NYU LAW — The advent of vaccines for COVID-19 exposed major questions about intellectual property laws, as many countries clamored for legal alterations and waivers in order to obtain information about producing effective vaccines. The vaccines also underlined disparities between low- and high-income countries, including differences in manufacturing and research capabilities that dictated how quickly nations were able to vaccinate their citizens. In a forthcoming paper in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law, Pauline Newman Professor of Law Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss and her co-author, University of Haifa Law Professor Daniel Benoliel, argue that certain international intellectual property standards are partially to blame for these disparities. As a solution, they propose second-tier patent protections to encourage and support innovation by local inventors. Intellectual property law, Dreyfuss says, is focused on the idea of “novelty,” or the concept that an invention is sufficiently innovative or different from existing inventions or widely practiced ideas to merit legal protection. For developed countries, having a high standard of novelty for IP protection stimulates innovation and, with high customer demand, serves as a further impetus for developing new products and processes.