From aashish.thomas.john at gmail.com Sat Apr 1 23:05:06 2006 From: aashish.thomas.john at gmail.com (Thomas John) Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2006 23:05:06 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Assignment of Trademarks and the Use of Personal Names: The Case of Elizabeth Emanuel Message-ID: <9f8713210604010935q4efe805fq27e757c9cdc11e64@mail.gmail.com> I didn't notice anything on this, so I thought I'd post it. It raises some rather interesting questions about the use ability to use one's own name as a trademark after an assignment. Thomas. Princess Diana's dressmaker loses fight over name (Reuters) 30 March 2006 http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/theworld/2006/March/theworld_March965.xml§ion=theworld BRUSSELS - Princess Diana's wedding dressmaker, Elizabeth Emanuel, has no right to regain her own name as a trademark, Europe's highest court ruled on Thursday. Emanuel shot to fame with the intense publicity of the late princess's wedding to Britain's Prince Charles in 1981 and has designed clothes for actresses such as Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Collins. But when she was on the brink of bankruptcy, Emanuel sold her company and her trademark in 1997, the year Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. In 1999, she launched a fight to get her name back after the company that bought her trademark started selling clothes under her signature. Media reports quoted her as saying she was heartbroken that people thought she had designed the garments. The case went all the way to the European Court of Justice, the EU's highest court in Luxembourg. Emanuel's lawyers argued that consumers were being deceived by the trademark since they were under the impression that she was the designer. But on Thursday, the court said there was no deceit and she had no right to her name as a trademark. "The name Elizabeth Emanuel cannot be regarded in itself as being of such a nature as to deceive the public as to the nature, quality or geographical origin of the product it designates," the court said in its ruling. Even if the average consumer might be influenced by imagining Emanuel designed the garment, what matters is that the characteristics and the qualities of the clothes are guaranteed by the company which owns the trademark, the court said. The ruling left it up to an English court to determine whether the new owner of the trademark intended to make consumers believe Emanuel is still the designer of the goods. "In that case, there would be conduct which might be held to be fraudulent," the European judges said, adding that even that would not affect the registration or ownership of the trademark. Emanuel assigned her business, goodwill and the registered trademark in 1997 to Frostprint Ltd, which changed its name to Elizabeth Emanuel International Ltd ('EE International'). EE International then assigned the registered trademark to another company, Oakridge Trading Ltd ('Oakridge'). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20060401/2677adf7/attachment.html From patrice at xs4all.nl Sun Apr 2 16:15:14 2006 From: patrice at xs4all.nl (Patrice Riemens) Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2006 12:45:14 +0200 Subject: [Commons-Law] fwdfyi: Pfizer sues Philippines officials in their personal capacity Message-ID: <20060402104514.GB27921@xs4all.nl> ----- Forwarded message from nettime's_roving_reporter ----- From: "nettime's_roving_reporter" Subject: Pfizer sues Philippines officials in their personal capacity Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 18:09:51 -0100 [via ] - ----- Forwarded To: random-bits at lists.essential.org From: James Love Subject: [Random-bits] Pfizer suing Philippine's governmental officials in their personal capacity in order to stop parallel trade Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 18:09:51 -0500 Judit Rius Sanjuan recently joined CPTech as a staff lawyer. This is her blog on Pfizer's recent decision to sue government officials in the Philippines, in order to stop efforts to register cheaper versions of a medicine for hypertension. Jamie http://secondview.blogspot.com/2006/03/pfizer-is-suing-philippines.html secondview Pfizer is suing Philippine's governmental officials in their personal capacity in order to stop parallel trade Judit Rius Sanjuan March 31, 2006 Pfizer likes high prices -- even when the market is in a developing country. And Pfizer is willing to sue to get high prices. Now, Pfizer is suing a Philippine government-owned company (PITC, Philippine International Trading Corporation), the Philippines FDA (BFAD, Bureau of Food and Drugs) and two Philippine government regulators (the BFAD director and one other staff person) in their personal capacity. For what? For importing from India samples of a drug that Pfizer sells in both the Philippines and India, and for submitting the samples to the government drug regulatory agency. Pfizer is doing this to delay parallel trade of one of its drugs. Parallel trade is a term used to describe the practice of buying a product in a country where prices are cheaper, and importing it into a country where prices are higher. The Philippines permits parallel trade, but only after patents expire. The drug in this case is amlodipine besylate, which is marketed by Pfizer in the United States under the trade name Norvasc. It is used to treat hypertension, angina and myocardial ischemia. The drug is sold in two dosage formats: 5 mg. and 10 mg. tablets, and typically taken once a day. Pfizer charges different prices in the Philippines than they do in India. In the Philippines, the prices are $.87 per day for the 5 mg version, and $1.46 per day for the 10 mg dose. In India, the prices are $.12 and $.18 per day, for the same doses of the same drug made by the same company. Pfizer holds a Philippines patent on Norvasc, which expires in June 2007. The Philippine government owned trading company says it will not to sell the cheaper Indian version of the Pfizer product to the public until the Pfizer patent expires in June 2007. Its only goal is to begin the process of registering the imported version, so it can promptly enter the market when the Pfizer controlled patent expires. What is at stake legally is a new twist on the issue of "early working" of a patent. In the United States, there was a 1983 dispute between Roche and Bolar Pharmaceuticals. Bolar was in possession of small quantities of a generic version of a sleeping pill marketed by Roche as Dalmane. The Bolar Company wanted to register a generic version, so it could promptly enter the market when the Roche patent expired. Roche successfully sued Bolar and its officers and importers, claiming the effort to register the generic product violated the Roche patent. This had the effect of delaying entry by generics for about 18 months. In 1984, the US Congress changed US patent law to allow for the early working of a patent when preparing a generic drug registration, effectively overturning this decision. This is known as the "Bolar" provision, or "Bolar amendment." Some countries have implemented similar statutory changes in their laws (early Australia, Canada, Argentina, Israel), and recently the European Union required its member states to implement similar provisions. Some countries in Europe have done this through statutory changes, while others already allow this through interpretations of other exceptions in patent laws, including domestic experimental use exceptions. There is no express Bolar provision in the Philippines Intellectual Property Code. The exception, however, has been part of Philippine regulatory practice for several years, and it has never been challenged before. The Pfizer pricing of Norvasc in the Philippines: The Pfizer prices for Norvasc vary by country. As noted above, in the Philippines, the prices are from $.88 to $1.46 per day. For the vast majority of people who live in the Philippines, this is not affordable. The World Bank reports that the Philippines has a per capita income of $1,170 per year. This is of course an average. Many earn much less. About 20 percent of the population earns less than $400 per year. A handful of Philippine residents earn more. The top 10 percent have an average per capita income of $4,247. The Pfizer price is targeted at only the wealthiest Philippine residents -- probably no more than the top 5 percent of the population. Like many developing countries with a highly skewed and unequal income distribution, selling to the economic elite at high prices is the profit maximizing strategy for Pfizer. The government of the Philippines is trying to protect the 95 percent of the population who cannot afford the high Pfizer price for Norvasc. The lawsuit against the Philippine regulators is an appalling action by Pfizer. Pfizer is reportly seeking more than 1.4 millions Philippines pesos from the defendants. Pfizer is making it personal by suing the government officials in their personal capacity; therefore we are going to make it personal also. I will be writing the Pfizer CEO, Mr. Henry A. McKinnell, asking him to take personal responsibility for Pfizer's actions, and drop the lawsuit. I'll report his response next week. - --------------------------------- James Love, CPTech / www.cptech.org / mailto:james.love at cptech.org / tel. +1.202.332.2670 / mobile +1.202.361.3040 "If everyone thinks the same: No one thinks." Bill Walton # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo at bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime at bbs.thing.net - ----- End backwarded message ----- From hbs.law at gmail.com Mon Apr 3 12:20:27 2006 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2006 12:20:27 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Paul Graham on Software Patents and Startups Message-ID: <8b60429e0604022350m3c91577eoc214401f78654e93@mail.gmail.com> Hi, Paul is a person I respect tremendously. He is credited with creating the first E-commerce application over web, Viaweb, and also proposing to use Bayesian techiques to filter spam mail which is now the standard anti-spam technique in use. Paul is a essayist and a trained painter. You can read more about him at http://www.paulgraham.com . Paul here talks about software patents in general and in particular about startups and patents. Good education! Regards, Hasit Seth =============================== Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com) March 2006 (This essay is derived from a talk at Google.) A few weeks ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted four patents. This was all the more surprising because I'd only applied for three. The patents aren't mine, of course. They were assigned to Viaweb, and became Yahoo's when they bought us. But the news set me thinking about the question of software patents generally. Patents are a hard problem. I've had to advise most of the startups we've funded about them, and despite years of experience I'm still not always sure I'm giving the right advice. One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general. Gradually our machines consist more and more of software. Things that used to be done with levers and cams and gears are now done with loops and trees and closures. There's nothing special about physical embodiments of control systems that should make them patentable, and the software equivalent not. Unfortunately, patent law is inconsistent on this point. Patent law in most countries says that algorithms aren't patentable. This rule is left over from a time when "algorithm" meant something like the Sieve of Eratosthenes. In 1800, people could not see as readily as we can that a great many patents on mechanical objects were really patents on the algorithms they embodied. Patent lawyers still have to pretend that's what they're doing when they patent algorithms. You must not use the word "algorithm" in the title of a patent application, just as you must not use the word "essays" in the title of a book. If you want to patent an algorithm, you have to frame it as a computer system executing it. Then it's mechanical; phew. The default euphemism for algorithm is "system and method." Try a patent search for that phrase and see how many results you get. Since software patents are no different from hardware patents, people who say "software patents are evil" are saying simply "patents are evil." So why do so many people complain about software patents specifically? I think the problem is more with the patent office than the concept of software patents. Whenever software meets government, bad things happen, because software changes fast and government changes slow. The patent office has been overwhelmed by both the volume and the novelty of applications for software patents, and as a result they've made a lot of mistakes. The most common is to grant patents that shouldn't be granted. To be patentable, an invention has to be more than new. It also has to be non-obvious. And this, especially, is where the USPTO has been dropping the ball. Slashdot has an icon that expresses the problem vividly: a knife and fork with the words "patent pending" superimposed. The scary thing is, this is the only icon they have for patent stories. Slashdot readers now take it for granted that a story about a patent will be about a bogus patent. That's how bad the problem has become. The problem with Amazon's notorious one-click patent, for example, is not that it's a software patent, but that it's obvious. Any online store that kept people's shipping addresses would have implemented this. The reason Amazon did it first was not that they were especially smart, but because they were one of the earliest sites with enough clout to force customers to log in before they could buy something. [1] We, as hackers, know the USPTO is letting people patent the knives and forks of our world. The problem is, the USPTO are not hackers. They're probably good at judging new inventions for casting steel or grinding lenses, but they don't understand software yet. At this point an optimist would be tempted to add "but they will eventually." Unfortunately that might not be true. The problem with software patents is an instance of a more general one: the patent office takes a while to understand new technology. If so, this problem will only get worse, because the rate of technological change seems to be increasing. In thirty years, the patent office may understand the sort of things we now patent as software, but there will be other new types of inventions they understand even less. Applying for a patent is a negotiation. You generally apply for a broader patent than you think you'll be granted, and the examiners reply by throwing out some of your claims and granting others. So I don't really blame Amazon for applying for the one-click patent. The big mistake was the patent office's, for not insisting on something narrower, with real technical content. By granting such an over-broad patent, the USPTO in effect slept with Amazon on the first date. Was Amazon supposed to say no? Where Amazon went over to the dark side was not in applying for the patent, but in enforcing it. A lot of companies (Microsoft, for example) have been granted large numbers of preposterously over-broad patents, but they keep them mainly for defensive purposes. Like nuclear weapons, the main role of big companies' patent portfolios is to threaten anyone who attacks them with a counter-suit. Amazon's suit against Barnes & Noble was thus the equivalent of a nuclear first strike. That suit probably hurt Amazon more than it helped them. Barnes & Noble was a lame site; Amazon would have crushed them anyway. To attack a rival they could have ignored, Amazon put a lasting black mark on their own reputation. Even now I think if you asked hackers to free-associate about Amazon, the one-click patent would turn up in the first ten topics. Google clearly doesn't feel that merely holding patents is evil. They've applied for a lot of them. Are they hypocrites? Are patents evil? There are really two variants of that question, and people answering it often aren't clear in their own minds which they're answering. There's a narrow variant: is it bad, given the current legal system, to apply for patents? and also a broader one: it is bad that the current legal system allows patents? These are separate questions. For example, in preindustrial societies like medieval Europe, when someone attacked you, you didn't call the police. There were no police. When attacked, you were supposed to fight back, and there were conventions about how to do it. Was this wrong? That's two questions: was it wrong to take justice into your own hands, and was it wrong that you had to? We tend to say yes to the second, but no to the first. If no one else will defend you, you have to defend yourself. [2] The situation with patents is similar. Business is a kind of ritualized warfare. Indeed, it evolved from actual warfare: most early traders switched on the fly from merchants to pirates depending on how strong you seemed. In business there are certain rules describing how companies may and may not compete with one another, and someone deciding that they're going to play by their own rules is missing the point. Saying "I'm not going to apply for patents just because everyone else does" is not like saying "I'm not going to lie just because everyone else does." It's more like saying "I'm not going to use TCP/IP just because everyone else does." Oh yes you are. A closer comparison might be someone seeing a hockey game for the first time, realizing with shock that the players were deliberately bumping into one another, and deciding that one would on no account be so rude when playing hockey oneself. Hockey allows checking. It's part of the game. If your team refuses to do it, you simply lose. So it is in business. Under the present rules, patents are part of the game. What does that mean in practice? We tell the startups we fund not to worry about infringing patents, because startups rarely get sued for patent infringement. There are only two reasons someone might sue you: for money, or to prevent you from competing with them. Startups are too poor to be worth suing for money. And in practice they don't seem to get sued much by competitors, either. They don't get sued by other startups because (a) patent suits are an expensive distraction, and (b) since the other startups are as young as they are, their patents probably haven't issued yet. [3] Nor do startups, at least in the software business, seem to get sued much by established competitors. Despite all the patents Microsoft holds, I don't know of an instance where they sued a startup for patent infringement. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle don't win by winning lawsuits. That's too uncertain. They win by locking competitors out of their sales channels. If you do manage to threaten them, they're more likely to buy you than sue you. When you read of big companies filing patent suits against smaller ones, it's usually a big company on the way down, grasping at straws. For example, Unisys's attempts to enforce their patent on LZW compression. When you see a big company threatening patent suits, sell. When a company starts fighting over IP, it's a sign they've lost the real battle, for users. A company that sues competitors for patent infringement is like a a defender who has been beaten so thoroughly that he turns to plead with the referee. You don't do that if you can still reach the ball, even if you genuinely believe you've been fouled. So a company threatening patent suits is a company in trouble. When we were working on Viaweb, a bigger company in the e-commerce business was granted a patent on online ordering, or something like that. I got a call from a VP there asking if we'd like to license it. I replied that I thought the patent was completely bogus, and would never hold up in court. "Ok," he replied. "So, are you guys hiring?" If your startup grows big enough, however, you'll start to get sued, no matter what you do. If you go public, for example, you'll be sued by multiple patent trolls who hope you'll pay them off to go away. More on them later. In other words, no one will sue you for patent infringement till you have money, and once you have money, people will sue you whether they have grounds to or not. So I advise fatalism. Don't waste your time worrying about patent infringement. You're probably violating a patent every time you tie your shoelaces. At the start, at least, just worry about making something great and getting lots of users. If you grow to the point where anyone considers you worth attacking, you're doing well. We do advise the companies we fund to apply for patents, but not so they can sue competitors. Successful startups either get bought or grow into big companies. If a startup wants to grow into a big company, they should apply for patents to build up the patent portfolio they'll need to maintain an armed truce with other big companies. If they want to get bought, they should apply for patents because patents are part of the mating dance with acquirers. Most startups that succeed do it by getting bought, and most acquirers care about patents. Startup acquisitions are usually a build-vs-buy decision for the acquirer. Should we buy this little startup or build our own? And two things, especially, make them decide not to build their own: if you already have a large and rapidly growing user base, and if you have a fairly solid patent application on critical parts of your software. There's a third reason big companies should prefer buying to building: that if they built their own, they'd screw it up. But few big companies are smart enough yet to admit this to themselves. It's usually the acquirer's engineers who are asked how hard it would be for the company to build their own, and they overestimate their abilities. [4] A patent seems to change the balance. It gives the acquirer an excuse to admit they couldn't copy what you're doing. It may also help them to grasp what's special about your technology. Frankly, it surprises me how small a role patents play in the software business. It's kind of ironic, considering all the dire things experts say about software patents stifling innovation, but when one looks closely at the software business, the most striking thing is how little patents seem to matter. In other fields, companies regularly sue competitors for patent infringement. For example, the airport baggage scanning business was for many years a cozy duopoly shared between two companies, InVision and L-3. In 2002 a startup called Reveal appeared, with new technology that let them build scanners a third the size. They were sued for patent infringement before they'd even released a product. You rarely hear that kind of story in our world. The one example I've found is, embarrassingly enough, Yahoo, which filed a patent suit against a gaming startup called Xfire in 2005. Xfire doesn't seem to be a very big deal, and it's hard to say why Yahoo felt threatened. Xfire's VP of engineering had worked at Yahoo on similar stuff-- in fact, he was listed as an inventor on the patent Yahoo sued over-- so perhaps there was something personal about it. My guess is that someone at Yahoo goofed. At any rate they didn't pursue the suit very vigorously. Why do patents play so small a role in software? I can think of three possible reasons. One is that software is so complicated that patents by themselves are not worth very much. I may be maligning other fields here, but it seems that in most types of engineering you can hand the details of some new technique to a group of medium-high quality people and get the desired result. For example, if someone develops a new process for smelting ore that gets a better yield, and you assemble a team of qualified experts and tell them about it, they'll be able to get the same yield. This doesn't seem to work in software. Software is so subtle and unpredictable that "qualified experts" don't get you very far. That's why we rarely hear phrases like "qualified expert" in the software business. What that level of ability can get you is, say, to make your software compatible with some other piece of software-- in eight months, at enormous cost. To do anything harder you need individual brilliance. If you assemble a team of qualified experts and tell them to make a new web-based email program, they'll get their asses kicked by a team of inspired nineteen year olds. Experts can implement, but they can't design. Or rather, expertise in implementation is the only kind most people, including the experts themselves, can measure. [5] But design is a definite skill. It's not just an airy intangible. Things always seem intangible when you don't understand them. Electricity seemed an airy intangible to most people in 1800. Who knew there was so much to know about it? So it is with design. Some people are good at it and some people are bad at it, and there's something very tangible they're good or bad at. The reason design counts so much in software is probably that there are fewer constraints than on physical things. Building physical things is expensive and dangerous. The space of possible choices is smaller; you tend to have to work as part of a larger group; and you're subject to a lot of regulations. You don't have any of that if you and a couple friends decide to create a new web-based application. Because there's so much scope for design in software, a successful application tends to be way more than the sum of its patents. What protects little companies from being copied by bigger competitors is not just their patents, but the thousand little things the big company will get wrong if they try. The second reason patents don't count for much in our world is that startups rarely attack big companies head-on, the way Reveal did. In the software business, startups beat established companies by transcending them. Startups don't build desktop word processing programs to compete with Microsoft Word. [6] They build Writely. If this paradigm is crowded, just wait for the next one; they run pretty frequently on this route. Fortunately for startups, big companies are extremely good at denial. If you take the trouble to attack them from an oblique angle, they'll meet you half-way and maneuver to keep you in their blind spot. To sue a startup would mean admitting it was dangerous, and that often means seeing something the big company doesn't want to see. IBM used to sue its mainframe competitors regularly, but they didn't bother much about the microcomputer industry because they didn't want to see the threat it posed. Companies building web based apps are similarly protected from Microsoft, which even now doesn't want to imagine a world in which Windows is irrelevant. The third reason patents don't seem to matter very much in software is public opinion-- or rather, hacker opinion. In a recent interview, Steve Ballmer coyly left open the possibility of attacking Linux on patent grounds. But I doubt Microsoft would ever be so stupid. They'd face the mother of all boycotts. And not just from the technical community in general; a lot of their own people would rebel. Good hackers care a lot about matters of principle, and they are highly mobile. If a company starts misbehaving, smart people won't work there. For some reason this seems to be more true in software than other businesses. I don't think it's because hackers have intrinsically higher principles so much as that their skills are easily transferrable. Perhaps we can split the difference and say that mobility gives hackers the luxury of being principled. Google's "don't be evil" policy may for this reason be the most valuable thing they've discovered. It's very constraining in some ways. If Google does do something evil, they get doubly whacked for it: once for whatever they did, and again for hypocrisy. But I think it's worth it. It helps them to hire the best people, and it's better, even from a purely selfish point of view, to be constrained by principles than by stupidity. (I wish someone would get this point across to the present administration.) I'm not sure what the proportions are of the preceding three ingredients, but the custom among the big companies seems to be not to sue the small ones, and the startups are mostly too busy and too poor to sue one another. So despite the huge number of software patents there's not a lot of suing going on. With one exception: patent trolls. Patent trolls are companies consisting mainly of lawyers whose whole business is to accumulate patents and threaten to sue companies who actually make things. Patent trolls, it seems safe to say, are evil. I feel a bit stupid saying that, because when you're saying something that Richard Stallman and Bill Gates would both agree with, you must be perilously close to tautologies. The CEO of Forgent, one of the most notorious patent trolls, says that what his company does is "the American way." Actually that's not true. The American way is to make money by creating wealth, not by suing people. [7] What companies like Forgent do is actually the proto-industrial way. In the period just before the industrial revolution, some of the greatest fortunes in countries like England and France were made by courtiers who extracted some lucrative right from the crown-- like the right to collect taxes on the import of silk-- and then used this to squeeze money from the merchants in that business. So when people compare patent trolls to the mafia, they're more right than they know, because the mafia too are not merely bad, but bad specifically in the sense of being an obsolete business model. Patent trolls seem to have caught big companies by surprise. In the last couple years they've extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from them. Patent trolls are hard to fight precisely because they create nothing. Big companies are safe from being sued by other big companies because they can threaten a counter-suit. But because patent trolls don't make anything, there's nothing they can be sued for. I predict this loophole will get closed fairly quickly, at least by legal standards. It's clearly an abuse of the system, and the victims are powerful. [8] But evil as patent trolls are, I don't think they hamper innovation much. They don't sue till a startup has made money, and by that point the innovation that generated it has already happpened. I can't think of a startup that avoided working on some problem because of patent trolls. So much for hockey as the game is played now. What about the more theoretical question of whether hockey would be a better game without checking? Do patents encourage or discourage innovation? This is a very hard question to answer in the general case. People write whole books on the topic. One of my main hobbies is the history of technology, and even though I've studied the subject for years, it would take me several weeks of research to be able to say whether patents have in general been a net win. One thing I can say is that 99.9% of the people who express opinions on the subject do it not based on such research, but out of a kind of religious conviction. At least, that's the polite way of putting it; the colloquial version involves speech coming out of organs not designed for that purpose. Whether they encourage innovation or not, patents were at least intended to. You don't get a patent for nothing. In return for the exclusive right to use an idea, you have to publish it, and it was largely to encourage such openness that patents were established. Before patents, people protected ideas by keeping them secret. With patents, central governments said, in effect, if you tell everyone your idea, we'll protect it for you. There is a parallel here to the rise of civil order, which happened at roughly the same time. Before central governments were powerful enough to enforce order, rich people had private armies. As governments got more powerful, they gradually compelled magnates to cede most responsibility for protecting them. (Magnates still have bodyguards, but no longer to protect them from other magnates.) Patents, like police, are involved in many abuses. But in both cases the default is something worse. The choice is not "patents or freedom?" any more than it is "police or freedom?" The actual questions are respectively "patents or secrecy?" and "police or gangs?" As with gangs, we have some idea what secrecy would be like, because that's how things used to be. The economy of medieval Europe was divided up into little tribes, each jealously guarding their privileges and secrets. In Shakespeare's time, "mystery" was synonymous with "craft." Even today we can see an echo of the secrecy of medieval guilds, in the now pointless secrecy of the Masons. The most memorable example of medieval industrial secrecy is probably Venice, which forbade glassblowers to leave the city, and sent assassins after those who tried. We might like to think we wouldn't go so far, but the movie industry has already tried to pass laws prescribing three year prison terms just for putting movies on public networks. Want to try a frightening thought experiment? If the movie industry could have any law they wanted, where would they stop? Short of the death penalty, one assumes, but how close would they get? Even worse than the spectacular abuses might be the overall decrease in efficiency that would accompany increased secrecy. As anyone who has dealt with organizations that operate on a "need to know" basis can attest, dividing information up into little cells is terribly inefficient. The flaw in the "need to know" principle is that you don't know who needs to know something. An idea from one area might spark a great discovery in another. But the discoverer doesn't know he needs to know it. If secrecy were the only protection for ideas, companies wouldn't just have to be secretive with other companies; they'd have to be secretive internally. This would encourage what is already the worst trait of big companies. I'm not saying secrecy would be worse than patents, just that we couldn't discard patents for free. Businesses would become more secretive to compensate, and in some fields this might get ugly. Nor am I defending the current patent system. There is clearly a lot that's broken about it. But the breakage seems to affect software less than most other fields. In the software business I know from experience whether patents encourage or discourage innovation, and the answer is the type that people who like to argue about public policy least like to hear: they don't affect innovation much, one way or the other. Most innovation in the software business happens in startups, and startups should simply ignore other companies' patents. At least, that's what we advise, and we bet money on that advice. The only real role of patents, for most startups, is as an element of the mating dance with acquirers. There patents do help a little. And so they do encourage innovation indirectly, in that they give more power to startups, which is where, pound for pound, the most innovation happens. But even in the mating dance, patents are of secondary importance. It matters more to make something great and get a lot of users. Notes [1] You have to be careful here, because a great discovery often seems obvious in retrospect. One-click ordering, however, is not such a discovery. [2] "Turn the other cheek" skirts the issue; the critical question is not how to deal with slaps, but sword thrusts. [3] Applying for a patent is now very slow, but it might actually be bad if that got fixed. At the moment the time it takes to get a patent is conveniently just longer than the time it takes a startup to succeed or fail. [4] Instead of the canonical "could you build this?" maybe the corp dev guys should be asking "will you build this?" or even "why haven't you already built this?" [5] Design ability is so hard to measure that you can't even trust the design world's internal standards. You can't assume that someone with a degree in design is any good at design, or that an eminent designer is any better than his peers. If that worked, any company could build products as good as Apple's just by hiring sufficiently qualified designers. [6] If anyone wanted to try, we'd be interested to hear from them. I suspect it's one of those things that's not as hard as everyone assumes. [7] Patent trolls can't even claim, like speculators, that they "create" liquidity. [8] If big companies don't want to wait for the government to take action, there is a way to fight back themselves. For a long time I thought there wasn't, because there was nothing to grab onto. But there is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers. Big technology companies between them generate a lot of legal business. If they agreed among themselves never to do business with any firm employing anyone who had worked for a patent troll, either as an employee or as outside counsel, they could probably starve the trolls of the lawyers they need. Thanks to Dan Bloomberg, Paul Buchheit, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Peter Norvig for reading drafts of this, to Joel Lehrer and Peter Eng for answering my questions about patents, and to Ankur Pansari for inviting me to speak. From monica at sarai.net Mon Apr 3 23:31:26 2006 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2006 23:31:26 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] TRIPS, a mistake Message-ID: <112217C4-CCF4-44DD-A217-1BD0D56FECB6@sarai.net> From Ian Brown's blog (one of the main designers of the TRIPS): Lehman: TRIPS was a mistake http://dooooooom.blogspot.com/2006/03/lehman-trips-was-mistake.html I'm attending a great meeting in Brussels on "The Politics and Ideology of Intellectual Property" [1]. We just had quite a newsflash from Bruce Lehman, President Clinton's head of intellectual property policy who was largely responsible for the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Lehman now believes TRIPS has been a failure for the United States, because the WTO agreement in which it is included opened US markets to overseas manufactured goods and destroyed the US manufacturing industry. He feels that the US has kept its part of the TRIPS bargain, but that with 90% piracy in China, higher-end developing nations have not. In retrospect, he feels the US should instead have introduced labour and environmental standards into the WTO agreement so that jobs would not be lost in the US manufacturing sector to countries with few environmental standards and weak unions. How exhilirating that Mr Lehman agrees with civil society IP experts across the developed and developing world! [1] http://www.tacd.org/docs/?id=286 [2] http://www.edri.org/ Monica Narula Raqs Media Collective Sarai-CSDS 29 Rajpur Road Delhi 110054 www.raqsmediacollective.net www.sarai.net From hbs.law at gmail.com Tue Apr 4 15:53:05 2006 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2006 15:53:05 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] World Health Organization Targets Intellectual Property Rights Message-ID: <8b60429e0604040323o7ca910d3q7c410edff89f3f6@mail.gmail.com> 03 April 2006 World Health Organization Targets Intellectual Property Rights New report calls for action to ensure developing-country access to medicines Washington – An independent Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health presented a report to the World Health Organization (WHO) April 3 that recommends key actions needed to ensure that poor people in developing countries have access to products to diagnose, treat and prevent common diseases. More than half of those in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia lack regular access to essential medicines because they cannot afford them or because of weak health systems in their countries. The 10-member commission represented 10 countries – Argentina, Egypt, India, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States – and the perspectives of government, industry, public-private partnerships, science, medicine, law and economics. WHO Director-General Dr. Lee Jong-wook established the commission in February 2004. Apart from access to existing medicines, some health products for diseases that disproportionately affect developing countries are not developed because there is no sustainable market, according to a WHO press release. The relationship among intellectual property rights, innovation and public health is at the heart of debate on these issues. The report, Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property Rights, comes after two years of analysis about how governments, industry, scientists, international law and financing mechanisms can work best to overcome such challenges. "There is now global momentum to address these issues, and we have a unique opportunity to build on this," said Commission Chair Ruth Dreifuss, former president of Switzerland. The report, which was commissioned by the World Health Assembly, WHO's governing body of 192 member states, contains more than 50 recommendations that serve as a road map for tackling the issues in different country settings. An intergovernmental working group of the WHO executive board will consider the report at a meeting April 28. The World Health Assembly then will examine and debate the report during its annual meeting May 22-27. The assembly will decide how to apply the report findings. Text of the press release and the complete report – in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish and Russian – are available on the WHO Web site. (Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov) From prabhuram at gmail.com Wed Apr 5 23:48:28 2006 From: prabhuram at gmail.com (prabhu ram) Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2006 20:18:28 +0200 Subject: [Commons-Law] Steal This Book Message-ID: <68752c9f0604051118p32704c5ev5aee8cdddfa882bc@mail.gmail.com> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/04/opinion/04finder.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print Steal This Book By JOSEPH FINDER Boston IN the next week or two, a British judge will rule on whether one of the biggest-selling novelists of all time is a thief. The co-authors of a 1982 work of nonfiction, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," are suing the novelist Dan Brown, author of "The Da Vinci Code," for breach of copyright. They charge that Mr. Brown's novel stole their hypothesis — which, in case you've been holed away for the past few years rereading Proust, is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married, and a shadowy group called the Priory of Sion has protected their descendants over the centuries, fending off dark, contending forces inside the Vatican. But what those in that London courtroom seem not to realize is that the novel has always been a confidence game. Early in the 18th century, the English novel came into being when a sometime jailbird gulled his readers with the counterfeit memoir of a certain Robinson Crusoe. Across the Channel, plenty of readers took narratives like "Manon Lescaut," by the Abbé Provost, a convicted forger, as the historical accounts they pretended to be. No surprise that our ancestors' mischief has lingered in the literary bloodline, especially when it comes to fiction masquerading as history. "Writers have to avoid taking material from other writers," one of the plaintiffs, Michael Baigent, has declared, unappeased by the fact that Mr. Brown's book makes explicit reference to his. "It's part of the deal, really." Tell that to the author of "A Tale of Two Cities," who not only boasted of having read Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution hundreds of times but also credited it with having "inspired me with the general fancy of that story." The truth is that historical fiction has its roots in fictional history. So it is fitting that the "hypothesis" in the Brown dispute was largely the invention of a French hoaxster named Pierre Plantard, who died in 2000 at age 80. During the 1960's, he and his collaborators planted forged parchments in the French national library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, to provide spurious support for Plantard's wild tale about Jesus and his bloodline. Alexandre Dumas would have smiled: In a preface to his "Three Musketeers," Dumas, a jovial showman, claimed to have discovered the text in the Royal Library, the forerunner to the national library. "The discovery of a completely unknown manuscript, at a time when historical science is at such a high level, seemed almost miraculous," he declared. In truth, the novel was largely a reworking of "The Memoirs of M. d'Artagnan," a fictionalized autobiography published much earlier. Once the novel became a blockbuster, the historian with whom Dumas collaborated sued him for royalties. We novelists call that foreshadowing. So what's to be learned from a modern novelist whose plot involves conspiracies at the heart of the Roman Catholic church, and who finds himself accused of taking central plot elements from a previous work of nonfiction? I'm thinking, of course, of the French Nobel laureate André Gide and his brilliant 1914 novel, "The Vatican Cellars," first published in English under the title "The Vatican Swindle." The novel revolved around a historical episode detailed in "The False Pope," by the distinguished Hebraist Jean de Pauly. In the early 1880's, Pauly wrote, a ring of con artists persuaded gullible Catholic traditionalists that Pope Leo VIII was being held captive in the Vatican cellars, while Masonic conspirators (possibly with Jesuit assistance) had replaced him with an impostor. The victims forked over hundreds of thousands of francs that were supposedly needed for a secret crusade to rescue God's vicar on earth. Gide's detractors found their ammunition. In a nimbly insinuating article, the literary journalist Frédéric Lefèvre framed the matter this way: "When André Gide wrote 'The Vatican Cellars,' did he or did he not know 'The False Pope,' published 20 years before? Mr. Gide has enough talent that he does not need to plagiarize anybody, but there are coincidences, surprising points of convergence." So he felt obliged to address an issue of "capital importance," namely, "a writer's rights and duties in using, organizing, and transposing reality." Turning the case of the false pope into the case of the false author, these critics were too literal-minded to see that the "reality" in question concerned a fabulation — that what drew Gide to the true story was that it was a lie. Gide wasn't writing a historical novel about a hoax. He thought the novel was a hoax. "Fiction there is — and history," Gide wrote in "The Vatican Swindle": "We are indeed, forced to acknowledge that the novelist's art often compels belief, just as reality sometimes defies it." Maybe that's why "The Da Vinci Code" made Plantard's counterfeit history even more convincing than "Holy Blood" could, starting with its Dumas-style author's note: "Fact: The Priory of Sion — a European secret society founded in 1099 — is a real organization. In 1975 Paris's Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci." The novel got its start because, whatever we claim, we've always hungered for fake true stories, or inventive lies we can pretend are real. Gide, for one, suspected that this hunger was actually the rock on which the Catholic Church was built. That's why his characters tend to be deluded, misinformed, confused, prone to false inferences, easily misled. Secret histories, hidden intrigues: he knew that people would always place their confidence in such things. Another name for that confidence, Gide thought, was faith. Still another was fiction. Meanwhile, as the London litigants await the judge's verdict, you can at least be sure of this: the Vatican swindle goes on. Joseph Finder is the author of "Company Man" and the forthcoming "Killer Instinct." From skjha at iitb.ac.in Sat Apr 8 22:36:02 2006 From: skjha at iitb.ac.in (Shishir K Jha) Date: Sat, 8 Apr 2006 22:36:02 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Commons-Law] The big pharma spin on CIPIH Report In-Reply-To: <20060405100236.6AD9928DF33@mail.sarai.net> References: <20060405100236.6AD9928DF33@mail.sarai.net> Message-ID: <1240.10.163.30.66.1144515962.squirrel@gpo.iitb.ac.in> Maybe of interest to many on this site. There is mention of the Liberty Institute of India as one of the authoring institutes of this "big pharma spin" on the CIPIH report. Does anyone know about them? Looks like big pharma supporters are creating their "think tanks" in India too. ------------------------------------------------- "... a quite useful document, because it is the big pharma spin on the CIPIH report. Clearly the industry did not want to take the lead criticizing the report, and prefer that these industry funded NGOs do it for them. The IPN report involved a fair amount of planning and coordination. The reference to "civil society" organizations is of course designed to confuse the press, by making it sound as if it is independent from pharmaceutical industry, which is not true. Note they don't advertise themselves as a pro-free market group funded by drug companies -- and present themselves in the language usually used to describe the industry critics. ... It is interesting IPN uses John Kilama so much in this report. This former Dupont executive spends a lot of time pushing agricultural patents in Africa on behalf on the agricultural biotechnology industry, and is a frequent speaker against compulsory licensing of essential medicine patents." James Love > A newly released report published by 16 independent and non- > partisan civil society organisations on the subject of IP, innovation and > health may be of interest to ip-health readers in light of the release, > as covered yesterday on this list-serve, of a WHO Commission report > addressing the same issues. > > An English version of the report can be accessed via the International > Policy Network website, > http://www.policynetwork.net/uploaded/pdf/ > Civil_Society_text_web.pdf, or > A Spanish version of the press release can be accessed at the > Instituto Ecuatoriano de Economía Política: > http://www.ieep.org.ec/ieep/ieepsite/templates/articulos.aspx? > articleid=527&zoneid=2; > > The report identifies 50 per cent of people in parts of Africa and > Asia have no access to medicines due to harmful government policies. > > Examples of harmful government interventions found in the report are: > Taxes and tariffs of up to 55 per cent on imported medicines price > people out of treatment. > > Byzantine and costly registration requirements mean many medicines > already approved in the US, EU and Japan are simply not registered in most > poor countries because manufacturers cannot justify the investment in > registration. > > Health insurance is hampered by government regulations, so the poor > are unable to obtain insurance and are only able to pay for treatments > if they have sufficient savings, or must rely on charity or meagre > government healthcare provision. > > Price controls - which proponents claim benefit the poor - actually > reduce the availability of drugs, especially in distant rural regions, by > making it uneconomic for pharmacies to stock them. Even in relatively > wealthy South Africa, price controls have led to the closure of scores of > rural pharmacies - leaving thousands of poor people without any access to > medicines at all. > > Inadequate protection for intellectual property in poor countries > undermines incentives to invest in R&D for the diseases of poverty by > making it more difficult to recover costs. The report found no > evidence that intellectual property protection had hampered access to > medicines. > > Low pay and poor conditions at government run hospitals and clinics > mean that a large number of trained medical professionals (doctors, > nurses, etc.) have emigrated to wealthier countries with better healthcare > systems. > > The Civil Society report was motivated in part by a concern that > the WHO's Commission on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Health, > would not address these fundamental issues because of concerns about the > response of member governments. > > Barun Mitra (Liberty Institute, India), one of the lead authors of the > report, said: > > "Our report shows that, when it comes to medicines for the diseases of > poverty, governments are the main barriers to access and innovation. > Intellectual property is an important driver of innovation but in poor > countries governments currently prevent people from accessing cheap, > generic medicines that could cure many of the diseases they face. > In such circumstance, what is the point of producing new drugs for these > diseases? Governments must remove the taxes, tariffs and regulations that > prevent the sick from getting treatment." > > --------- > > Alec van Gelder > Research Fellow > International Policy Network From hbs.law at gmail.com Mon Apr 10 10:10:23 2006 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 10:10:23 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] First Indian Patent Filing Message-ID: <8b60429e0604092140ufea9e12na63472ee0f671657@mail.gmail.com> Hi, Credit for finding and telling me about this piece goes to Murari Venkatraman, the co-founder of Cricinfo (murari.v at gmail.com). I think this piece has great research and archival value for those interested in Indian IP. Hasit Intellectual property? Right! T.V. MALAVIKA The first Intellectual Property Rights legislation was enacted in India 150 years ago. A look at the progress since then. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Although the concept of intellectual property was very old, there appeared the need to harmonise laws to facilitate international trade and the free flow of technology. This became necessary because it was difficult to obtain sufficient protection in other countries of the world, in view of the disparity in the laws in each country. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Early bird: George Alfred DePenning made the first application for a patent in India. EVER since India joined the World Trade Organisation in 1995 and became a signatory to the agreement on trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPS), much has been said about intellectual property, trademarks, patents, how much more expensive medicines are going to become, western exploitation of Indian traditional practices and so on, thereby leading the casual observer to imagine that this whole Intellectual Property Rights issue is a relatively recent one. However, less well known is the fact that the Government of India has offered citizens of the country the opportunity to protect their intellectual property for exactly 150 years: the first IPR legislation was enacted in British India in 1856. Even if the Government of India is being reticent about celebrating the achievement of this extraordinary milestone, DePenning and DePenning, a Chennai-based firm of IPR Attorneys whose history runs a close parallel with that of the IPR industry in the country and whose founder was granted the first ever patent in the country, is not (see box). As per the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) definition, intellectual property refers to creations of the mind, inventions, literary and artistic works, symbols, names, images and designs used in commerce. Broadly, intellectual property is divided into two categories. The first category covers industrial property, which includes patents, industrial designs and trademarks., all of which have industrial applications. The other refers to copyright laws, which are applied to such things as literary, dramatic and artistic works; rights relating to performing artists, the production of phonograms and rights of broadcasters in their radio and television programs. The history of the development of international patent reforms makes fascinating reading. Although the concept of intellectual property was very old, there appeared the need to harmonise laws to facilitate international trade and the free flow of technology. This became necessary because it was difficult to obtain sufficient protection in other countries of the world, in view of the disparity in the laws in each country. International impact A prime example of this occurred, when the Empires of Austria and Hungary invited several countries to participate in an international exhibition of inventions held in Vienna in 1873. Many countries refused to display their inventions in view of inadequate legal protection. This incident had a far-reaching impact; the Congress of Vienna for patent reforms was convened in 1873, following which an international congress on industrial property was convened in Paris in 1878. A final draft proposing an "International" union of laws was prepared by France and sent to other countries with an invitation to attend the international conference in Paris in 1880. `The Paris Convention' as it was called concluded in 1883. Since then, the Convention has been subject to several revisions. In 1967 in Stockholm, the last revision was made to the Paris Convention by which an international organisation was formed to administer and promote intellectual property on an international level — the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). The main principles of the Paris Convention state that nationals, of any country, which is a signatory to the convention, will enjoy the same treatment (with respect to "industrial property" laws) in other countries, as if they were and nationals of the respective countries. The Paris convention did not include the term "intellectual property" but only "industrial property". This necessitated an international Convention to curb rampant piracy in the area of literary and artistic works. The Berne Convention for the protection of literary and artistic works was adopted in the year 1886 with an objective to facilitate uniformity in the level of protection granted in all the member countries. The Convention has since then gone through several revisions to adapt to the practical changes in the field of copyright law. The development of the IPR legislation in our country has been in parallel with the international scenario. The Act relating to Patent Rights introduced in 1856 granted exclusive privileges to the inventor of new methods of manufacturing for a period of 14 years. This Act was amended on the lines of the British Patent Law (1852) and re-enacted in 1859. The monopoly granted to the inventor was known as "exclusive privileges". Subsequently, several changes to the law in this field were introduced through various enactments, which paved the way to the Indian Patents and Designs Act 1911. The realisation that the laws were not designed to motivate or protect Indian inventors led to the enactment of the more progressive Indian Patents Act of 1970. Eventually following the TRIPS agreement, Indian Parliament passed the Patents (Amendment) Act of 2005. Similarly, the Indian Merchandise Act of 1889 that awarded exclusive rights to individuals and businesses to use their `recognised brands' and enforce their rights against other traders has, through a series of stages metamorphosed over the years into the currently active Trademarks Act of 1999. Currently the other pieces of legislation that govern IPR in the country are — The Copyrights Act, 1957, The Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and the Protection) Act, 1999 and The Designs Act, 2000. Since most nations have their own IPR laws, the inventor who wanted to protect his invention worldwide had to go through the cumbersome procedure of applying for patents in every country where protection was sought. This led to delays, greater expense and piquant situations until, in 1978 eighteen nations got together to sign the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) which has now been adopted by over 108 nations the world over. India became a signatory state to the Treaty on December 7, 1998. The PCT is extremely facilitatory in nature and today inventors need to go through an initial rigorous examination process of their inventions only in the Patent Office they first apply to (the international phase of the application). Following this they go through a less rigorous and more rapid screening process in each of the countries they seek protection of their patents in (the national phase of the application). Despite the first application for a patent in India having been made as early as 1856 by George Alfred DePenning (see box) and the laws of the land in connection with IPR having been designed to encourage original inventiveness, it is a pity that Indian industry and academia have not yet risen to the challenge. Current scene In 2005, according to statistics put out by the World Intellectual Property Organisation, among the developing countries, Korea topped the list filing twice as many applications under the PCT as its nearest competitor China. India made third place with just a quarter of the number of applications that China made. Also, of the applications made for patents in China in a year, approximately, half are made by local inventors, whereas, in India this figure would be less than 30 per cent. We can certainly do better than this and hopefully in the years to come, this gap will be comfortably bridged. A punkah pulling machine ON February 28, 1856, the Government of India promulgated legislation to grant what was then termed as "exclusive privileges for the encouragement of inventions of new manufactures". On March 3, 1856, a civil engineer, George Alfred DePenning of 7, Grant's Lane, Calcutta petitioned the Government of India for grant of exclusive privileges for his invention — "An Efficient Punkah Pulling Machine". On September 2DePenning, submitted the Specifications for his invention along with drawings to illustrate its working. These were accepted and the invention was granted the first ever Intellectual Property protection in India. DePenning, submitted petitions for two more inventions that same year — No. 2 and No. 4 of 1856 under the Act and in the years to follow several patents were granted by the Calcutta Patent Office to this prodigious inventor. http://www.thehindu.com/mag/2006/04/09/stories/2006040900150200.htm (The article has pictures of DePenning and the first patent too) Having secured his place in Indian history, George Alfred DePenning could well have rested. But he did not. The entrepreneur in him saw other inventors struggling with the process involved in patenting new inventions and he saw the possibility of representing them as a Patent Agent. And so in 1856, the firm of DePenning & DePenning was born. Today, exactly 150 years on, not only does the firm continue to exist, but has grown to become one of the largest attorney firms devoted exclusively to the protection of Intellectual Property Rights with an impressive list of clients from many parts of the world. The firm has always had a member of the DePenning family at the helm. Started initially in Calcutta, the firm relocated its headquarters to Chennai in 1987 and today has branches in Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi. The firm celebrates the 150th year of its existence with a series of events that started on March 3, 2006 and will culminate in September 2006. The writer is a Chennai-based Intellectual Property Rights Attorney. From hbs.law at gmail.com Mon Apr 10 20:52:35 2006 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 20:52:35 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Google buys search algorithm invented by Israeli student Message-ID: <8b60429e0604100822i55013da1h4246aa7741259e37@mail.gmail.com> Hi, See how a software patent helped a student/his university get returns for their efforts. Do you realistically think without this patent Google would have paid anything to make a clone of the algorithm? Regards, Hasit ====================================== http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/703798.html Last update - 04:57 09/04/2006 Google buys search algorithm invented by Israeli student By Oded Yaron Search engine giant Google recently acquired an advanced text search algorithm invented by Ori Alon, an Israeli student. Sources believe Yahoo and Microsoft were also negotiating with the University of New South Wales in Australia, where Alon is a doctoral student in computer science. Google, Alon and the university all refused to comment, though Google confirmed that "Ori Alon works at Google's Mountain View, California offices." The University acknowledged that Yahoo and Microsoft had conducted negotiations with its business development company. Alon told TheMarker in an interview six months ago that the university had registered a patent on the invention. Orion, as it is called, which Alon developed with faculty, relates only to the most relevant textual results. In addition the software, which currently operates only in English, offers a list of topics directly related to the original source. "For example, if you search information on the War of Independence, you'll receive a list of related words, like Etzel, Palmach, Ben-Gurion," he explained. The text will only appear on the results page if enough words relevant to the search and the link between them is reasonable. Orion also rates the texts by quality of the site in which they appear. /hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=703798 close window From prashant at nalsartech.org Wed Apr 12 16:37:02 2006 From: prashant at nalsartech.org (Your Name) Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2006 16:37:02 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] BRAILLE VERSION OF QURAN, BIBLE GET COPYRIGHT Message-ID: BRAILLE VERSION OF QURAN, BIBLE GET COPYRIGHT Source: The Hindu HYDERABAD:The Holy Quran and Bible brought out in Braille script by Guru Kondaveeti Jyothirmayee, noted devotional singer, have been given an entry in the Register of Copyrights, Copyright Office, Government of India. Ms. Jyothirmayee known for her rendition of Annamacharya sankeertanas and a social worker, brought out Braille (English) version of the holy books for the benefit of visually challenged children. She also won the copyright for other epics — Ramayanam, Bharatham, Bhagavatham, Annamacharya Sankeertanas — brought out in Braille by her earlier. A communication about entry of her latest Braille books was received from Copyright Registrar Office, according to a release. She also launched an e-mobile Braille library recently under the aegis of Kondaveeti Jyothirmayee Central Trust to bring various Braille books brought out by the Trust and others for the visually challenged school children. © Copyright 2000 - 2006 The Hindu http://www.nalsartech.org/tikiwiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=13445 From seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org Wed Apr 12 23:48:37 2006 From: seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org (Seth Johnson) Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2006 14:18:37 -0400 Subject: [Commons-Law] Home Invasion by EULA Bill in Oklahoma Message-ID: <443D447D.7F572AC8@RealMeasures.dyndns.org> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [IP] Oklahoma bill to open your computer to companies... Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 18:48:35 -0400 From: David Farber To: ip at v2.listbox.com Begin forwarded message: From: Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu Date: April 11, 2006 4:00:45 PM EDT To: David Farber Subject: FOR IP: Oklahoma bill to open your computer to companies... (Note - this is an Oklahoma House bill, not a US Congress. Doesn't make it any more right...) http://www.okgazette.com/news/templates/cover.asp?articleid=423&zoneid=7 Get ready for Microsoft, cable and phone companies, and quite a few other people to know a lot more about what you do on your computer, thanks to House Bill 2083. Wednesday, April 05, 2006 Ben Fenwick It's supposed to protect you from predators spying on your computer habits, but a bill Microsoft Corp. helped write for Oklahoma will open your personal information to warrantless searches, according to a computer privacy expert and a state representative. Called the "Computer Spyware Protection Act", House Bill 2083 would create fines of up to a million dollars for anyone using viruses or surreptitious computer techniques to break on to someone's computer without that person's knowledge and acceptance, according to the bill's state Senate author, Clark Jolley. "The bill has a clear prohibition on anything going in without your permission. You have to grant permission", said Jolley, R-Edmond. "You can look at your license agreement. It will say whether they have the ability to take that information or not". But therein lies the catch. If you click that "accept" button on the routine user's agreement, the proposed law would allow any company from whom you bought upgradable software the freedom to come onto your computer for "detection or prevention of the unauthorized use of or fraudulent or other illegal activities in connection with a network, service, or computer software, including scanning for and removing computer software prescribed under this act". That means that Microsoft (or another company with such software) can erase spyware or viruses. But if you have, say, a pirated copy of Excel - Microsoft (or companies with similar software) can erase it, or anything else they want to erase, and not be held liable for it. Additionally, that phrase "fraudulent or other illegal activities" means they can: - Let the local district attorney know that you wrote a hot check last month. - Let the attorney general know that you play online poker. - Let the tax commission know you bought cartons of cigarettes and didn't pay the state tax on them. - Read anything on your hard drive, such as your name, home address, personal identification code, passwords, Social Security number ... etc., etc., etc. "I think in broad terms that is still a form of spying", said Marc Rotenberg, attorney and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. "Some people say, 'Well, it's justified'. I'm not so clear that should be the case. Particularly if the reason you are passing legislation is to cover that activity". The bill is scheduled to go back before the House for another vote. Will the Oklahoma House, on behalf of all computer users in the state of Oklahoma, click "accept"? (More in the online article) ------------------------------------- Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ From a_prabhala at yahoo.co.uk Sat Apr 8 23:36:13 2006 From: a_prabhala at yahoo.co.uk (Achal Prabhala) Date: Sat, 8 Apr 2006 23:36:13 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] The big pharma spin on CIPIH Report References: <20060405100236.6AD9928DF33@mail.sarai.net> <1240.10.163.30.66.1144515962.squirrel@gpo.iitb.ac.in> Message-ID: <02f501c65b37$22ba6e50$aa8b41db@som.yale.edu> Actually they've been around for a bit, and their main achievement is to have cornered the market for token brown/ third world support to corporate lobbies in the US, with occasional support from local oddballs - Kishwar etc. - but largely it seems like they go about organising their little birthday parties for Ayn Rand etc without anyone taking too much notice of them. The only damaging aspect of their work is the somewhat fantastic claim that they represent independent civil society. They probably model themselves on de Soto and his outfit in Peru - thankfully they don't seem near as influential, nor are they headed up by anyone as charismatic. Achal. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Shishir K Jha" To: Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2006 10:36 PM Subject: [Commons-Law] The big pharma spin on CIPIH Report > Maybe of interest to many on this site. > > There is mention of the Liberty Institute of India as one of the authoring > institutes of this "big pharma spin" on the CIPIH report. Does anyone know > about them? Looks like big pharma supporters are creating their "think > tanks" in India too. > > ------------------------------------------------- > "... a quite useful document, because it is the big pharma spin on > the CIPIH report. Clearly the industry did not want to take the > lead criticizing the report, and prefer that these industry funded > NGOs do it for them. The IPN report involved a fair amount of > planning and coordination. The reference to "civil society" > organizations is of course designed to confuse the press, by making > it sound as if it is independent from pharmaceutical industry, which > is not true. Note they don't advertise themselves as a pro-free > market group funded by drug companies -- and present themselves in > the language usually used to describe the industry critics. ... > It is interesting IPN uses John Kilama so much in this report. > This former Dupont executive spends a lot of time pushing agricultural > patents in Africa on behalf on the agricultural biotechnology industry, > and is a frequent speaker against compulsory licensing of essential > medicine patents." James Love > > > A newly released report published by 16 independent and non- > > partisan civil society organisations on the subject of IP, innovation > and > health may be of interest to ip-health readers in light of the > release, > > as covered yesterday on this list-serve, of a WHO Commission report > > addressing the same issues. > > > > An English version of the report can be accessed via the International > > Policy Network website, > > http://www.policynetwork.net/uploaded/pdf/ > > Civil_Society_text_web.pdf, or > > > A Spanish version of the press release can be accessed at the > > Instituto Ecuatoriano de Economía Política: > > http://www.ieep.org.ec/ieep/ieepsite/templates/articulos.aspx? > > articleid=527&zoneid=2; > > > > The report identifies 50 per cent of people in parts of Africa and > > Asia have no access to medicines due to harmful government policies. > > > > Examples of harmful government interventions found in the report are: > > Taxes and tariffs of up to 55 per cent on imported medicines price > > people out of treatment. > > > > Byzantine and costly registration requirements mean many medicines > > already approved in the US, EU and Japan are simply not registered in most > > poor countries because manufacturers cannot justify the investment in > > registration. > > > > Health insurance is hampered by government regulations, so the poor > > are unable to obtain insurance and are only able to pay for treatments > > if they have sufficient savings, or must rely on charity or meagre > > government healthcare provision. > > > > Price controls - which proponents claim benefit the poor - actually > > reduce the availability of drugs, especially in distant rural regions, by > > making it uneconomic for pharmacies to stock them. Even in relatively > > wealthy South Africa, price controls have led to the closure of scores of > > rural pharmacies - leaving thousands of poor people without any access to > > medicines at all. > > > > Inadequate protection for intellectual property in poor countries > > undermines incentives to invest in R&D for the diseases of poverty by > > making it more difficult to recover costs. The report found no > > evidence that intellectual property protection had hampered access to > > medicines. > > > > Low pay and poor conditions at government run hospitals and clinics > > mean that a large number of trained medical professionals (doctors, > > nurses, etc.) have emigrated to wealthier countries with better healthcare > > systems. > > > > The Civil Society report was motivated in part by a concern that > > the WHO's Commission on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Health, > > would not address these fundamental issues because of concerns about the > > response of member governments. > > > > Barun Mitra (Liberty Institute, India), one of the lead authors of the > > report, said: > > > > "Our report shows that, when it comes to medicines for the diseases of > > poverty, governments are the main barriers to access and innovation. > > Intellectual property is an important driver of innovation but in poor > > countries governments currently prevent people from accessing cheap, > > generic medicines that could cure many of the diseases they face. > > In such circumstance, what is the point of producing new drugs for these > > diseases? Governments must remove the taxes, tariffs and regulations that > > prevent the sick from getting treatment." > > > > --------- > > > > Alec van Gelder > > Research Fellow > > International Policy Network > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > commons-law mailing list > commons-law at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law ___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Photos – NEW, now offering a quality print service from just 8p a photo http://uk.photos.yahoo.com From jeebesh at sarai.net Sat Apr 15 17:20:27 2006 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 17:20:27 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Dispersed property and pirate acts Message-ID: <546A0F17-7453-448B-A1F1-30E7BAE0C486@sarai.net> Recently we were part of the Leonardo/SFAI Digital Salon where we spoke of "The Strange Destiny of Open Source in the Nation State" and Steve Cisler talked of Piracy. Some thoughts that have arisen after the quite impassioned discussion that evening around piracy, how it is constituted and how to think it beyond a simple anxiety of the loss of property: What if we think of' 'dispersed property' and 'pirate acts'. The present scenario is of an increasing dispersal of 'property' through everyday immaterial goods. This makes us enveloped by 'property'. Many acts that touch upon this 'property envelop' do infringe property rights. There is, thus, a ubiquitous presence of daily small 'pirate acts' by almost anyone. Perhaps a simple listing of such daily acts and the reality of 'property dispersal' will be relevant in the displacement of the idea of the 'pirate' as a figure out there - removed and away from us - ruining 'social order and meaning'. The figure of the 'pirate' increasingly haunts all discussion of 'intellectual property'. It is figure on whom various fears and anxieties of capitalism's core 'productive values' are projected - from free riders to free lunch, to criminality, to idleness, to laziness, to profiting without labour, to destruction of innovation, etc. If we can imagine daily life enmeshed within immaterial forms of property as a series of relays and disruptions produced by multiple 'commoning acts', 'property acts' and 'pirate acts' - then we can have an account of everyday life and practice that does not freeze all of us into singular 'figures'; figures that do not address how we all navigate the contemporary in complex ways. best jeebesh From hbs.law at gmail.com Sun Apr 16 20:27:53 2006 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2006 20:27:53 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Swiss Copyright Office - Great Cartoon Message-ID: <8b60429e0604160757g4ffc0014h5d51580e6c7ac705@mail.gmail.com> Hi, A classmate of mine told me that Swiss copyright office has a new website. It has a nice cartoon on the front page: http://www.urheberrecht.ch/E/index.php?m=1 . Cheers! Hasit From monica at sarai.net Sun Apr 16 23:26:11 2006 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2006 23:26:11 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Benkler's Wealth of Networks Message-ID: Download PDFs of the book You can download the whole book in one PDF: Download whole book (3.6 MB) Or you can download each chapter individually: Chapter 1. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge (390 KB) Part One. The Networked Information Economy Chapter 2. Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation (687 KB) Chapter 3. Peer Production and Sharing (382 KB) Chapter 4. The Economics of Social Production (394 KB) Part Two. The Political Economy of Property and Commons Chapter 5. Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information, and Law (426 KB) Chapter 6. Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media (433 KB) Chapter 7. Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere (716 KB) Chapter 8. Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical (368 KB) Chapter 9. Justice and Development (485 KB) Chapter 10. Social Ties: Networking Together (341 KB) Part Three. Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation Chapter 11. The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment (561 KB) Chapter 12. Conclusion: The Stakes of Information Law and Policy (94 KB) Notes (179 KB) _______________________________________________ Monica Narula Raqs Media Collective Sarai-CSDS 29 Rajpur Road Delhi 110054 www.raqsmediacollective.net www.sarai.net From felix at openflows.org Sun Apr 16 23:59:33 2006 From: felix at openflows.org (Felix Stalder) Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2006 20:29:33 +0200 Subject: [Commons-Law] Swiss Copyright Office - Great Cartoon In-Reply-To: <8b60429e0604160757g4ffc0014h5d51580e6c7ac705@mail.gmail.com> References: <8b60429e0604160757g4ffc0014h5d51580e6c7ac705@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200604162029.33181.felix@openflows.org> Hi Hasit, I would be interested to learn in what sense do you think this is a 'nice' or even 'great' cartoon? Felix On Sunday, 16. April 2006 16:57, Hasit seth wrote: > Hi, > > A classmate of mine told me that Swiss copyright office has a new > website. It has a nice cartoon on the front page: > http://www.urheberrecht.ch/E/index.php?m=1 . > > Cheers! > Hasit > _______________________________________________ > commons-law mailing list > commons-law at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law -- ----http://felix.openflows.org------------------------------ out now: *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 From sunil at mahiti.org Mon Apr 17 11:15:51 2006 From: sunil at mahiti.org (Sunil Abraham) Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 06:45:51 +0100 Subject: [Commons-Law] Regional Conference on Open Standards: The Key to an Open ICT Ecosystem, 2-4 May 2006 - Bangkok, Thailand Message-ID: <1145252751.9176.68.camel@localhost.localdomain> Forwarded announcement: ----------------------- Dear all, Over the past decade, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has evolved rapidly in many aspects. However, to develop further and move towards a broader consideration of open standards and open architectures that facilitate interoperability and enhance system value. An open environment is believed to enable increased competition, access, and control, which will enhance national economic growth and development in the long run. We would like to invite you to register for the "Regional Conference on Open Standards: The Key to an Open ICT Ecosystem", 2-4 May 2006 - Bangkok, Thailand. The purposes of the conference are: * To raise awareness and create understanding about the importance of open standards. * To exchange ideas and information on open ICT ecosystems among key players. * To explore possibility of collaboration on promotion and implementation of open standards. Key areas that will be addressed in the Conference are: * Open standards for e-government and e-learning * Open standards for information exchange * Open standards for e-commerce * Internet: the best practice for open standards development * We expect participation from technology and policy leaders from the public, private, and academic sectors, as well as other key relevant stakeholders, and practitioners. The conference is organized by Thailand's National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC), in partnership with the Software Industry Promotion Agency (SIPA) of Thailand, IBM, Oracle, Intel, Cisco Systems, and UNDP-APDIP. NOTE: Please note that registered participants are expected to cover all own their expense (flights, accommodation, etc.). Conference URLs: http://open.giti.nectec.or.th/conference2006 http://open.giti.nectec.or.th/registration/loginregister.php Regards Phet Sayo UNDP-APDIP -- Sunil Abraham, sunil at mahiti.org http://www.mahiti.org "Vijay Kiran" IInd Floor, 314/1, 7th Cross, Domlur Bangalore - 560 071 Karnataka, INDIA Ph/Fax: +91 80 51150580. Mob: (91) 9342201521 UK: (44) 02000000259 From hbs.law at gmail.com Mon Apr 17 16:44:58 2006 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 16:44:58 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Re: commons-law Digest, Vol 33, Issue 11 In-Reply-To: <20060417100011.BD7F428DF1B@mail.sarai.net> References: <20060417100011.BD7F428DF1B@mail.sarai.net> Message-ID: <8b60429e0604170414r68fa19a8rc79ed38fdc3340c0@mail.gmail.com> Hi Felix, The cartoon on the Swiss (C) office site is "nice" or "great" (adjectives that I have not used with some normative-blah-blah scope) show that downloading a song (presumably for free) will trump creating/performing a song as the most important act. It parodies a state of things where distribution or consumption of art is more important in terms of value (monetary or otherwise) than the act of creation. Cheers, Hasit > ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2006 20:29:33 +0200 > From: Felix Stalder > Subject: Re: [Commons-Law] Swiss Copyright Office - Great Cartoon > To: commons-law at sarai.net > Message-ID: <200604162029.33181.felix at openflows.org> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > Hi Hasit, > > I would be interested to learn in what sense do you think this is a 'nice' or > even 'great' cartoon? > > Felix > > > On Sunday, 16. April 2006 16:57, Hasit seth wrote: > > Hi, > > > > A classmate of mine told me that Swiss copyright office has a new > > website. It has a nice cartoon on the front page: > > http://www.urheberrecht.ch/E/index.php?m=1 . > > > > Cheers! > > Hasit > > _______________________________________________ > > commons-law mailing list > > commons-law at sarai.net > > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > From sjayasimha at vsnl.net Mon Apr 17 17:18:52 2006 From: sjayasimha at vsnl.net (Shreyas Jayasimha) Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 17:18:52 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] 'Serengeti' and 'Kilamanjaro' Brew References: <20060417100011.BD7F428DF1B@mail.sarai.net> <8b60429e0604170414r68fa19a8rc79ed38fdc3340c0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <005901c66214$e7129320$0a01a8c0@Shreyas> This may turn out to be an interesting site of contest between corporations, wildlife, indigenous people, trademarks, geographical indicators and more. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4915368.stm Best, Shreyas From aidslaw2 at lawyerscollective.org Wed Apr 19 11:43:16 2006 From: aidslaw2 at lawyerscollective.org (aidslaw2 at lawyerscollective.org) Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 11:43:16 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Mailbox Project Message-ID: <04ff01c66378$5a0af250$1400a8c0@LCHAUBLR.com> Dear Friends, We are pleased to inform you that exactly one year after the Indian Patent (Amendment) Act (2005) passed, on 26 March 2005, we are able to share with you a searchable database of "mailbox drugs". The existing database of the Indian Patent Controller was not searchable, nor did it provide critical information regarding disease or priority. Over the last year, we worked to improve the government's database and are happy to share with you the first installment, available at: http://www.lawyerscollective.org/lc_hivaids/amtc/mailbox and http://www.altlawforum.org/MAIL%20BOX What can you do with this information? Firstly, you can search by disease for drugs that may be patented soon, and may not be available, affordable or accessible in the near future. Secondly, you can engage in the Indian procedure of pre-grant opposition whereby any interested person can oppose the granting of patents on these drugs. Thirdly, you can engage in advocacy against the drug companies seeking to obtain patents (or monopolies) on these drugs. We are still hoping to improve on the database so do send us your comments at aidslaw2 at lawyerscollective.org. Also, we will be regularly updating and releasing the mailbox drugs database and hope to soon bring you completely up to date. In solidarity, Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit and Alternative Law Forum -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20060419/a6b79c44/attachment.html From sollybenj at yahoo.co.in Wed Apr 19 12:39:00 2006 From: sollybenj at yahoo.co.in (solomon benjamin) Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 08:09:00 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Commons-Law] beyond the binary Dispersed property and pirate acts in city economy space and politics In-Reply-To: <546A0F17-7453-448B-A1F1-30E7BAE0C486@sarai.net> Message-ID: <20060419070900.99488.qmail@web8809.mail.in.yahoo.com> Hi, To 'displace' the idea of the pirate, and with that, question powerful binaries seems very important via the concept of 'dispersed property'. Some wandering thoughts as this relates to city economy, settlement, and politics that binds these both. Here, several point raised by Hans Christ (at the Kunstverein at Stuttgart)who distinguished between piracy of a 'brand', versus say the creation of products seen in city economies. The latter are varied -- embracing economies the weekly markets and hawkers on pavements, of small firms located in trade and manufacturing arrangements. In many of these forms of re-tooling that derive from 'reverse engineering' open up a relatively new line of products that are customized via the locality of demand and use: what Jeebesh refers to the small day to day acts by everyone as a pirate! If so, the notion of the 'pirate' soon dematerializes -- just as attempts to 'fix' property. Diane Singerman's wonderful book on the economy, legality, and politics of neighborhood life in Cairo (Avenues of Participation) makes an important and relevant point that many of these 'small' acts (that also disperse property) add up to a larger (quiet) politics of subversion are not percieved by those carruing them out as being 'political'. Breaking beyond this binary and into considering the dispersal of property that comes from such quiet politics. Sigificanlty, underlying economy, the politics of land destabilizes and disperses property via the consolidation of ever complex forms of land tenure. Its hardly surprisign that most 'old / traditional/ walled' city quarters of cities (Cairo, Delhi, Lahore, Jaffa) layer complex tenure forms of land with those of inter-connecting economies. But these are not just 'traditional' and locked into a linealirity and binary of a development kind (The anthropologist Robert Redfeild's 'Folk to Modern' society). In Bangalore and also Bombay, we see contemporary forms of tenancies that underpin complex forms of economy. And these dispersed proproties are deeply material in that they open up complex forms of fundsing. In India, Pakistan (and perhaps other parts of South Asia) multple land tenure forms release funds to be invested into a locality of economy. This also happens in middle eastarn tenure forms, and recently Nathalie Boseul, mentioned that a similar arrangement exists in the Korean context too. Former (Formal) economist termed these as traditional / informal as perhaps such destablization of property hardly fitted into their developmentalist frameworks. Such systems of tenure, (unsettled) economy, provide for a politics that is deeply threatening to the dirgisme of both the 'Market' and the Nation State. Witness the huge corporate funding backed by very regrssive state power to digitize land records, to control the 'Informal Sector' (via Master Planning), the 'anti-piracy raids', and to weaken municipal government that has consistantly build a political realm around dispersal of property and economy. If ones takes these arguments furthe to consider the computer 'grey' markets of Bangalore, Bombay, Delhi, it may reveal the importance of moving beyond and away from notions of 'open source' and propriatry (within which the figure and concept of piracy lies). Instead, just as we can conceptualize other forms of economies that unsettle 'property' from within the 'commodity logic' (as observed by Jeebesh in an earlier time), can we consider more fundamentally, more interesting issues of dispersed property rooted in complex forms of occoupancy -- in space, in economy and in politics. What, for example, would an environment of re-tooled and re-machined "networked" society look like in an anarchic territory. This is not neccessary speculative or utopian. A closer look at the streets of East Delhi around Shakarpur in East Delhi as they link to the 'nodes' of Nehru Place and Palika Bazzar in other parts of Delhi, and perhaps connected to Lamington Road in Bombay. And its not just the 'grey' market outlets but rather the small business accounting software customized for more speaiclized applications like those of small chemists and pharmacies, or then more recently in the auto marchine re-toolers of west bangalore. I suspect that the notion of 'open source' can hardly describe these situations. This is not just as it refers to a very very specific form of economic arrangements, but more due a conceptual fracture and an unease with the bulk of economies being too 'wild' to be boxed into a binaries. Cheers Solly --- Jeebesh Bagchi wrote: > Recently we were part of the Leonardo/SFAI Digital > Salon where we > spoke of "The Strange Destiny of Open Source in the > Nation State" and > Steve Cisler talked of Piracy. > > Some thoughts that have arisen after the quite > impassioned discussion > that evening around piracy, how it is constituted > and how to think it > beyond a simple anxiety of the loss of property: > > What if we think of' 'dispersed property' and > 'pirate acts'. The > present scenario is of an increasing dispersal of > 'property' through > everyday immaterial goods. This makes us enveloped > by 'property'. > Many acts that touch upon this 'property envelop' do > infringe > property rights. There is, thus, a ubiquitous > presence of daily small > 'pirate acts' by almost anyone. > > Perhaps a simple listing of such daily acts and the > reality of > 'property dispersal' will be relevant in the > displacement of the idea > of the 'pirate' as a figure out there - removed and > away from us - > ruining 'social order and meaning'. The figure of > the 'pirate' > increasingly haunts all discussion of 'intellectual > property'. It is > figure on whom various fears and anxieties of > capitalism's core > 'productive values' are projected - from free riders > to free lunch, > to criminality, to idleness, to laziness, to > profiting without > labour, to destruction of innovation, etc. > > If we can imagine daily life enmeshed within > immaterial forms of > property as a series of relays and disruptions > produced by multiple > 'commoning acts', 'property acts' and 'pirate acts' > - then we can > have an account of everyday life and practice that > does not freeze > all of us into singular 'figures'; figures that do > not address how we > all navigate the contemporary in complex ways. > > best > jeebesh > _______________________________________________ > commons-law mailing list > commons-law at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > __________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner now. Go to http://yahoo.shaadi.com From anilg at iimahd.ernet.in Sun Apr 16 12:03:42 2006 From: anilg at iimahd.ernet.in (anil k gupta) Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2006 12:03:42 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Commons-Law] Dispersed property and pirate acts In-Reply-To: <546A0F17-7453-448B-A1F1-30E7BAE0C486@sarai.net> References: <546A0F17-7453-448B-A1F1-30E7BAE0C486@sarai.net> Message-ID: <1672.172.16.15.1.1145169222.squirrel@172.16.15.1> very interesting observation about dispersed property. there are many ways of thinking about it: a) the degree of dispersal may not be directly correlated with the extent of assimilation in the 'property envelop' of different users, for instance, a tune or beat may be assimilated by a music composer mopre than just listener, though both may have been benfitted by the dispersal b) the 'piracy' may, if at all, may be calculated by the extent to which the originality exists at the 'dispersal' end, if the disperser of the innovation is itself not having the full title of the music ( jackson having pirated many african beats), then extent of piracy at the recepient level is difficult to sustain It is a very interesting observation and much good theoretical and empiracl work can follow keep it up anil > Recently we were part of the Leonardo/SFAI Digital Salon where we > spoke of "The Strange Destiny of Open Source in the Nation State" and > Steve Cisler talked of Piracy. > > Some thoughts that have arisen after the quite impassioned discussion > that evening around piracy, how it is constituted and how to think it > beyond a simple anxiety of the loss of property: > > What if we think of' 'dispersed property' and 'pirate acts'. The > present scenario is of an increasing dispersal of 'property' through > everyday immaterial goods. This makes us enveloped by 'property'. > Many acts that touch upon this 'property envelop' do infringe > property rights. There is, thus, a ubiquitous presence of daily small > 'pirate acts' by almost anyone. > > Perhaps a simple listing of such daily acts and the reality of > 'property dispersal' will be relevant in the displacement of the idea > of the 'pirate' as a figure out there - removed and away from us - > ruining 'social order and meaning'. The figure of the 'pirate' > increasingly haunts all discussion of 'intellectual property'. It is > figure on whom various fears and anxieties of capitalism's core > 'productive values' are projected - from free riders to free lunch, > to criminality, to idleness, to laziness, to profiting without > labour, to destruction of innovation, etc. > > If we can imagine daily life enmeshed within immaterial forms of > property as a series of relays and disruptions produced by multiple > 'commoning acts', 'property acts' and 'pirate acts' - then we can > have an account of everyday life and practice that does not freeze > all of us into singular 'figures'; figures that do not address how we > all navigate the contemporary in complex ways. > > best > jeebesh > _______________________________________________ > commons-law mailing list > commons-law at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > -- - Prof Anil K Gupta K L Chair Professor of Entrepreneurship, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad 380015, India anilg at sristi.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Personal Page: http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/~anilg/ Sristi Page: http://www.sristi.org, GIAN Page: http://www.gian.org National Innovation Foundation (NIF): http://www.nifindia.org www.Indiainnovates.com Phone Numbers: (0) +91 (79) 632 4927, 630 8357, 6309973 Fax Numbers: +91 (79) 630 7341, 630 6896 Fortitude is the capacity to say 'yes' when the whole world wants to say, 'NO, it cant be done' From annymcbeal at gmail.com Thu Apr 20 15:54:19 2006 From: annymcbeal at gmail.com (anu) Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2006 15:54:19 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Announcing Harvard Law School Symposium on Bloggership In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8a1161ed0604200324r776eb89cw89b33fe31bf81674@mail.gmail.com> This should be of interest to the members on this list. Anuranjan Announcing the following conference papers at SSRN: HARVARD LAW SCHOOL SYMPOSIUM ON BLOGGERSHIP: HOW BLOGS ARE TRANSFORMING LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP - APRIL 28, 2006 Web logs ("blogs") are transforming much of American society, including government, politics, journalism, and business. In the past few years, blogs have begun to affect the delivery of legal education, the production and dissemination of legal scholarship, and the practice of law. We are delighted that twenty of the nationís leading law professor bloggers have agreed to join with us for the first scholarly conference on the impact of blogs on the legal academy. The conference is sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School with the online proceedings provided by SSRN. There will be four panels with presentations of papers, accompanied by commentary and questions from the audience. The symposium will be held in the Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School. It is free and open to the public; advance registration is not required. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/bloggership 8:30 - 8:40 a.m.: Welcome: John Palfrey (Executive Director, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society) 8:40 - 9:00 a.m.: Introduction: Paul Caron (Cincinnati; Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Law Professor Blogs Network) 9:00 - 10:30 a.m.: Law Blogs as Legal Scholarship Papers - Doug Berman (Ohio State) - Larry Solum (Illinois) - Kate Litvak (Texas) Commentators - Paul Butler (George Washington) - Jim Lindgren (Northwestern) - Ellen Podgor (Stetson) 11:00 - 12:30 p.m.: The Role of the Law Professor Blogger Papers - Gail Heriot (San Diego) - Orin Kerr (George Washington) - Gordon Smith (Wisconsin) Commentators - Randy Barnett (Boston University) - Michael Froomkin (Miami) 12:30 - 2:00 p.m.: Lunch 2:00 - 3:30 p.m.: Law Blogs and the First Amendment Papers - Glenn Reynolds (Tennessee) - Eugene Volokh (UCLA) - Eric Goldman (Marquette) Commentators - Betsy Malloy (Cincinnati) - Dan Solove (George Washington) 3:45 - 5:15 p.m.: The Many Faces of Law Professor Blogs Papers - Larry Ribstein (Illinois) - Ann Althouse (Wisconsin) - Christine Hurt (Illinois) & Tung Yin (Iowa) Commentators - Howard Bashman - Peter Lattman The following URL will allow you to quickly access all of the papers for this conference. The Harvard Law School Symposium on Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship < http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?form_name=journalbrowse&journal_id=890371 > http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?form_name=journalbrowse&journal_id=890371 SSRN's eLIBRARY SSRN's searchable electronic library contains abstracts, full bibliographic data, and author contact information for more than 115,100 papers, approximately 58,400 authors, and full text for nearly 86,800 papers. The eLibrary can be accessed at http://papers.ssrn.com Authors may upload papers to the eLibrary without charge through SSRN User Headquarters at http://hq.ssrn.com All author-uploaded papers are available for world-wide free downloading. Downloads from the SSRN eLibrary are running at an annual rate of over 2.6 million, with approximately 9.8 million downloads since inception. SSRN's PROFESSIONAL DIRECTORY Searching on an individual's name in the author field on our search page at http://papers.ssrn.com provides the best single professional directory of scholars in accounting, economics, finance, law, and management. Complete contact information for authors including email, postal, telephone and fax information is available there. SSRN DOWNLOAD POLICY SSRN provides worldwide free access to all papers included in all of our institutional Research Paper Series, and all other papers uploaded to the eLibrary directly by an author. SSRN'S MISSION SSRN's objective is to provide rapid, worldwide distribution of research to authors and their readers and to facilitate communication among them at the lowest possible cost. In pursuit of this objective, we allow authors to upload papers without charge. And any paper an author uploads to SSRN is downloadable for free, worldwide. SSRN reinvests all of the net cash it receives (principally from subscriptions to our abstracting journals and from institutions that use us to distribute their research papers), after servicing debt, to enhance our services to authors and users. SSRN's shareholders have not received any return on their investment, including dividends. To minimize potential conflicts with authors and users, SSRN has no outside investors. Sincerely, Bernie Black Managing Director, Legal Scholarship Network -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20060420/d9284bca/attachment.html From rms at gnu.org Wed Apr 19 21:10:55 2006 From: rms at gnu.org (Richard Stallman) Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 11:40:55 -0400 Subject: [Commons-Law] Re: [Upd-discuss] Home Invasion by EULA Bill in Oklahoma In-Reply-To: (message from Dean Anderson on Tue, 18 Apr 2006 22:25:18 -0400 (EDT)) References: Message-ID: Sigh, yet another reason to run Linux? YARRL It's a good reason to run GNU/Linux (or BSD); Linux alone won't run on a PC. (See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html.) However, we who champion free software should not take that as a reason to accept this law as no threat to us. It does not threaten us directly, but the more people become accustomed to surrendering their freedom and having no rights, the harder it will be to defend any rights at all. From sunil at mahiti.org Mon Apr 24 23:57:11 2006 From: sunil at mahiti.org (Sunil Abraham) Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 19:27:11 +0100 Subject: [Commons-Law] Laos signed WIPO Message-ID: <1145903231.8121.368.camel@localhost.localdomain> -------- Forwarded Message -------- From: Phet Sayo Laos, Honduras sign WIPO's patent treaty GENEVA, Switzerland, April 20 (UPI) -- Laos and Honduras signed on to the patent cooperation treaty of the World Intellectual Property Organization. By becoming a member country of the treaty, the U.N. organization said that patent applicants from a member country "can seek patent protection for an invention simultaneously in each of a large number of countries. This is because the effect of such an international application in each 'designated state' is the same as if a national patent application had been filed with the national patent office of that country. Without the PCT, an applicant would generally be required to file separate national patent applications with the office of each country in which patent protection is sought." In addition, WIPO stated that "PCT membership gives better access to the national patent systems in multiple countries. As the system offers a more user-friendly and cost-effective option for applicants seeking patent protection in multiple countries, PCT membership will normally result in an increase in the number of patent applications filed and a corresponding increase in revenues for the national patent office. PCT membership may also result in reduced publication costs for those national offices which recognize the international publication of PCT applications for the purposes of national law." The treaty currently has 130 member countries. - -- Sunil Abraham, sunil at mahiti.org http://www.mahiti.org "Vijay Kiran" IInd Floor, 314/1, 7th Cross, Domlur Bangalore - 560 071 Karnataka, INDIA Ph/Fax: +91 80 51150580. Mob: (91) 9342201521 UK: (44) 02000000259 From seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org Fri Apr 28 16:21:41 2006 From: seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org (Seth Johnson) Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 06:51:41 -0400 Subject: [Commons-Law] What's Up With the New French Copyright Law? Message-ID: <4451F3BD.94F726AF@RealMeasures.dyndns.org> (Website text pasted below. -- Seth) -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [FC-discuss] EUCD / DADVSI : what is going on with the new Frenchcopyright law ? Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 11:25:15 +0200 From: Jean-Baptiste Soufron To: Public discussion list The new french copyright law is just about to be studied at the High House of Parliament. Its name is Droit d’Auteur et Droits Voisin dans la Société de l’Information (DADVSI) which means Authors Rights and Neighboring Rights within Information Society, and its content is heavily debated over the Internet. Given the high number of questions I get on this topic, I thought a short explanation of the whole thing might be an interesting piece for english speaking readers. > http://soufron.typhon.net/article.php3?id_article=132 Do not hesitate to ask questions or commentaries. Best, Jean-Baptiste Soufron cersa-cnrs paris 2 +33 (0)6 17 96 24 57 http://soufron.typhon.net _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss at freeculture.org http://mail.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_freeculture.org --- > http://soufron.typhon.net/article.php3?id_article=132 EUCD / DADVSI : what is going on with the new French copyright law ? Par Jean-Baptiste Soufron, vendredi 28 avril 2006 à 01:52 :: Mesures Techniques de Protection, DRM ::#132 ::rss The new French Copyright law is just about to be studied at the High House of Parliament. Its name is Droit d’Auteur et Droits Voisin dans la Société de l’Information (DADVSI) which means Authors Rights and Neighboring Rights within Information Society. And its content is heavily debated over the Internet, but it’s not always easy to find english information about it. Given the high number of questions I get on this topic, I thought a short explanation of the whole thing might be an interesting piece. DADVSI history First of all, it’s important to understand that this DADVSI text was originally a mere transposition of the 2001/29/CE European Copyright Directive from 2001 (EUCD). This European legislation is available here : (EUCD english pdf http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/consleg/pdf/2001/en_2001L0029_do_001.pdf) At first, this european text was itself a transpotion of the 1995 WIPO treaties. It was simply designed to grant legal protection to Digital Right Managements. But since its introduction in front of the Parliament in 2005 December, the text evolved following various amendments proposed by lobbyists from all sides. It now looks like a very complicated text, with various levels of complex provisions impacting on DRM as well as on flat rate levies system, interoperability, fair use law, etc. The original text of the DADVSI is here : (in french http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/12/projets/pl1206.asp) The current version of the text is here : (in french http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/12/ta/ta0554.asp) DADVSI importance Legal frameworks surrounding the music industry and file sharing are transforming at a fast pace across the world. The French debate is of uttermost importance In this worldwide movement for three reasons. First because contrary to many other countries, french people managed that it ends up as a real national debate. Public got passionate over what is happening. Representatives did not hesitate to vote against their own government, or to propose amendments that could infuriate groups like Apple. Newspapers rand daily papers about this fight. Second, France is probably one of the only countries where groups like Association of Audionautes managed to get at the forefront of the political campaign. They not only achieved impressive success in getting public attention through newspaper, tv, and internet. But they also found their way in Courts, in Parliament, and with the government. Thanks to their work, several Court trials decided that downloading and uploading was legal under the fair use provision of French Law, Legislators understood the importance of interoperability, major Artists associations became sensitive to the issue of leaving their public free instead of trying to uphold some illusionary DRM business models. Third, it is necessary to remember that France was one of the first country to create a modern intellectual property regime. The difference between moral and economical rights were already present in the 1793 French Law. Artists associations begun collecting and redistributing music revenues around 1950, private copying provisions were added in 1957, and levies were created between 1975 and 1985. And last but not least, interoperability provisions begun to appear in 2002. Actually, French have experience on all these modern issues. They were one of the first to implement it, and looking at the French situation is certainly the right way to understand both the legal and economical consequences of solutions like flat rate levies, or interoperability provisions. And if we add that French are able to influence EU legislation, the evolution of their system should be studied even carefully. DADVSI process First of all, it is important to understand the actual legislative process. Last December, the government proposed a law to transpose the 2001 European Union Copyright Directive. Once again, this first DADVSI text is here : in french This text was amended by the Assemblée Nationale (Low House) from December to March. The impressive list of amendments is here : (in french and in html http://recherche.assemblee-nationale.fr/amendements/resultats.asp?NUM_INIT=1206) or here (in pdf http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/12/pdf/amendements/adts_1206.pdf) The debate was first supposed to last only for a couple of days, but Representatives from both sides begun rising issues about civil liberties, privacy protection, interoperability, etc. This took the government by surprise, but they finally managed to get their text adopted even in a heavily modified version. This text is now in the hands of the Sénat (High House) that should study it from May 5th to May 9th, and amend it again. Once it will have been voted by the two Houses, the final text will then be studied by the Constitutional Court that will certainly decide to modify it for one last time. The DADVSI webpage on the website of the Low House of the parliament is here : (in french with the projet of law, its amendments and the various official reports http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/12/projets/pl1206.asp) And the DADVSI webpage on the website of the High House of the parliament is here : (in french with additional reports and new amendments http://www.senat.fr/dossierleg/pjl05-269.html) DADVSI content So, as one can easily understand, the current version of the law will still evolve. But the current text is incredibly complicated and it will probably keep impossible to enforce. It was supposed to transpose the 2001 EUCD, but it now implements so many new provisions that have no relations whatsoever with the original European text. For example, the sanction system is absolutely inapplicable as such. It suppose several sanction levels going from euros 38 to euros 300 000 under the dual assumption that it will be possible to monitor every citizen, and that judges will actually accept to enforce it even when it’s contrary to very common civil liberties provisions like due process of law, or innocence presumption. Same thing for the "iPod" provision. Representatives decided to amend the text. They wished to mandate DRM producers to grant RAND licenses of their DRM Software to any user who would need it for interoperability. This provision is very unlikely to be accepted by the High House or the Constitutional Court, but it is worth noting that France was the first country to implement the notion of Open Standards in its legislation with the 2002 Loi pour la Confiance dans l’Economie Numerique (LCEN). This iPod provision only translates these principles from e-gov to the DRM context. Here is the text in french : - Les mesures techniques ne doivent pas avoir pour effet d’empêcher la mise en œuvre effective de l’interopérabilité, dans le respect du droit d’auteur. Les fournisseurs de mesures techniques donnent l’accès aux informations essentielles à l’interopérabilité. - On entend par informations essentielles à l’interopérabilité la documentation technique et les interfaces de programmation nécessaires pour obtenir dans un standard ouvert, au sens de l’article 4 de la loi n° 2004-575 du 21 juin 2004 pour la confiance dans l’économie numérique, une copie d’une reproduction protégée par une mesure technique, et une copie des informations sous forme électronique jointes à cette reproduction. - Tout intéressé peut demander au président du tribunal de grande instance statuant en référé d’enjoindre sous astreinte à un fournisseur de mesures techniques de fournir les informations essentielles à l’interopérabilité. Seuls les frais de logistique sont exigibles en contrepartie par le fournisseur. Which means in english : - DRMs cannot forbid effective interoperability, with respect for copyright. DRMs providers grant access to informations that are essential for interoperability. - Informations that are essential for interoperability means the technical documentation and the programmation interfaces that are necessary to reproduce in an Open Standard any content protected by a DRM, and a copy of these informations. - Anyone can use a procedure of urgency to ask the president of the Tribunal de Grande Instance to mandate DRMs providers to give the essential informations necessary for interoperability. Only transportation costs will be exigible. And the same problem is arising when it comes to the so-called "vivendi" provision claiming that Software developers should be sued and condemned heavily when their work is used to exchange content over Internet. It comes like this in french : Est puni de trois ans d’emprisonnement et de 300 000 € d’amende, le fait : 1° D’éditer, de mettre à la disposition du public ou de communiquer au public, sciemment et sous quelque forme que ce soit, un dispositif manifestement destiné à la mise à disposition du public non autorisée d’œuvres ou d’objets protégés Meaning in english : Whatever its form and when (meaning that this is true for distributing the source code as well), the voluntary edition or distribution of any system obviously designed to allow the non-authorized distribution of protected content shall be punished with 3 years of jail, and a fine of €300 000 The result ? Given the over-extensive range of this provision, a few French companies already managed to leave the country, and some others are thinking about it. But there is a more ambitious agenda about a global licensing system. France has a long-lasting history of cultural levies. We begun discussing around 1975, and we created a flat rate tax system called "Redevance Copie Privée" in 1985. This idea was based on the assumption that private copying on VHS or audiotapes was perfectly legal, but that it was a downstream market, and that Artists should get something from it. Then, in order to ensure that they would get a revenue from the increasing sales of VHS and audiotapes, a system was organized around a "Private Copying Commission" composed equally from consumer unions, producers, industrials and artists. They extended this flat rate tax to digital storage supports in 2001. The system worked well enough to generate a mere euros 200 millions in 2003. It was also adapted and transformed to fit other contexts like books and photocopying, radio, movie theaters, etc. So far, in December, we were able to convince some representatives from both sides of the Parliament. They proposed various amendments implementing levies rather than criminal sanctions. The proposed system was called "Licence Globale", adapting the photocopying flat rate tax to Broadband access. And for the first time in recent French history some of them got voted by the Low House against the project of government owning the House majority. They eventually got rejected in March, but we hope to be able to get them back in May. Anyway, we will push forward a new legislation after the next Presidential Election to take place in April 2007 An explanation of the "Licence Globale" is available on the website of the public-artists alliance : (in french http://www.lalliance.org/pages/2_1.html) We are quite confident that a similar system will have to be implemented in the end. People are not afraid of Criminal sanctions. Not to mention that such a law would be heavily challenged in Courts. Despite its young age, the Association of Audionautes already has a good history of judicial, helping 200 prosecuted people, and winning more than 20 cases in less than 2 years. Downloads will not stop, but artists will get nothing unless there is some mechanism to get things right. For example, here is the website of the Association of Audionautes, featuring many Court cases that were won by its members : (in french and in english http://www.audionautes.net/blog/) And if you want to help them to defend more people, do not hesitate to give them a donation : (donation for audionautes http://www.audionautes.net/pages/donner/cb.php) But the government is not really supportive of these goals. It’s a luck that other interest groups are opposing him. The French government wrote one of the strongest DRM legislation in the world, and since the DMCA go back to 1995, they don’t even have the excuse of addressing new issues. When Free Software associations explained them that some provisions of this law could put a stop to Free Software development, they showed their total lack of knowledge on this subject by answering that they understood these questions but that it was a new problem since Free Software did not exist in 2002, at the time they drafted their project. For real. In the same way, the government refused to back up any amendments resulting in an effective education exception. These were proposed in order to allow the use of online content for education purposes, but the government answered that they were actually negotiating licenses with authors association, and that they preferred to go that that way rather than regulate it. The result ? A license with a limited number of quotations authorized in a PhD paper. A contract where the government authorizes authors associations to get logins and passwords to access any education or research computer facilities. Whatever the topic of research, they should be granted the right to search for counterfeinting content, etc. I wrote a piece about this with my friend David Monniaux, a french computer science maverick : http://soufron.typhon.net/article.php3 ?id_article=127 On the opposite, french consumer unions and some authors associations invited us to work with them. To understand this, it is important to realize that the amount of the private copying tax was close from 200 millions euros in 2003, and that it’s only expanding with the rise of digital storage. So what happened is that some associations are now redistributing that private copying tax, instead of redistributing sales products. It’s also important to note that 25% of this tax is dedicated to the support of new creation through sponsorship. DADVSI future Now a question would be to know if such a legislation might be able to pass in the other countries, like in the EU or the US. It’s completely possible. Actually, it helped France to protect its culture for the last 20 years. But another solution might be to open catalogues of rights by suppressing exclusive rights. That would create a system where artists are certain to get paid when their work generates some value, but they would not have the possibility to negotiate or say "no" anymore. From monica at sarai.net Sat Apr 29 13:48:41 2006 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2006 13:48:41 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Intel opposes WIPO Message-ID: <1DB82527-6CFF-4844-8BAD-EE1B19D28006@sarai.net> (apologies for cross posting) [1] Art Brodsky, "A Democratic Internet", tompaine.com (April 25, 2006), also see http://www.savetheinternet.com DISCUSSION DRAFT: APRIL 10, 2006 STATEMENT OF INTEL CORPORATION CONCERNING THE WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ORGANIZATION'S PROPOSED TREATY ON THE PROTECTION OF BROADCASTING ORGANIZATIONS CONTACT: Jeff Lawrence, Director, Digital Home and Content Policy Brad Biddle, Senior Attorney, Systems Technology Lab BACKGROUND. The World Intellectual Property Organization is drafting a proposed "Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations." For many countries (including the United States) the treaty, if adopted, will create an entirely new type of intellectual property right. Under the treaty, broadcasting organizations obtain new legal rights to control uses of content that they broadcast-rights that are separate from and in addition to any existing copyright rights in the content. Adopting countries can choose to extend these new rights to "webcast" content in addition to traditional broadcast content. INTEL'S POSITION. Intel opposes the WIPO Broadcast Treaty. Proponents have not demonstrated that the benefits of creating new exclusive rights outweigh the burdens that these new rights impose. These burdens include: - Control of mobile device and digital home innovation. The treaty could give broadcasting organizations the right to control uses of content within the home-uses that are legitimate and non-infringing under copyright law. For example, makers of digital video recorders could be required to obtain licenses and agree to limitations imposed by broadcasters in order to enable "time shifting" of broadcast content. Similarly, mobile device designers could be required to get permission from broadcasters (in addition to copyright owners) in order to enable innovative uses of broadcast content. This regime will increase consumer costs and reduce technical innovation. - Technical Protection Measure (TPM) provisions will become regulatory mandates that limit design freedom. The treaty requires that the new broadcaster rights be protected by TPMs. Because broadcasting signals are generally subject to government standards, TPMs will need to be incorporated into these standards. Government-mandated TPMs will limit design freedom and distort markets. - Liability risk for software developers, device makers, and ISPs. Under copyright law, in some circumstances one party can be liable for infringement committed by an unrelated party. The treaty raises similar questions of secondary liability for infringement of its new broadcaster rights, but provides no guidance or safe harbors that limit risks for those non-infringing parties that might inadvertently enable infringement. These unquantifiable risks will inhibit innovation and market development. - Increased rights clearance complexity. Users of content already face a nearly impenetrable thicket when trying to clear traditional copyright rights. Adding more complexity to the clearance process will inhibit innovative uses of content. - Harm to copyright owner interests. Content users will pay licensee fees to broadcasters in addition to copyright owners, likely resulting in reduced revenues for copyright owners. Reduced incentives for creators may result in less created content. - Harm to public interests. The treaty could limit "fair uses" and other publicly beneficial uses of content, and restrict content that is otherwise in the public domain. Intel believes that efforts to enact the WIPO Broadcast Treaty should be abandoned. Alternatively, and less optimally, Intel believes that the scope of the treaty should be dramatically narrowed, to focus specifically on signal theft. Monica Narula Raqs Media Collective Sarai-CSDS 29 Rajpur Road Delhi 110054 www.raqsmediacollective.net www.sarai.net From seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org Sat Apr 29 20:39:31 2006 From: seth.johnson at RealMeasures.dyndns.org (Seth Johnson) Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2006 11:09:31 -0400 Subject: [Commons-Law] Sony: Music EULAs? Naah. You Bought It; It's Yours Message-ID: <445381AB.2C3D3954@RealMeasures.dyndns.org> > http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/28/sony_screwing_artist.html > http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060428/ap_en_mu/music_downloads_royalties;_ylt=AowpM.my63biaeu.FU8A_rRxFb8C;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA-- --- > http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/28/sony_screwing_artist.html Sony screwing artists out of iTunes royalties, customers out of first-sale Friday, April 28, 2006 Sony musicians including Cheap Trick and the Allman Brothers are suing the record label for screwing them out of their royalties on sales of music on iTunes and other digital music services. At issue is whether the music sold through these services is a "license" or a "sale." Sony pays less to its artists for sales than for licensing (Sony artists reportedly earn $0.045 for each $0.99 song sold on iTunes). Naturally, Sony claims that the songs sold on iTunes are sales and not licensing deals. This is where it gets interesting. As Brad Templeton and others have pointed out, Sony and others have long maintained that what you get when you buy an iTune is a license, not ownership of a product. That license prohibits you from doing all kinds of otherwise lawful things, like selling your music to a used-record store, loaning it to a friend, or playing it on someone else's program. But if Sony says that it's selling products (and therefore only liable for 4.5 cents in royalties to its artists) and not licenses, then how can it bind us, its customers, to licensing terms? According to the suit, the record company is treating digital downloads like traditional record sales, rather than licensed music, triggering a different royalty deal. Under that old rubrik, the record company deducts fees for the kind of extra costs they used to incur when records were pressed on vinyl, including packaging charges, restocking costs and losses due to breakage. --- > http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060428/ap_en_mu/music_downloads_royalties;_ylt=AowpM.my63biaeu.FU8A_rRxFb8C;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA-- Cheap Trick, Allman Brothers Sue Sony By DAVID B. CARUSO Fri Apr 28, 2:31 PM ET NEW YORK - Rock bands Cheap Trick and The Allman Brothers Band are suing Sony Music, claiming they are being shortchanged on royalties for songs downloaded legally over the Internet. The suit, filed at a federal court in Manhattan, claims Sony has failed to live up to a contract requiring that it pay its musicians half of the net revenue it receives from licensing songs to download services like iTunes and Napster. Sony has been paying the aging rockers less than that amount, in part because their record deals predate the existence of legal music sales over the Internet. According to the suit, the record company is treating digital downloads like traditional record sales, rather than licensed music, triggering a different royalty deal. Under that old rubrik, the record company deducts fees for the kind of extra costs they used to incur when records were pressed on vinyl, including packaging charges, restocking costs and losses due to breakage. Tracks sold over the Internet usually go for about 99 cents. About 70 cents of the sale price goes to Sony. The bands are getting about 4 1/2 cents per song, according to the suit, rather than the approximately 30 cents they claim is rightfully theirs. "I feel strongly that the record company is doing the wrong thing," said Brian Caplan, an attorney for the bands. A spokesman for Sony BMG did not immediately respond to inquiries about the lawsuit. The bands are seeking to have the suit declared a class action, which would cover all Sony artists who signed deals between 1962 and 2002. The Allman Brothers Band signed its current Sony deal in 1989. Cheap Trick's deal dates to 1976. While the amount of money at stake per song is small, it could add up to millions of dollars for Sony if a court rules for the bands. Caplan estimated that there may be 2,500 recording artists covered by the class. Sony Music is part of Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news). and Germany's Bertelsmann AG. From prashant at nalsartech.org Sun Apr 30 17:41:43 2006 From: prashant at nalsartech.org (Your Name) Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2006 17:41:43 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Era Ends: Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams Message-ID: Era Ends: Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams By Robert Roy Britt LiveScience Managing Editor posted: 31 January 2006 10:17 pm ET After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams. On the company's web site, if you click on "Telegrams" in the left-side navigation bar, you're taken to a page that ends a technological era with about as little fanfare as possible: "Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative." The decline of telegram use goes back at least to the 1980s, when long-distance telephone service became cheap enough to offer a viable alternative in many if not most cases. Faxes didn't help. Email could be counted as the final nail in the coffin. Western Union has not failed. It long ago refocused its main business to make money transfers for consumers and businesses. Revenues are now $3 billion annually. It's now called Western Union Financial Services, Inc. and is a subsidiary of First Data Corp. The world's first telegram was sent on May 24, 1844 by inventor Samuel Morse. The message, "What hath God wrought," was transmitted from Washington to Baltimore. In a crude way, the telegraph was a precursor to the Internet in that it allowed rapid communication, for the first time, across great distances. Western Union goes back to 1851 as the Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company. In 1856 it became the Western Union Telegraph Company after acquisition of competing telegraph systems. By 1861, during the Civil War, it had created a coast-to-coast network of lines. Other company highlights: * 1866: Introduced the first stock ticker. * 1871: Introduced money transfers. * 1884: Became one of the original 11 stocks tracked by the Dow Jones Average. * 1914: Introduced the first consumer charge card. * 1964: Began using a transcontinental microwave beam to replace land lines. * 1974: Launched Westar I, the first U.S. dedicated communications satellite. On Jan. 26, the last day you could send a telegram, First Data announced it would spin Western Union off as an independent, publicly traded company.