposed an "open source dividend" mechanism to provide financial incentives to open source research. The open source dividend proposal would later be incorporated into other innovation inducement prize fund proposals.

In 2008, Love and KEI worked with the World Blind Union to convene a meeting to draft a possible treaty on copyright limitations and exceptions for persons who are blind, visually impaired or have other disabilities. The treaty proposal was formerly tabled in the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2009. A diplomatic conference for a treaty is currently scheduled for June 2013.

In 2012, a panel of the WHO recommended governments begin negotiation on a global treaty on medical R&D, incorporation such principals as the de-linkage of R&D costs from drug prices. The proposal was seen by some as a building block to the broader visions of reform set out in the 2002 Aventis scenario sessions and in subsequent advocacy efforts by several academic experts and NGOs. In 2012, Love gave evidence in a compulsory licensing proceeding in India involving patents held by Bayer on the cancer drug sorafenib (brand name Nexavar). The Nexavar case was the first compulsory license on a patent granted by India, following India's decision to join the World Trade Organization.

Media

James Love's critical role in the battle for access to antiretroviral treatment in Africa and other parts of the global south is portrayed in the award-winning documentary Fire in the Blood (2013 film).

Personal life

Love is married to fellow activist Manon Ress, and they have two children together.