From prashantiyengar at gmail.com Mon Jun 2 14:21:02 2008 From: prashantiyengar at gmail.com (Prashant Iyengar) Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2008 14:21:02 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Kerala Cabinet nod for draft IPRs policy on traditional knowledge Message-ID: <908adbd0806020151g455c7e4ah46d720068fd10242@mail.gmail.com> http://www.thehindu.com/2008/06/02/stories/2008060253460400.htm Back Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram Cabinet nod for draft IPRs policy on traditional knowledge Special Correspondent To protect rights on traditional knowledge Permit will be mandatory for trade in bio-resources Board will assist in getting patents for inventions THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Cabinet on Saturday approved the draft intellectual property rights (IPRs) policy aimed at protecting traditional knowledge and inventions. The policy states that the government will ensure protection of the rights of people possessing traditional knowledge and inventions. Prior permission from the State Biodiversity Board will be required for outsiders to make use of traditional knowledge and inventions. Permit from the Board will also be mandatory for trade in bio resources except those related to traditional uses. The Board will compile details of traditional knowledge and bio resources of the State. Access to the database will require permission from the Board. It will assist people in getting patents for their inventions. There will be restrictions on outsourcing research related to biological resources from Kerala. The policy proposes legislation to protect the intellectual property rights of people possessing traditional knowledge. Punitary provisions will be incorporated for enforcement of the policy. There will also be a supervisory council with Chief Minister as chairman and the Law Minister as vice-chairman to oversee implementation of the policy. Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan told mediapersons after the Cabinet meeting that Kerala would be the first State to adopt a policy on intellectual property rights. (c) Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu From the.solipsist at gmail.com Sat Jun 7 13:39:33 2008 From: the.solipsist at gmail.com (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2008 13:39:33 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] More on the hush-hush Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Message-ID: <4785f1e20806070109i72f53f0dkf1921272e972009c@mail.gmail.com> Dear All, As pointed out in a recent EFF bulletin , there is "disturbingly little" that is known today about the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA): "In October 2007 the United States, the European Community, Switzerland and Japan simultaneously announced that they would negotiate a new intellectual property enforcement treaty, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand and Mexico have joined the negotiations. Although the proposed treaty's title might suggest that the agreement deals only with counterfeit physical goods (such as medicines), what little information has been made available publicly by negotiating governments about the content of the treaty makes it clear that it will have a far broader scope, and in particular, will deal with tools targeting "Internet distribution and information technology." To date, disturbingly little information has been released about the actual content of the agreement. However, despite that, it is clearly on a fast track; treaty proponents want it tabled at the G8 summit in July, and completed by the end of 2008." A few links: Proposed US ACTA multi-lateral intellectual property trade agreement (2007): http://wikileaks.org/wiki/G-8_plurilateral_intellectual_property_trade_agreement_discussion_paper http://wikileaks.org/leak/acta-proposal-2007.pdf EFF's submission to USTR's call for comments: http://www.eff.org/issues/acta/acta-submission-032108.pdf Office of US Trade Representative's ACTA Fact Sheet http://www.ustr.gov/assets/Document_Library/Reports_Publications/2007/asset_upload_file122_13414.pdf Debunking The Faulty Premises Of The Pirate Bay-Criminalization Treaty (TechDirt) http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080523/1203101212.shtml US Plots "Pirate Bay Killer" Trade Agreement (/.) http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/05/23/1251202.shtml?tid=153 >From the Wikileaks site: Who is really behind ACTA? Follow the money: Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) *Top four campaign contributions for 2006: * Time Warner $21,000 News Corp $15,000 Sony Corp of America $14,000 Walt Disney Co $13,550 *Top two Industries: * TV/Movies/Music $181,050 Lawyers/Law Firms $114,200 ----- http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1071 *30 May 2008* Embattled ACTA Negotiations Next Week In Geneva; US Sees Signing This Year By Monika Ermert for *Intellectual Property Watch* Formal negotiations on an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) are expected to commence next week in Geneva, according to a European Commission official, even as a leaked United States trade office paper is drawing criticism of the proposed pact. The publication of a US Trade Representative's office discussion paper on ACTA leaked last week on Wikileaks has spurred criticism of the new agreement proposed by the US, Japan, European Union and Switzerland and discussed behind closed doors so far. ACTA is intended as "a new standard of intellectual property enforcement to combat the high levels of trade in counterfeit and pirated goods worldwide," according to information made available by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), another partner in the negotiations. Several nongovernmental organisations have warned against a trend of "forum shopping" for global IP enforcement. According to DFAT, which has been more open than other governments on the issue, proposals made in the leaked paper date back to November 2007, with minor updates from 4 February. The idea of an international IP enforcement agreement has been around for some time, writes DFAT, and was discussed at the Global Congress on Combating Counterfeiting (GCCC) 2007 and 2008 and pushed by Japan at the 2005 Gleneagles Group of 8 Summit. A signing of ACTA at the G8 in Japan in July is out of the question, said the EU official. "This is a rumour," he said. IP on the G8 Agenda, But ACTA Targeted for Year's End *Update: IP-Watch has learned the meeting will take place on 3-4 June, at an unspecified location. Further information will be added as it becomes available.* Given that no draft ACTA text beyond the discussion paper has been presented signing in July would have been ambitious, say experts. But given that for negotiating partner the European Union the finalised text needs not only a "yes" of the Commission, but, said the Commission official, also of the Council, it seems close to impossible, at least for some EU negotiating partners. "We have a mandate for negotiation" since 14 April, the Commission official said. Yet for final approval the so-called Article 133 committee of the European Council and the Council itself would have a final say. "Negotiations will involve the Commission, EU member states and especially the presidency," he said. The EU presidency will change hands from Slovenia to France on 1 July. A US trade official put negotiations within this year. "The United States will strive to complete the agreement before the end of 2008," the official said. Like the Commission official, the US official said he did not expect signing at the G8, adding, "The G8 and ACTA are separate and distinct." But intellectual property is again on the preliminary agenda of the G8 summit in Japan and if signing in 2008 is intended it might come up in some of the bilateral talks between the ACTA negotiating partners who are in attendance. G8 members include: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, US and Russia. Cooperation, Enforcement, Legal Framework The discussion paper published on Wikileaksleaves a lot of details unanswered. It includes international cooperation measures, enforcement measures and legal framework as the main provision categories for ACTA. International cooperation among enforcement agencies, including joint actions, exchange of information between national authorities and capacity building and technical assistance in improving enforcement are the major points for the "cooperation" category. Mentioned enforcement practices to be harmonised include: formal or informal public/private advisory groups; specialised IP expertise in law enforcement agencies; the sharing of information on enforcement actions with international colleagues and the public; and the establishment of coordination bodies to facilitate joint actions are mentioned. For the legal framework, criminal and civil law enforcement is envisaged, as are far-reaching border measures like ex-officio authority for customs authorities to suspend import, export and trans-shipment of suspected IPR-infringing goods, possibilities for rights-holders to initiate border blocks for "suspicious" goods, and "the authority to impose deterrent penalties." Special provisions were put forward in the discussion paper for internet distribution and information technology. The discussion paper recommends a legal regime that includes safeguards for ISPs from liability on the one hand, and cooperation of ISPs with right holders on the other hand. Data about the identity of alleged infringers, for example, should be handed over on "effective notification" of "a claimed infringement." Also, remedies against circumvention of technological protection measures used by copyright owners and the trafficking of such circumvention devices are recommended. Finally, oversight to resolve implementation issues by a committee of ACTA parties is proposed. Negotiating partners are tight-lipped on the details of the provisions. On the question of what kind of oversight body might be finally chosen, USTR answered: "We are still studying appropriate mechanisms for ongoing cooperation internally and discussing the issue with the other ACTA participants." It is unclear from the available information if there is a more detailed draft proposal. According to USTR, "the text for the agreement is being developed." Criticism from NGOs Canadian law expert David Fewer, staff counsel at the University of Ottawa's Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, told the Ottawa Citizen that the discussion paper was very close to a potential Christmas wish-list by Hollywood companies. Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), in an earlier statement filed to USTR, warned against a lack in differentiation and clearness of core terms, like counterfeiting, infringement or piracy. "Is Microsoft a "pirate" for insisting on the right to continue to infringe the z4 patents in order to use an infringing DRM technology to protect Microsoft software itself from infringement by unauthorised uses?" KEI asked in its statement. "Is the International Trade Commission endorsing piracy by refusing to prevent the importation of all mobile phones that use infringing semiconductor chips?" or "Is Abbott Laboratories a "pirate" for seeking a compulsory license for its infringing use of patents on a Hepatitis C virus genotyping test kit?" Users of social networking tools MySpace, Facebook or Youtube might be searched at borders because of extensive evidence of unauthorised use of content on these platforms, as could USTR officials who had copies and shared copyrighted articles about counterfeit products, KEI asserted. IP Justice heavily criticised the attempt to keep developing countries out of the negotiations. "After the multilateral treaty's scope and priorities are negotiated by the few countries invited to participate in the early discussions, ACTA's text will be 'locked' and other countries who are later 'invited' to sign on to the pact will not be able to re-negotiate its one-sided terms," IP Justice stated. Signing on to ACTA is said to be "voluntary" but seen as difficult to refuse after the negotiation is completed. Petra Buhr of IP Justice suggested the World Intellectual Property Organisation or the World Trade Organisation as international fora for negotiations on IP issues. But the US trade official said, "We feel that the approach of a free-standing agreement is an appropriate way to pursue this project among interested countries. We support the important work of WTO and WIPO related to IPR enforcement." Lack of Transparency Despite the lack of legal details for the various ACTA provisions, critics, IP law researchers and some politicians concur that there is a lack of transparency in the process. "In my opinion it is not acceptable that international agreements are negotiated behind closed doors while Parliament is working on legislation on the very same issue in a co-decision procedure," said Eva Lichtenberger, Green Party member of the European Parliament. "It is contradictory to European rules to prejudice EU legislation in that way," she said, "and it does not serve our democratic process." Lichtenberger just won a decision by the president of the EU parliament with regard to a provision to exclude parallel imports from criminal sanctions in a directive on "Criminal measures aimed at ensuring the enforcement of intellectual property rights." The EU Parliament has not been informed about the negotiations so far and although the new Lisbon Treaty strengthens Parliament's role, under the status quo they might in the end only be "consulted" on a finalised ACTA. Questions in Europe Some questions are arising on the negotiation of ACTA in Europe. The EU enforcement directive called IPRED 2 is a follow up to civil rights measures against IPR infringement and piracy in the already passed IP Enforcement Directive (IPRED). Taken together, these EU directives cover very much the same ground on IPR enforcement as ACTA will. IP law experts in Europe say they do not know how ACTA would reconcile European data protection standards with perhaps tougher provision for searches in ACTA. "The EU Commission as a general rule strives towards keeping bilateral or plurilateral treaty negotiations in line with norms existing on the EU level," the German Ministry of Justice said in response to questions from Intellectual Property Watch. "Standards for criminal law sanctions are not in place at the EU level," it said. As IPRED 2 was delayed by questions of institutional competency and by changes in competency, the Lisbon Treaty of the Union still did not fix the content of Europe's criminal law sanctions regulation against IP infringement and piracy. "The question of possible overlaps therefore is not applicable here," it said. The German government supports the ACTA negotiations, the ministry said. As Germany already has high protection standards for IP, from the German point of view, timing is not as critical as the elaboration of sound regulations for ACTA. *Monika Ermert may be reached at info at ip-watch.ch.* ------------------------------ Filed under: - English - Access to Knowledge - Education - Human Rights - US Policy - European Policy - News - Enforcement *This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. All of the news articles and features on Intellectual Property Watch are also subject to a Creative Commons Licensewhich makes them available for widescale, free, non-commercial reproduction and translation.* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080607/6bfafc46/attachment-0001.html From the.solipsist at gmail.com Sat Jun 7 14:50:27 2008 From: the.solipsist at gmail.com (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2008 14:50:27 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Patent Attorney Stephan Kinsella Presents "On Why We Need To Rethink Intellectual Property" Message-ID: <4785f1e20806070220y4e7ba140ja8f695015d2e16c2@mail.gmail.com> Patent attorney Stephen Kinsella on "Rethinking Intellectual Property Completely" http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=280262988255234681&hl=en h/t: Mike Masnick at TechDirt: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080504/2229041029.shtml also see Mike Masnick's series of posts on IP: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080409/011406799.shtml ------ Patent Attorney Stephan Kinsella Presents On Why We Need To Rethink Intellectual Property from the *good-for-him *dept If you've got a spare 40 minutes to an hour, it's worth watching patent attorney Stephan Kinsella's presentation: Rethinking Intellectual Property Completely, as given in March. The video is embedded below, and it fits in nicely with my ongoing (yes, there's still plenty more) seriesof posts on intellectual property. It's pretty rare to see a patent attorney explain so lucidly the problems with patents (and copyrights): He does a very nice job ripping apart the "property rights" arguments that some, especially some libertarians, use in favor of patents, explaining why that doesn't make sense. It's an excellent presentation, and well worth watching. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080607/b0e76246/attachment.html From anivar.aravind at gmail.com Sat Jun 7 23:35:57 2008 From: anivar.aravind at gmail.com (Anivar Aravind) Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 23:35:57 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] INDIA: Will religious leaders help in fighting "piracy" and porn? Message-ID: <484ACE05.7050305@gmail.com> Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram Printer Friendly Page Send this Article to a Friend * Piracy: religious leaders back police * G. Anand / To be present when shops are raided / Also see the figure http://www.thehindu.com/2008/05/12/images/2008051258970301.jpg Thiruvananthapuram: Taking a cue from how the Church helped law-enforcers stop illegal brewing in the coastal areas of the district in the 1980s, the police's anti-piracy cell is seeking the support of religious leaders to curb the sale of pirated videos of films and pornography in neighbourhoods known for trade in smuggled goods in the city. The police and community leaders will form grassroots-level committees in such places to persuade traders to stop selling such DVDs and VCDs, officials said. Inspector-General of Police (Crime Branch) K. Padmakumar, who coordinates anti-piracy operations, has met certain community leaders. The traders will be given sufficient time for destroying their stock of pirated movies and pornographic films, following which the police will search their shops in the presence of community members. The Crime Branch is also investigating a Madurai-based businessman suspected to be one of the biggest suppliers of pirated movies in South India. The police will focus more on curbing the sale of pirated versions of the latest Malayalam films. Much of the high-quality pirated versions of the latest Malayalam movies are reaching Kerala from the Gulf. The police said Gulf-based racketeers used modern "telecine machines" for converting the theatrical prints of new releases into digital form. The top-quality digital prints are then smuggled into Kerala in laptop computers or portable hard discs. The movies are then copied on a large scale on DVDs and VCDs for sale in the black market. Film industry sources said that producers had scarce control over theatrical prints of movies released in the Gulf. In Kerala, film representatives are fiercely protective of the prints of new releases and they take away the reels containing key sequences after late-night shows to ensure that films are not illegally copied in entirety. In the Gulf, theatrical prints are not so protected and copyright violators are known to bribe courier service agents and movie hall staff for getting their hands on the original reels. Malayalam film producers often mark certain frames of the prints they distribute in an attempt to find out from which theatre they have been copied. Film exhibitors in some areas are now checking suspicious characters for handheld video cameras before allowing them into theatres. Video piracy, if unchecked, can make the nearly Rs.200-crore Malayalam movie industry unsustainable. The industry provides direct and indirect employment to nearly 25,000 people, including artistes and technicians. Lack of business, partly due to cable television and easy availability of pirated VCDs and DVDs, has forced the closure of nearly 700 movie halls in Kerala. Several young computer and Internet hobbyists are turning to video piracy for earning a quick income. The film industry is trying to combat this trend by simultaneously releasing films in rural and urban centres. http://www.thehindu.com/2008/05/12/stories/2008051258970300.htm -- Frederick FN Noronha * Independent Journalist http://fn.goa-india.org * Phone +91-832-2409490 Cell +91-9970157402 (sometimes out of range) http://www.youtube.com/user/fredericknoronha --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ASIA COMMONS" group. To post to this group, send email to asia-commons at googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to asia-commons-unsubscribe at googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/asia-commons?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~--- From the.solipsist at gmail.com Sun Jun 8 00:33:08 2008 From: the.solipsist at gmail.com (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 00:33:08 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Speculation Persists On ACTA As First Official Meeting Concludes Message-ID: <4785f1e20806071203n3139367elbbfd7ce08170340f@mail.gmail.com> http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1082&print=1 Intellectual Property Watch *5 June 2008* Speculation Persists On ACTA As First Official Meeting Concludes By Monika Ermert for *Intellectual Property Watch* Government representatives from developed nations and strategic developing nation partners met at the US mission in Geneva on 3-4 June to discuss proposals for an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Parties at the negotiation included: Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates and the United States. ACTA's declared goal, according to a note released after the meeting by the negotiators, is "to provide a high-level international framework that strengthens the global enforcement of intellectual property rights." According to a short press note released by the European Commission directorate general for trade on 5 June, "a number of topics were discussed" at the Geneva meeting. "The main focus of the discussion was border measures, particularly how to deal with large-scale intellectual property infringements, which can frequently involve criminal elements and pose a threat to public health and safety. Participants considered the discussions useful and are satisfied with the progress to date." A spokesperson of the European Commission confirmed that consultation with different stakeholders had been on the agenda and would happen over the coming month at the domestic level. Draft text proposals still have not been published, the source said. Several parties contacted pointed to confidentiality agreed on by the negotiating partners. It was still early, they said. Mathias Schaeli, head of legal services, International Trade Relations at the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI), told *Intellectual Property Watch* before the meeting that the criticism from some non-governmental organisations was premature as draft texts were not yet finalised. "ACTA's intention is to tackle the growing problem of large-scale counterfeiting which is a problem for every citizen," he said, adding that ACTA therefore should not be rejected upfront. Critical comments and contributions are welcome as soon as a text is on the table, he underlined. With no draft text available for comment from stakeholders or the public, there is active speculation about the measures envisaged by ACTA. The debate is fuelled by comments such as those of Google Senior Copyright Counsel William Patry. Patry wrote on his blogthat ISP filtering according to information he obtained might be on the table in the negotiation. The filtering of sites infringing third party rights on the internet has been a much-contended topic in Europe, with France still pushing for respective regulation. David Fewer, staff counsel at the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPIC), wrote to *Intellectual Property Watch* that the concern about customer data transfers from internet service providers to third parties stemmed from the consideration that the negotiators already had procedures in place to obtain data. "All signatories already have judicial processes for obtaining such data," he said, "thus the parties are likely looking to either sidestep judicial processes or lower the safeguards inherent in such judicial processes." Essential Action, an advocacy group focussing on access to medicine, warned in a statementto the Office of the United States Trade Representative, that "commercially interested parties sometimes cast compulsory licensing for medicines - legal under national legislation and World Trade Organization rules - as patent theft or 'piracy,' but no one can argue these practices bear any resemblance to counterfeiting." At the same time, an agreement focused on patent, copyright and trademark infringement was likely to overlook important options to control counterfeiting, including by requiring companies to disclose knowledge of counterfeit products. In the note published today, the ACTA negotiating partners obviously make an attempt to calm some concerns published in newspaper articles, for example, possible iPod searches by border authorities. Contrary to frequently asked questions published so far on ACTA the note speaks more specifically about "large-scale" infringements. Yet criticism might not die down soon, as there is no information about when and how stakeholders will be invited to comment and consult. Negotiators, according to the note, "will continue their substantive work over the coming months in a focussed manner. They tentatively scheduled their next meeting for mid-July, and expect to continue discussions on border enforcement while also exploring other areas, such as civil enforcement." *European Parliament Study Draws Some Critical Conclusions* A study, available here [pdf], commissioned and received in May by the European Parliament also points to some problems with ACTA. The study prepared by Professor Claudio Dordi of the University of Bocconi, Milan, found that "there is not 'enough evidence as to the extent or effects of international trade in counterfeiting and pirated products." There is, in fact, "a lack of reliable information and objective data as well as of harmonised definitions that would allow a proper quantification of the magnitude and impact of international trade in counterfeit and pirated goods and an adequate assessment of the problems it poses," it said. Dordi also is of the opinion that, "while it is necessary that claims on intellectual property rights infringement be based on substantial evidence, the United States and the European Union are evaluating intellectual property enforcement in developing countries against levels of counterfeiting and piracy that are mainly based on estimated losses that their industries claim to exist according to their own surveys. The estimates of the levels of counterfeit and piracy are imperfect and tend to exhibit an upward bias." Dordi agrees with NGOs like Knowledge Ecology International and IP Justice with regard to a certain "vagueness" in definitions and forum shopping. It was unclear from the use of the terms 'counterfeit' and 'piracy' what the new treaty would actually cover, he wrote. ACTA's nature as free-standing agreement constituted another "forum shift" in the international regime of intellectual property, he added. "One such shift took place in 1994 when discussion on IP moved from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to the WTO. The current forum shift is now occurring from the WTO to bilateral negotiations. While civil society and emerging developing countries exercise pressures on the WTO to maintain or even lower TRIPs standards, the United States and the European countries have found in bilateralism a way to extend international IP protection." A spokesman of the Canadian government had rejected the notion of forum shopping in his answers to earlier questions from *Intellectual Property Watch*. The ACTA approach of negotiations of only a few partners, wrote Dordi, "particularly penalizes developing countries as they do not have equal input to the agreement text they could adhere to." With regard to the question of whether the ACTA in the end might constitute a "new WIPO" and "a new layer of IPR standards," Dordi stated that "the industrialised countries' approach to enforcement, in sharp contrast to a public policy approach that takes into consideration issues broader than industry interests in formulating policy, is one of the major emerging challenges for national intellectual property rights systems." Monika Ermert may be reached at info at ip-watch.ch. ------------------------------ Filed under: - English - Access to Knowledge - Human Rights - US Policy - European Policy - News - Enforcement *This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. All of the news articles and features on Intellectual Property Watch are also subject to a Creative Commons Licensewhich makes them available for widescale, free, non-commercial reproduction and translation.* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080608/b389b70d/attachment-0001.html From prashantiyengar at gmail.com Mon Jun 9 10:28:52 2008 From: prashantiyengar at gmail.com (Prashant Iyengar) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 10:28:52 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Financial Express : Monsanto suggests provision for maintaining data confidentiality Message-ID: <908adbd0806082158h556cca51pf931db6867a6fe52@mail.gmail.com> http://www.financialexpress.com/printer/news/320284/ Financial Express : Monsanto suggests provision for maintaining data confidentiality Mon Jun 09 2008 10:24:02 GMT+0530 (India Standard Time) Monsanto suggests provision for maintaining data confidentiality ASHOK B SHARMA Posted online: Monday , June 09, 2008 at 2245 hrs New Delhi, Jun 8The seed multinational, Monsanto has suggested inclusion of the provision for maintaining data confidentiality in the draft National Biotechnology Regulatory Authority Bill-2008. Monsanto India's manager of regulatory affairs, Devraj Arya said : "It is a good thing to have a single window clearance of genetically modified (GM) products, but the new law should ensure data confidentiality. This is absolutely necessary in the IPR regime and we cannot afford to stand the risk of making such sensitive data public." The department of biotechnology (DBT) has drafted a Bill, which would allow setting up of a autonomous National Biotechnology Regulatory Authority (NBRA) as a single window clearance for GM products. Recently, Greenpeace India had asked Mahyco, which has developed Bt brinjal with technology sourced from Monsanto, to reveal some biosafety data. The Central Information Commission had ordered Mahyco to disclose the data. which was refused by Mahyco under the Right to Information Act and went with an appeal before the Delhi High Court. The proposed Bill, if passed by the Parliament, would take away the provisions of regulation of GM products from some existing laws like the rules for manufacture, use, import, export and storage of hazardous micro-organisms, genetically engineered organisms or cells, 1989 issued under Environment (Protection) Act 1986, Food Safety and Standards Act, Drugs and Cosmetic Act, Drugs and Cosmetic (Amendment) Bill-2007, Seed Bill-2004, draft Plant Quarantine Bill, National Biological Diversity Act and Plant Varieties Protection and Farmers' Rights Act. In a consultation session on the draft Bill convened on Friday, the member of Parliament, Sharad Joshi criticised setting up of the NBRA. He said : "The government sets up an authority only to rehabilitate retired government officials as its chairman and members." Noted activist, Vandana Shiva of Navdanya criticised the move to place NBRA under the promoter agency, DBT and said the position of the existing regulator, GEAC under the environment ministry was better. Though the draft Bill has proposed an inter-ministerial advisory body, its decisions are not binding for NBRA. The Union government can intervene only on policy matters. NBRA would also usurp the powers of the state governments by setting up its own state bodies. From prashantiyengar at gmail.com Mon Jun 9 10:40:19 2008 From: prashantiyengar at gmail.com (Prashant Iyengar) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 10:40:19 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] ICMR to patent mosquito trap Message-ID: <908adbd0806082210u47902aafr718236b118e62714@mail.gmail.com> http://www.thehindu.com/2008/06/09/stories/2008060958790800.htm Back Tamil Nadu ICMR to patent mosquito trap S. Vijay Kumar The new technology is expected to contain chikungunya and dengue MADURAI: In what could be a significant breakthrough in containing the incidence of chikungunya and dengue, the Centre for Research in Medical Entomology (CRME), a premier laboratory of the Indian Council of Medical Research here, has developed a new technology to trap infected mosquitoes. The 'OVI Trap' or simply the 'egg trapping device' is an indigenous technology conceived and developed by a team of scientists led by senior entomologist, B.K. Tyagi. After studying the breeding sites, behaviour and vigour of chikungunya and dengue-transmitting mosquitoes, the scientists designed the mechanical trap to seize gravid (pregnant) mosquitoes. "After successfully testing the device in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, we have forwarded it to the ICMR for obtaining patent. After successful patenting, the trap will be put to commercial use and made available to the common man," Dr. Tyagi told The Hindu on Sunday. The 'OVI Trap' would attract pregnant mosquitoes to lay eggs and confine them to the enclosure. Each trap could contain a maximum 300 mosquitoes. "The trapped mosquitoes, if not cleared for scientific investigation, will automatically die in confinement. Though such traps are available, this is an improvised version that takes into account the ecological system and targets particularly the 'Aedes Albopictus' mosquitoes that spread dengue." The outbreak of these infections has a direct correlation to the density of female mosquitoes. "By curbing the pregnant mosquitoes, we can minimise the mosquito population. Each mosquito lays about 200 eggs…nearly 50 per cent of the newborn are female mosquitoes again. It is like preventing the next generation mosquitoes." (c) Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu From prashantiyengar at gmail.com Mon Jun 9 11:38:25 2008 From: prashantiyengar at gmail.com (Prashant Iyengar) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 11:38:25 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Portal by IIM-A to present ethnic India Message-ID: <908adbd0806082308h7c56bed8gf84bc6f42a25b5bf@mail.gmail.com> http://www.business-standard.com/common/storypage_c.php?leftnm=10&autono=325497 Portal by IIM-A to present ethnic India Mon Jun 09 2008 11:37:55 GMT+0530 (India Standard Time) Portal by IIM-A to present ethnic India Chitra Unnithan / Mumbai/ Ahmedabad June 09, 2008, 4:55 IST The folklores and folk songs from the remotest part of the country may soon get global recognition. Thanks to a professor and his students at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM-A), who are planning to provide a virtual stage to showcase latent talent from distant parts of culturally endowed India. Anil Gupta, professor at IIM-A has plans to create a portal for creative people from the interiors of the country. The portal, to be created by the professor along with his students, aims at providing a medium for the unsung heroes, who possess a barrage of cultural knowledge. The portal will be an attempt to present the untapped folk lores, songs and other traditional talent from the remote yet culturally rich parts of India to the world. "There are about 250 million people who fall under the Below Poverty Line (BPL). If we can give them a platform, their ethnic knowledge and unbound creativity can be mapped. We are trying to get the government to get some mental work for the underprivileged people. The belief that these people have always been given labour work and not been engaged in any kind of creative work itself shows the bankruptcy of the government. The government's assumtion is that the deprived class has hands and legs but no head. We are planning to create a market for the unsung heroes and heroines of the society by tapping their creative talent," Gupta said. The revenue generated through downloads from the portal will be directed towards the benefit of people. From prashantiyengar at gmail.com Tue Jun 10 10:26:34 2008 From: prashantiyengar at gmail.com (Prashant Iyengar) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 10:26:34 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] India`s suggestion on bio-piracy ignored Message-ID: <908adbd0806092156k64d827aev1e1f50a750c26bb9@mail.gmail.com> http://www.business-standard.com/common/storypage_c.php?leftnm=10&autono=325677 India`s suggestion on bio-piracy ignored Tue Jun 10 2008 10:26:04 GMT+0530 (India Standard Time) India`s suggestion on bio-piracy ignored D Ravi Kanth / Geneva June 10, 2008, 0:28 IST India's long-standing demand for mandatory disclosure for genetic resources to stop bio-piracy was given a short shrift yesterday when World Trade Organisation Chief Pascal Lamy indicated that there were sharp differences among members over starting negotiations on this issue at this juncture. New Delhi had insisted that the disclosure for genetic resources must be part of the so-called horizontal negotiations to discuss trade-offs between Doha agriculture and market-opening for industrials commitments. But the United States, along with some other industrialised countries, vehemently opposed India's proposal, which was backed by a number of developing countries on the ground that it "would substantially set back efforts to arrive at a viable way forward for the Doha negotiations." In his report on the extension of the protection of geographical indications to items other than wines and spirits and those related to the relationship between the Trips Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity, Lamy said, "Different views have been expressed about linkages between the issues of GI extension and Trips/CBD and also between these issues and work elsewhere." Though the director general did not pronounce a judgment on what would happen to these two issues, the report, for all practical purposes, has poured cold water on India's demand to start negotiations to hammer out the disclosure provisions in the Trips agreement due to fierce opposition from the United States and other members. India attached more importance to amending the Trips agreement for including the disclosure provisions for genetic resources. It has also evinced interest in extending the GI protection to items other than wines and spirits because of the problems faced on the basmati rice when an American company sought the trademark for Texmati rice. In fact, India along with several countries, demanded a clear decision to launch text-based negotiations to be part of the so-called horizontal negotiations to discuss trade-offs between commitments in Doha agriculture and market-opening for industrials. But the United States and some leading farm exporting countries of the so-called New World — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Chile —among others, opposed both the issues, with the US having fiercely opposed the Trips/CBD issue. Lamy said while a large number of members — the European Union, India, Brazil, among others, who are proponents of GI extension and a new Trips disclosure requirement — have proposed that these issues, together with that of the GI register for wines and spirits pressed for modality texts to reflect the key parameters for negotiating these two issues. From lawrence at altlawforum.org Tue Jun 10 14:54:05 2008 From: lawrence at altlawforum.org (Lawrence Liang) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:54:05 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] The Consistency of Shekhar Kapur Message-ID: <484E4835.4060307@altlawforum.org> Found yet another quote on piracy from the consistent Mr. Shekhar Kapur, this one dating back to 2003 (Beyond Hollywood, India Today, 17th March 2003) /I am going to make some very controversial statements about piracy. There was a time when we used to be paid Rs 20 lakh or so for music about two decades ago. Then a pirate came along and started to pirate the music business. He almost destroyed the major companies. But he proved that when you sell a cassette for Rs 40. you have a limited market. But at Rs 12, the market went up 200 times. Not only did the market go up 200 times, it provoked the manufacture of cheap cassette recorders. Pirates, very often, actually are the people who are down there at the grassroots and who understand what the consumer wants because the corporations are too lazy. /No prizes for guessing who he was speaking about From the.solipsist at gmail.com Tue Jun 10 15:39:35 2008 From: the.solipsist at gmail.com (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:39:35 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Fwd: [Reader-list] Bibliography on the Ethics of Free Software In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4785f1e20806100309l70d8ba4ckb876af3fe79d806e@mail.gmail.com> Dear All, Jamie Dow, a Research Fellow at the IDEA CETL of the University of Leeds (working on interdisciplinary ethics) has asked for his mail (below) to be forwarded to Commons-Law. He's putting together a bibliography of "serious academic work" on "the ethics of F/LOSS", and would like to share it, and get some help in improving it. Please do mail back with suggestions as to material (or even as to other, more pertinent mailing lists). Regards, Pranesh ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jamie Dow Date: Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 23:14 Subject: [Reader-list] Bibliography on the Ethics of Free Software To: reader-list at sarai.net Dear listmembers, This post is partly for information, partly to see if this information can be improved upon. It's a bibliography of serious academic work on the ethics of Free (Libre) and Open-Source Software - but mainly Free Software. The bibliography is pasted below - I know that this is an issue on which many on this list take a keen interest. I hope this is a useful source to you. I'd be interested to hear of any important or good pieces that you know of that are not listed here. In that connection, I'm interested specifically on the *ethics* of free and non-free software (so history of the movement, technical evaluations, and sociological analysis are not relevant here. Legal stuff on licensing can go either way - I'm only interested in jurisprudential stuff that deals with the ethical issues.). Best wishes, Jamie Dow *Free Software Bibliography* _2 Classics:_ Raymond, Eric (2001) /The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 2/^/nd/ / Edition, /O'Reilly. Stallman, Richard M (2002) /Free Software, Free Society/, (Intro by Lawrence Lessig, edited by Joshua Gay) Cambridge, MA: Free Software Foundation. _General (lightly vetted, and simply in the order they came to me):_ Falquet, G and Grin, F (2008) "Free Software, Proprietary Software and Linguistic Justice" in eds. Gosseries, A, Marciano, A and Strowel, A (2008) /Intellectual Property and Theories of Justice/, London: Macmillan. Nissenbaum*,* Helen (1995) "Should I copy my Neighbour's Software?" in eds. Nissenbaum, H & Johnson, D (1995) /Computers, Ethics and Social Values/, Prentice Hall, pp.201-213. Lerner, Joshua and Tirole, Jean (2000) /The Simple Economics of Open Source (NBER working paper series), /NBER. Kimppa, Kai K. (2005) "Intellectual Property Rights in Software—Justifiable from a Liberalist Position? The Free Software Foundations Position in Comparison to John Locke's Concept of Property", in Richard A. Spinello and Herman T. Tavani (eds.), /Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World: Theory and Practice/, Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Kimppa, Kai K. (2004) "Intellectual Property Rights – or Rights to the Immaterial – in Digitally Distributable Media Gone All Wrong?", in Lee Freeman and Graham Peace (eds.), /Information Ethics: Privacy and Intellectual Property/, Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Kimppa Kai K. (2007) /Problems with the Justification of Intellectual Property Rights in Relation to Software and Other Digitally Distributable Media: PhD thesis/, May 2007. Available (in part) at: http://www.tucs.fi/publications/attachment.php?fname=DISS83.pdf_ Tavani, Herman T. (2004) "Balancing intellectual property rights and the intellectual commons: a Lockean analysis", /Information, Communication and Ethics in Society,/ 2: S5–S14 Tavani, Herman T. (2005) "Locke, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Information Commons", /Ethics and Information Technology,/ 7:87–97 DiBona,Chris; Ockman, Sam and Stone, Mark (1999) /Open Sources : Voices from the Open Source Revolution/, Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media Inc.. DiBona, Chris; Stone, Mark and Cooper, Danese (2005) /Open Sources 2.0 The Continuing Evolution, /Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media Inc.. Sunstein, Cass R. (2006) /Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge/, New York: Oxford University Press. Esp. ch 5. Moglen, Eben (2003) /Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture, / http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/maine-speech.html. Moglen, Eben (2003) /The dotCommunist Manifesto, / http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/dcm.html Berry, David M. (2004) "The Contestation of Code: A Preliminary Investigation into the Discourse of the Free/Libre and Open Source Movements", /Critical Discourse Studies/ 1 (1): 65–89. Berry, David M., and Moss, Giles (2006) "Free and Open Source Software: Opening and Democratising E-Government's Black Box", /Information Polity/ 11:21–34. Cusumano, Michael; Shirky, Clay; Feller, Joseph; Fitzgerald, Brian; Hissam, Scott A. and Lakhani, Karim R. (eds.) (2005) /Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software,/ Cambridge: MIT Press. Weber, Steven (2004) /The Success of Open Source,/ Cambridge: Harvard University Press. M. Wolf (moderator), D. Gotterbarn, K. Bowyer, and K. Miller. (2002) "Open Source Software: Intellectual Challenges to the Status Quo"/,/ /ACM, SIGCSE 2002/, Cincinnati, OH (March 2, 2002). F. Grodzinsky, K. Miller and M. Wolf. (2004) "Ethical Issues in Open Source Software", /Readings in Cyberethics 2/^/nd/ /edition,/ R. Spinello and H. Tavani, eds. Jones and Bartlett, 2004. 351-366. (reprinted conference paper) Miller, Keith (2007) "Open source software and consequential responsibility: GPU, GPL, and the no military use clause", /APA Newsletter of Philosophy and Computers/, Vol. 6, No. 2 (ed. Boltuc, P), 17-22. _More towards Legal-Theory:_ Rosen, Lawrence (2004) /Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law,/ Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall PTR. St Laurent, Andrew (2004) /Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing/, O'Reilly. (The Eben Moglen writings may belong in this "legal" category.) Zittrain, Jonathan (2004) "Normative Principles for Evaluating Free and Proprietary Software", /Harvard Law School Public Law Research Papers,/ No. 98, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=529862 . -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080610/45a16c32/attachment-0001.html From the.solipsist at gmail.com Tue Jun 10 15:39:35 2008 From: the.solipsist at gmail.com (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:39:35 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Fwd: [Reader-list] Bibliography on the Ethics of Free Software In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4785f1e20806100309l70d8ba4ckb876af3fe79d806e@mail.gmail.com> Dear All, Jamie Dow, a Research Fellow at the IDEA CETL of the University of Leeds (working on interdisciplinary ethics) has asked for his mail (below) to be forwarded to Commons-Law. He's putting together a bibliography of "serious academic work" on "the ethics of F/LOSS", and would like to share it, and get some help in improving it. Please do mail back with suggestions as to material (or even as to other, more pertinent mailing lists). Regards, Pranesh ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jamie Dow Date: Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 23:14 Subject: [Reader-list] Bibliography on the Ethics of Free Software To: reader-list at sarai.net Dear listmembers, This post is partly for information, partly to see if this information can be improved upon. It's a bibliography of serious academic work on the ethics of Free (Libre) and Open-Source Software - but mainly Free Software. The bibliography is pasted below - I know that this is an issue on which many on this list take a keen interest. I hope this is a useful source to you. I'd be interested to hear of any important or good pieces that you know of that are not listed here. In that connection, I'm interested specifically on the *ethics* of free and non-free software (so history of the movement, technical evaluations, and sociological analysis are not relevant here. Legal stuff on licensing can go either way - I'm only interested in jurisprudential stuff that deals with the ethical issues.). Best wishes, Jamie Dow *Free Software Bibliography* _2 Classics:_ Raymond, Eric (2001) /The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 2/^/nd/ / Edition, /O'Reilly. Stallman, Richard M (2002) /Free Software, Free Society/, (Intro by Lawrence Lessig, edited by Joshua Gay) Cambridge, MA: Free Software Foundation. _General (lightly vetted, and simply in the order they came to me):_ Falquet, G and Grin, F (2008) "Free Software, Proprietary Software and Linguistic Justice" in eds. Gosseries, A, Marciano, A and Strowel, A (2008) /Intellectual Property and Theories of Justice/, London: Macmillan. Nissenbaum*,* Helen (1995) "Should I copy my Neighbour's Software?" in eds. Nissenbaum, H & Johnson, D (1995) /Computers, Ethics and Social Values/, Prentice Hall, pp.201-213. Lerner, Joshua and Tirole, Jean (2000) /The Simple Economics of Open Source (NBER working paper series), /NBER. Kimppa, Kai K. (2005) "Intellectual Property Rights in Software—Justifiable from a Liberalist Position? The Free Software Foundations Position in Comparison to John Locke's Concept of Property", in Richard A. Spinello and Herman T. Tavani (eds.), /Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World: Theory and Practice/, Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Kimppa, Kai K. (2004) "Intellectual Property Rights – or Rights to the Immaterial – in Digitally Distributable Media Gone All Wrong?", in Lee Freeman and Graham Peace (eds.), /Information Ethics: Privacy and Intellectual Property/, Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Kimppa Kai K. (2007) /Problems with the Justification of Intellectual Property Rights in Relation to Software and Other Digitally Distributable Media: PhD thesis/, May 2007. Available (in part) at: http://www.tucs.fi/publications/attachment.php?fname=DISS83.pdf_ Tavani, Herman T. (2004) "Balancing intellectual property rights and the intellectual commons: a Lockean analysis", /Information, Communication and Ethics in Society,/ 2: S5–S14 Tavani, Herman T. (2005) "Locke, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Information Commons", /Ethics and Information Technology,/ 7:87–97 DiBona,Chris; Ockman, Sam and Stone, Mark (1999) /Open Sources : Voices from the Open Source Revolution/, Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media Inc.. DiBona, Chris; Stone, Mark and Cooper, Danese (2005) /Open Sources 2.0 The Continuing Evolution, /Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media Inc.. Sunstein, Cass R. (2006) /Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge/, New York: Oxford University Press. Esp. ch 5. Moglen, Eben (2003) /Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture, / http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/maine-speech.html. Moglen, Eben (2003) /The dotCommunist Manifesto, / http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/dcm.html Berry, David M. (2004) "The Contestation of Code: A Preliminary Investigation into the Discourse of the Free/Libre and Open Source Movements", /Critical Discourse Studies/ 1 (1): 65–89. Berry, David M., and Moss, Giles (2006) "Free and Open Source Software: Opening and Democratising E-Government's Black Box", /Information Polity/ 11:21–34. Cusumano, Michael; Shirky, Clay; Feller, Joseph; Fitzgerald, Brian; Hissam, Scott A. and Lakhani, Karim R. (eds.) (2005) /Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software,/ Cambridge: MIT Press. Weber, Steven (2004) /The Success of Open Source,/ Cambridge: Harvard University Press. M. Wolf (moderator), D. Gotterbarn, K. Bowyer, and K. Miller. (2002) "Open Source Software: Intellectual Challenges to the Status Quo"/,/ /ACM, SIGCSE 2002/, Cincinnati, OH (March 2, 2002). F. Grodzinsky, K. Miller and M. Wolf. (2004) "Ethical Issues in Open Source Software", /Readings in Cyberethics 2/^/nd/ /edition,/ R. Spinello and H. Tavani, eds. Jones and Bartlett, 2004. 351-366. (reprinted conference paper) Miller, Keith (2007) "Open source software and consequential responsibility: GPU, GPL, and the no military use clause", /APA Newsletter of Philosophy and Computers/, Vol. 6, No. 2 (ed. Boltuc, P), 17-22. _More towards Legal-Theory:_ Rosen, Lawrence (2004) /Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law,/ Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall PTR. St Laurent, Andrew (2004) /Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing/, O'Reilly. (The Eben Moglen writings may belong in this "legal" category.) Zittrain, Jonathan (2004) "Normative Principles for Evaluating Free and Proprietary Software", /Harvard Law School Public Law Research Papers,/ No. 98, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=529862 . -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080610/45a16c32/attachment-0002.html From the.solipsist at gmail.com Tue Jun 10 23:55:38 2008 From: the.solipsist at gmail.com (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:55:38 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] When pop culture tributes become copyright infringements Message-ID: <4785f1e20806101125u459502en14cd1e6c267dc243@mail.gmail.com> Dear All, This article can be read in light with Judge Kozinski's (now classic) brilliant dissenting opinion in *White v. Samsung*, a case on the right of publicity, where he famously states: "All creators draw in part on the work of those who came before, referring to it, building on it, poking fun at it; we call this creativity, not piracy." http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/White_v._Samsung_Electronics_America%2C_Inc./En_banc_Opinion#Dissenting_Opinion's ---------- When pop culture tributes become copyright infringements by Dan Bischoff/Star-Ledger Staff Saturday February 16, 2008, 9:00 PM STAR-LEDGER FILE PHOTOSculptor J. Seward Johnson, whose latest series of works explore the image of celebrity, is pictured in his Hamilton Township studio. As a sculptor, J. Seward Johnson Jr., is perhaps best known for his playful, photo-realist sculptures of everyday scenes: a father teaching his child how to ride a bike, or a stockbroker checking through his briefcase before a meeting, or even painters rolling latex on a blank wall. At his 35-acre park, Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton Township, he's added three-dimensional bronzes that depict whole Impressionist paintings like "Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe" by Manet or "Luncheon of the Boating Party" by Renoir, both sculpted in colored bronze, so visitors can walk through a famous painting in a natural setting. Recently the 71-year-old artist and heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune has begun a series that he calls "American Icons," depicting famous images from Americana, like the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square at the end of World War II, or "Forever Marilyn," Johnson's three-dimensional bronze of Marilyn Monroe standing on the subway grate from "The Seven-Year Itch." Most of them, Johnson says cheerfully, are icons of his generation, the "American images I grew up with that defined the country." When rendered 25 feet tall in molded resins, they can be read as monuments to popular American history, the transformation from two-dimensional photos into three-dimensional statues, giving them the status of 19th century soldiers on horseback. Lots of people find this transition thrilling, as if it confirms their taste -- and the taste of millions of other Americans -- who recognize these images as pivotal symbols of Pop culture. But lots of other people, mostly with law degrees or some inherited claim to the original image, think these sculptures are a form of copyright infringement. Beginning in 1985, when California passed a Celebrities Rights Act (with a sub-section known as the "Astaire Celebrity Image Protection Act," designed to block TV commercials similar to one that showed Fred Astaire dancing with a brand of vacuum cleaner instead of Ginger Rogers), these folks have had a legal case. Nineteen states have laws that in some way protect the right of celebrities to demand a fee from anyone who uses their image for any commercial purpose. The California law, which is something of a model, allows a celebrity to sue for damages if the unlicensed image hurts his or her reputation in some specific way, but it also allows them to garnish whatever profits the artist or vendor made from the image and to apply for an injunction to stop any activity that treads on their "right of publicity." "I wanted to do something in the wake of 9/11 that reminded Americans of who they were. Something that caught the mood of the country right then," Johnson says. One of his street genre scenes, a bronze of a businessman looking through his briefcase called "Double Check," was under the collapse of the towers and became an impromptu memorial, covered with firefighters' signs and wishes, bringing home the power of sculpture in a time of crisis. "But here I was treading on copyright laws. I worry about it all the time. I've even thought of showing the sculptures with giant paper bags on their heads, as a kind of protest," Johnson adds. "Marilyn," a sculpture by J. Seward Johnson. Another 11 states recognize the right of publicity through common law, meaning there is some precedent in the state courts for protecting the public use of anyone's image. New Jersey and New York both recognize this right, but to a much lesser extent than California law. (The local precedent goes back to the ¤'30s and is designed to prevent an advertiser from using anyone's picture to sell a product without that person's approval.) Since 1985, the California Legislature has passed a number of amendments, like the one last fall with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's support, that extended the right of publicity for up to 70 years after the celebrity's death. (It has been set at 50 years before that, and, as with copyright legislation, the date keeps being extended every few years to meet the needs of the merchandisers.) These laws are applicable only within the state's borders, so an artist would have to have a public show in the state before he or she could be sued. Last year, the Monroe estate tried to use existing New York state law to stop the sale of posters and other tchotchkes bearing her likeness, but they lost in the courts. So the New York State Legislature is considering its own copycat celebrity protection act, sponsored by state Sen. Martin Golden and Assemblywoman Helene Weinstein, chairwoman of the Standing Committee on the Judiciary, which may come to a vote this winter or spring. It, too, stipulates a right held for 70 years after death. Like the California law, it includes an exception for any "play, book, magazine, newspaper, motion picture, musical composition ... single and original work of art, work of political or newsworthy value," a clause intended to shield any First Amendment-protected use of a celebrity's "name, portrait, voice, signature or picture." But the catch lies in the terms "single and original work of art." Yes, under the law an artist can paint or sculpt Monroe once -- but only once. Johnson has already cast five versions of "Forever Marilyn," with plans for seven more; he routinely casts his sculptures in series of seven or more. That's just the beginning. What about, for example, all those Andy Warhol silkscreens of "Liz"? Or "Elvis"? There are scores of them, and in fact, the point of those portraits is that they are about the way celebrity images are mass-produced in contemporary culture. Indeed, all sorts of artists today manipulate the images of celebrities in their work -- it's a mark of the sampling-based, collagist critique of the media-marinated mindset we cope with every day. "I worry any time a legislature puts any sort of limit on what an artist can say or do," says San Francisco attorney Richard Wiebe, a fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a frequent contributor to the debates over intellectual property. (Wiebe was instrumental in quashing Steve Jobs' suit against Apple employees who leak to journalists, and he's advising Congress on the controversy over the phone companies' cooperation with the Bush administration to surreptitiously wiretap American citizens.) "But what this reminds me of most is the way the courts spent much of the last century trying to define pornography," he continues. "We spent enormous amounts of legal energy on that debate, never could come to any real logical way to separate it from fine art, only to give up in the end. And I fear the courts could spend much of this century trying to define a similarly illogical right of publicity." But the difference is that, in the battle over porn, big money was on the side of freedom. Here, it's entirely on the side of censorship. The biggest dead-celebrity firm in the world is CMG Worldwide, based in Indianapolis (because Indiana has a celeb protection act that extends for a full century after the famed one's death). CMG Worldwide holds at least partial rights to Monroe, James Dean, Buddy Holly, Babe Ruth, Malcolm X, Mark Twain, the late pro wrestler Andre the Giant, and scores of others. The counterintuitive weirdness of celebrity protection acts is already fairly evident in the two California Supreme Court judgments on that state's law; both limited the impact of the statute in different ways. The first, brought in 2001 by the heirs of the Three Stooges against artist Gary Saderup, involved respectful, even reverential (in a Stooge-y kind of way) charcoal drawings of Moe, Larry and Curly that Saderup converted into lithographs and T-shirts. The court ruled Saderup had to have written permission from the Stooges' estates to do that. But in 2003, the court ruled that DC Comics could publish a five-part comic book series, "Jonah Hex," which featured two albino musician characters named Johnny and Edgar "Autumn." One wore the distinctive top hat favored by Johnny Winter, who together with Edgar are probably the most famous albino brothers in rock music. The storyline was a fantastic melange of Pop gags and horror fiction, in which the Autumn brothers are half-human offspring of a supernatural worm who "engage in wanton acts of violence, murder and bestiality." That was okay by the court because "the creative appropriation of celebrity images can be an important avenue of individual expression." So a celebrity's image can be reproduced in an original work of art if it's defamed, but his or her image cannot be reproduced as an original work of art if it depicts that celebrity accurately and respectfully? The spotted owl gets more protection than that, and it's nowhere near as popular as Shemp -- never mind Curly. As Wiebe says, the courts will have to work out the ultimate meaning of these laws, and that will likely take years. Still, the rise of intellectual property rights has already had a sizable chilling effect on contemporary artists. In 1992, Art Rogers, a professional photographer, sued artist Jeff Koons for creating a sculpture out of a Rogers photo, "Puppies," showing a man and woman holding eight puppies in their laps. Though Koons exaggerated the noses of the puppies and painted them blue, the ceramic sculpture looked enough like the greeting card made of Rogers' photo that the court ruled Koons had infringed on Rogers' copyright. (Koons had sold three sculptures, titled "String of Puppies," for $367,000 each.) "My father used to say, 'Are you always agin the law?'" the occasionally litigious Johnson says. "These are stupid rules, but I guess I'll have to do what my lawyer says and change the pieces just enough, at least until it's settled. "You know, the irony is, Arnold (Schwarzenegger) owns a couple of my street pieces. He contacted me while he was shooting that movie, 'True Lies,' to tell me how much he liked them." *Dan Bischoff may be reached at dbischoff at starledger.com.* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080610/01be58b0/attachment-0001.html From prashantiyengar at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 10:14:06 2008 From: prashantiyengar at gmail.com (Prashant Iyengar) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:14:06 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Indian drug firms wary of global customs norms Message-ID: <908adbd0806112144w322e1af3y36b0459e20b676c5@mail.gmail.com> http://www.business-standard.com/common/storypage_c.php?leftnm=10&autono=325906 Indian drug firms wary of global customs norms Thu Jun 12 2008 10:12:56 GMT+0530 (India Standard Time) Indian drug firms wary of global customs norms Joe C Mathew / New Delhi June 12, 2008, 0:31 IST The World Customs Organisation (WCO), the intergovernmental body that aims at developing global standards for Customs departments, is planning to recommend stringent norms for enforcing the intellectual property rights of export consignments. However, Indian researchers have expressed concern over the move which goes beyond the minimum standards prescribed under the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as TRIPS mandates such standards only for "imports" of goods and leaves stringent provisions for "exports" optional. The WCO proposals, if implemented, could empower the customs authorities to seize any export or goods in transit consignments on complaints of suspected IP violation. This could prove to be a powerful non-tariff barrier for industries like pharmaceuticals in the developing countries, warn Indian researchers. The working draft of the proposal — Standards Employed by Customs for Uniform Rights Enforcement (SECURE) — was prepared after the WCO observed that "only by granting certain powers and measures that go beyond the minimum requirement set forth in the TRIPS agreement, governments can provide an effective and efficient level of IPR protection and enforcement at their borders". "The 'Provisional Global Customs Standards' to counter IPR violations go much beyond the definition of 'counterfeits' discussed by the World Health Assembly (WHA) last week in Geneva. It talks of its own 'Model IPR Legislation' for enforcement of IPRs and advocates granting powers and measures to the customs that go beyond the minimum requirements set forth in the TRIPS Agreement," says D G Shah, secretary general, Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA). "This, unless properly addressed, could be yet one more hurdle for access to medicines. It is a matter of concern not only for the national pharmaceutical industry, but also for the Government of India and the civil society as its potential to create barrier is even greater than the TRIPS Agreement," he added. According to Nirmalya Syam, a researcher with the Delhi-based Centre for Trade and Development (Centad), the application of SECURE provisions in the current form "will enable states to interdict and seize the shipment of any product which is suspected to be counterfeit". "Such powers may be used as non-tariff barriers to deny market access from developing countries like India to the markets of other countries." From sunil at mahiti.org Thu Jun 12 12:38:49 2008 From: sunil at mahiti.org (Sunil Abraham) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:38:49 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] 51st state Message-ID: <1213254529.5581.2.camel@sunil-laptop> -------- Forwarded Message -------- From: Michael Geist This Canadian comic on copyright is well worth a look. http://www.appropriationart.ca/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/51_state.pdf From the.solipsist at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 01:45:56 2008 From: the.solipsist at gmail.com (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:45:56 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Rasmus Fleischer essay for the Cato Institute's "The Future of Copyright" series Message-ID: <4785f1e20806111315y60609437m51fd7ab62d5a5810@mail.gmail.com> Dear All, In an extremely interesting piece (first in a series on "The Future of Copyright") on the Cato Institute's Cato Unbound, Rasmus Fleischer, a co-founder of Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau, a Swedish anti-copyright organization), makes a striking argument that copyright laws will necessarily have to change to cope with changing technology, instead of trying to seek more control as a reaction. There is a good (but slightly less interesting) response paper by Timothy B. Lee at < http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/06/11/tim-lee/two-paths-for-copyright-law/>. Two more response papers will be published this month: one by Doug Lichtman and one by Tom W. Bell. [h/t: Techdirt: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080609/1950311357.shtml] ------------ Quotes: "We already have access to more film, music, text and images than we can possibly incorporate into our lives. Retreating from this paradigm of abundance to the old paradigm of scarcity is simply not an alternative. Adding more "content" will strictly speaking produce no value — whether culturally or economically. What's valuable is supplying a context where people can come together to create meaning out of abundance." "It's characteristic of the dishonesty found in copyright law that the ACTA has been promoted as a treaty aimed to save people from dangerous fake medicine, which has very little to do with issues like "ISP responsibility." While patents, trademarks, and copyright are significantly different in many respects, copyright industry lobbyists prefer to present their draconian enforcement strategies as a matter of "intellectual property" in general." "The real dispute, once again, is not between proponents and opponents of copyright as a whole. It is between believers and non-believers. Believers in copyright keep dreaming about building a digital simulation of a 20th-century copyright economy, based on scarcity and with distinct limits between broadcasting and unit sales. I don't believe such a stabilization will ever occur, but I fear that this vision of copyright utopia is triggering an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties. Accepting a laissez-faire attitude regarding software development and communication infrastructure can prevent such an escalation." "Creative practices, with some exceptions, thrive in economies where digital abundance is connected to scarce qualities in space and time. But there can never be a question of finding one universal business model for a world without copyright. The more urgent question regards what price we will have to pay for upholding the phantasm of universal copyright." ------------ There is a bit in the essay about Mark Getty's "Intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century." That quote gives rise to http://www.oil21.org/and their associated projects http://0xdb.org/ and http://pad.ma (the latter being put together by oil21.org, Alternative Law Forum , Majlis, Point of View and Chitrakarkhana /CAMP .) ------------- To quote the editors of Cato Unbound: The Future of Copyright Does copyright have a future in the digital age? Or are new technologies steadily making it obsolete? As the copying of digital texts, audio, and video grows cheaper, the restrictions needed to enforce copyright grow more expensive and invasive. What are the implications of easy digital copying and storage for public policy? How can copyright be preserved in the digital age, and is it even worth preserving? To discuss these issues, we've brought in *Rasmus Fleischer*, one of the co-founders of Piratbyrån, or "The Piracy Bureau." Piratbyrån is a Swedish advocacy group opposed to invasive digital copyright laws. Although Piratbyrån does not engage in illegal activities, some of its members did help found The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker for downloading copyrighted material online. As such, both organizations have gained considerable notoriety. In his lead essay, Fleischer discusses the proliferation of digital copying online – and the widening circle of laws designed to stop it. He questions whether these laws are enforceable without destroying the Internet's openness and innovation, and whether technological fixes to impose traditional copyright will not end up destroying civil liberties. To comment on his essay, we've invited *Timothy B. Lee*, a Cato Institute adjunct scholar specializing in technology issues and civil liberties and a frequent contributor to *Techdirt, *and *Ars Technica, *as well as the *Wall Street Journal* and the* **Los Angeles Times.* We've also invited Professor *Doug Lichtman*, who teaches on law and technology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and who is co-author of *Telecommunications Law and Policy*, a textbook on the federal regulation of broadcast television, cable television, radio, telephony, and the Internet. Finally, we will also be hearing from *Tom W. Bell*, a law professor at Chapman University and author of the forthcoming book *Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good*. -------------------- http://www.cato-unbound.org/wp-print.php?p=745 The Future of Copyright By Rasmus Fleischer June 9th, 2008 Lead Essay How relevant is it to declare oneself to be "for" or "against" copyright? Neither the stabilization nor the abolition of the copyright system seems within reach. All we see is a seemingly endless assembly line of new extensions to the law being proposed and enacted. The most recent is the proposed "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) [1], to be tabled at next month's G8 meeting in Tokyo, including a clause known as the "Pirate Bay killer" that would force countries to criminalize services that may facilitate copyright infringement, even if not for profit. This is just one example of how copyright law is mutating into something qualitatively different than what it has been in previous centuries. A very condensed version of copyright history could look like this: texts (1800), works (1900), tools (2000). Originally the law was designed to regulate the use of one machine only: the printing press. It concerned the reproduction of *texts*, printed matter, without interfering with their subsequent uses. Roughly around 1900, however, copyright law was drastically extended to cover *works*, independent of any specific medium. This opened up the field for collective rights management organizations, which since have been setting fixed prices on performance and broadcasting licenses. Under their direction, very specific copyright customs developed for each new medium: cinema, gramophone, radio, and so forth. This differentiation was undermined by the emergence of the Internet, and since about the year 2000 copyright law has been pushed in a new direction, regulating access to tools in a way much more arbitrary than anyone in the pre-digital age could have imagined. This change has taken place because previously distinct media are now simulated within the singular medium of the Internet, and copyright law simply seems unable to cope with it. Consider radio broadcasting and record shops, which once were inherently different. Their online counterparts are known respectively as "streaming" and "downloading," but the distinction is ultimately artificial, since the same data transfer takes place in each. The only essential difference lies in how the software is configured at the receiving end. If the software saves the music as a file for later use, it's called a "download." If the software immediately sends the music to the loudspeakers, it's called "streaming." However, the receiver can *always *choose to transform a stream to a digital file. It's simple, legal, and not very different from home taping. What now fills the record industry with fear is the possibility that users could "automatically identify and separate individual tracks from digital transmissions and store them for future playback in any order."[2] In other words, they fear that the distinction between streaming and downloading will be exposed as a big fake. For example, Swedish company Chilirec provides a rapidly growing free online service assisting users in ripping digital audio streams.[3] After choosing among hundreds of radio stations, you will soon have access to thousands of MP3 files in an online depository, neatly sorted and correctly tagged, available for download. The interface and functionality could be easily confused with a peer-to-peer application like Limewire. You connect, you get MP3s for free, and no one pays a penny to any rights holder. But it is fully legal, as all Chilirec does is automate a process that anyone could do manually. Cutting a recorded radio stream into individual tracks and entering each correct song title is easy, but takes lots of time. The open source community is continuously coming up with free tools for simplifying it, such as a program called The Last Ripper that can turn the on-demand streaming service Last.fm into a library of MP3 files. Record industry lobbyists smell the danger, and now they are urging governments to criminalize such practices. On their orders the so-called PERFORM Act ("Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act") was introduced in the U.S. Senate last year. [4] The proposed law would force every Internet radio station to encrypt the transmission of file information, such as the name of the song. Yet anything visible on the screen can still be easily obtained by special software, encryption notwithstanding, and such restrictions would therefore be ridiculously easy to circumvent. Thus the PERFORM Act includes a follow-up clause banning the distribution of this class of software. People with some programming skills, however, won't need to do much more than combining a few readily available and otherwise perfectly legal code libraries to compile their own streamripping tool, one that would circumvent the PERFORM Act. For regulations like these to be effective, it is necessary also to censor the sharing of skills that potentially can be useful for coding illegal software. The circle of prohibition grows still larger: Acoustic fingerprinting technologies, which have nothing copyright-infringing to them, but which can be used for the same feared identification of individual tracks, must probably also be restricted. This domino effect captures the essence of copyright maximalism: Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last. Copyright law in the 21st century tends to be less concerned about concrete cases of infringement, and more about criminalizing entire technologies because of their potential uses. This development undermines the freedom of choice that Creative Commons licenses are meant to realize. It will also have seriously chilling effects on innovation, as the legal status of new technologies will always be uncertain under ever more invasive rules. Anti-piracy agencies are today fiercely attacking different kinds of search engines, solely because they provide links to files which may be copyrighted. This includes the bizarre case against Swedish BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay, as well as recent lawsuits against Yahoo! China and Baidu. Only Google remains largely uncontested, although they operate in the same gray zone of copyright. For example, the business model of Google Books is to display millions of pages of copyrighted and uncopyrighted books as part of a business plan drawing its revenue from advertising. Gray zones like these are omnipresent in 21st century copyright law. One reason for this development is the uncertain status of the very idea of "copying" today. Contrast today's world with the golden age of copyright, roughly speaking between 1800 and 1950. Back then, enforcement was easy. The act of reading a book was far removed from the act of printing one. Record presses and gramophones were safely distinct machines. Since then, things have changed. When American troops liberated the city of Luxembourg in 1944, they made a strange capture: a machine capable of recording sound on magnetic tapes. Shortly after the war, this German military invention made its appearance in private homes. Tape recorders integrated listening and reproduction in one device, but as separate functions. That's no longer the case with digital technology. Today, to use digital information *is* to copy it. Computers operate by copying. They couldn't care less whether the physical distance between original and copy is measured in micrometers or in miles; both work equally well for them. Copyright law, on the other hand, must somehow draw a line between use and distribution. That means putting an imaginary grid over the chaotic myriad of network nodes, delineating clusters of devices that can be attributed to individuals or households. Whatever happens inside such a cluster is defined as private use, while any trespassing of these borders is potentially criminal. But what can this strict division between private and public mean to someone with 400 "friends" on Facebook? Another important consideration is that the digital is larger than the online. According to one recent study 95 percent of British youth engage in file sharing via burned CDs, instant messaging clients, mobile phones, USB sticks, e-mail, and portable hard drives. [5] Such practices constitute the "darknet," a term popularized by four Microsoft-affiliated researchers in a brilliant 2002 paper.[6] Their thesis is simply that people who have information and want to exchange it with each other will do just that, forming spontaneous networks which may be large or small, online or offline. By being interconnected they can always keep the most popular material available. Attempts to curb open file-sharing infrastructure may only drive activity towards smaller and darker networks. One early darknet has been termed the "sneakernet": walking by foot to your friend carrying video cassettes or floppy discs. Nor is the sneakernet purely a technology of the past. The capacity of portable storage devices is increasing exponentially, much faster than Internet bandwidth, according to a principle known as "Kryder's Law." [7] The information in our pockets yesterday was measured in megabytes, today in gigabytes, tomorrow in terabytes and in a few years probably in petabytes (an incredible amount of data). Within 10-15 years a cheap pocket-size media player will probably be able to store all recorded music that has ever been released — ready for direct copying to another person's device. In other words: The sneakernet will come back if needed. "I believe this is a 'wild card' that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all," writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. "When music fans can say, 'I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?' — what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?" [8] We already have access to more film, music, text and images than we can possibly incorporate into our lives. Retreating from this paradigm of abundance to the old paradigm of scarcity is simply not an alternative. Adding more "content" will strictly speaking produce no value — whether culturally or economically. What's valuable is supplying a context where people can come together to create meaning out of abundance. The digital world poses questions whose answers can't remain within the digital sphere. A key challenge is to relate the digital to that which is not digital: time, space, human relationships, and so forth. Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of *Wired *magazine, has recently captured it well: When copies are superabundant, they become worthless, while things which can't be copied become scarce and valuable. What counts in the end are "uncopyable values," qualities which are "better than free." [9] The file-sharing explosion beginning around the year 2000 marked not only the start of a falling trend in sales of recorded music, but also of a drastic rise in spending on live music experiences. Only ten years ago, live music was widely conceived of as merely a way to market recordings. Today that strange equation seems to have been turned on its head. Music is far from unique in demonstrating how the pendulum has swung. Kelly mentions how writers increasingly make their money from appearing in person, promoted by their books, which may well be available for free. The computer game industry has understood how to make big money not by selling software, but by selling access to online worlds. Businesses that adopted the copyright industry's old formula of selling "content without context" are meeting harder times. "Intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century," was once the motto of Mark Getty, the businessman who used his family's oil fortune to invest in one of the world's largest copyright portfolios, controlling more than 60 million images." Getty Images saw its stock price fall steadily since its peak in 2004, before the company earlier this year was sold out to private equity. The failure of Getty Images can't be blamed on piracy, but rather has to do with the spread of digital cameras. Editors increasingly tend to prefer on-the-spot pictures, regardless of image quality. Sitting on a large database of archived pictures becomes less relevant when newspapers want photography to produce a feeling of real-time presence — an uncopyable quality. Faced with these new realities, copyright industries may instead go on the offensive. First out on the battlefield were the record industry's watchdogs, the Recording Industry Association of America and its international counterpart, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Together, the RIAA and IFPI have set the industry's lobbying agenda. Topping their wishlist is legislation requiring "carriers of digital content" to intervene in the use of communications services, or what they call "ISP responsibility." [10] The ACTA might soon deliver them such legislation, which basically encompasses measures of two kinds. One is simply net censorship. In several European countries, the IFPI is already taking ISPs to court to make them block access to search engines like The Pirate Bay. The question arises: Which site would be next? That infringement hotbed called YouTube? Probably not, but such implicit threats are increasingly being used by copyright industries in their hunt for profitable but one-sided licensing deals. Yet more alarming, the very existence of an Internet blacklist will constantly tempt politicians to expand that list's uses to all kinds of morally or politically inconvenient sites. Franco Frattini, the EU Justice Commissioner, is already pushing to censor online information about bombmaking. [11] Censorship, however, can be circumvented, as demonstrated in Denmark, where more people started using The Pirate Bay after a court-ordered block was implemented. As a second measure, the anti-piracy lobby demands authorization to order ISPs to disconnect users and to force ISPs to give out subscribers' identities on request. Unfortunately, criticisms of such policies have hitherto been limited to concerns about the violation of privacy. While privacy is a valid concern, there are other reasons to mistrust this measure. Consider first that the Internet is not a network of people; it is a network of computers. Any node in a network is not necessarily an endpoint, but a potential opening to a sub-network. Firms and neighborhoods routinely install one fiber connection and share it via a router. Only their local network administrator can then trace online activities to an actual user. In other words, anonymity will remain a possibility. Yet in the name of ISP responsibility, virtually any Internet user might be called to account by the recording industry. Here's why: In discussions about so-called ISP responsibility, it is crucial to remember that big telecom companies are far from the only existing "operators of electronic communications networks and services." This is the actual definition of an ISP, used within the European Union bureaucracy, but by this definition, you may be one, too. The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act is equally vague: It defines a "service provider" as a "provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities therefor," leading many to wonder whether libraries, employers, or private individuals operating routers might also qualify as ISPs. Given such a broad definition, any company or person sharing connectivity, as well as anyone hosting a blog or a web forum, could, in the name of "ISP responsibility," be obligated to register the identities of users and to deliver them to copyright enforcers on request. The range of possible abuses is enormous. Attempts to save an already broken policy will mean an ever more absurd sequence of follow-up regulations. Meanwhile, darknets will proliferate and demand for new anonymization techniques will remain high as a general side-effect of the hunt for small-scale copyright infringers. The most eager to take advantage of that situation will of course be the real criminals, including terrorists, while the legitimate Internet may grow fragmented and lose its open, freewheeling character. Copyright enforcement weakens general law enforcement. And it's expensive. The proposed ACTA treaty would create international legislation turning border guards into copyright police, charged with checking laptops, iPods, and other devices for possibly infringing content, and given the authority to confiscate and destroy equipment without even requiring a complaint from a rights-holder. It's characteristic of the dishonesty found in copyright law that the ACTA has been promoted as a treaty aimed to save people from dangerous fake medicine, which has very little to do with issues like "ISP responsibility." While patents, trademarks, and copyright are significantly different in many respects, copyright industry lobbyists prefer to present their draconian enforcement strategies as a matter of "intellectual property" in general. The real dispute, once again, is not between proponents and opponents of copyright as a whole. It is between believers and non-believers. Believers in copyright keep dreaming about building a digital simulation of a 20th-century copyright economy, based on scarcity and with distinct limits between broadcasting and unit sales. I don't believe such a stabilization will ever occur, but I fear that this vision of copyright utopia is triggering an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties. Accepting a laissez-faire attitude regarding software development and communication infrastructure can prevent such an escalation. Unauthorized sharing of files will prevail in darknets, online and offline. On the other hand, certain non-digital activities, like book publishing, continue to work relatively well under the terms of classical copyright law designed for printing presses. Still other fields, like software and music, are characterized by complex competition among different models, where some make money on selling copyable units, while others profit by delivering uncopyable services. A qualified guess is that we will have to live in this landscape of gray zones for quite a while, for good and bad. Creative practices, with some exceptions, thrive in economies where digital abundance is connected to scarce qualities in space and time. But there can never be a question of finding one universal business model for a world without copyright. The more urgent question regards what price we will have to pay for upholding the phantasm of universal copyright. * Notes * [1] [1] IP Justice: Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) . [2] [2] IFPI: "Digital Music Report 2007″, p. 20 . [3] [3] http://www.chilirec.com/ [4] [4] http://feinstein.senate.gov/06releases/r-dig-music.htm [5] [5] Katie Allen: "Home copying - burnt into teenage psyche." *The Guardian*, April 7, 2008 . [6] [6] Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado und Bryan Willman: "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution ." [7] [7] Chip Walter, "Kryder's Law." *Scientific American*, July, 2005 . [8] [8] Daniel Johansson: "The Future of Private Copying." *Digital Renaissance*, March 27th, 2008 . [9] [9] Kevin Kelly, "Better than free ." [10] [10] IFPI: "Digital Music Report 2008 ." [11] [11] "Website bomb-making lessons to be outlawed across Europe" *Times *online, July 4, 2007 . — *Rasmus Fleischer is a co-founder of Piratbyrån, a Swedish anti-copyright organization. * ------------------------------ Article printed from Cato Unbound: *http://www.cato-unbound.org* URL to article: * http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/06/09/rasmus-fleischer/the-future-of-copyright/ * URLs in this post: [1] IP Justice: Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA): * http://ipjustice.org/wp/campaigns/acta/* [2] IFPI: "Digital Music Report 2007″, p. 20: * http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/digital-music-report-2007.pdf* [3] http://www.chilirec.com/: *http://www.chilirec.com/* [4] http://feinstein.senate.gov/06releases/r-dig-music.htm: * http://feinstein.senate.gov/06releases/r-dig-music.htm* [5] Katie Allen: "Home copying - burnt into teenage psyche." *The Guardian*, April 7, 2008: * http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/07/digitalmusic.drm* [6] Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado und Bryan Willman: "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution: * http://msl1.mit.edu/ESD10/docs/darknet5.pdf* [7] Chip Walter, "Kryder's Law." *Scientific American*, July, 2005: * http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=kryders-law* [8] Daniel Johansson: "The Future of Private Copying." *Digital Renaissance*, March 27th, 2008: * http://www.digitalrenaissance.se/2008/03/27/the-future-of-private-copying/* [9] Kevin Kelly, "Better than free: * http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html* [10] IFPI: "Digital Music Report 2008: * http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/DMR2008.pdf* [11] "Website bomb-making lessons to be outlawed across Europe" *Times *online, July 4, 2007: * http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article2023030.ece* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080612/8de97ac2/attachment-0001.html From the.solipsist at gmail.com Wed Jun 18 20:36:40 2008 From: the.solipsist at gmail.com (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:36:40 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] An interview with Peter Rost, (former) VP Pfizer & Whistleblower Message-ID: <4785f1e20806180806r34421439y81e85faaf2ef5067@mail.gmail.com> Published in June 2008 for Guernica Magazine. http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/617/healthscare/ Healthscare An interview with Peter Rost | June 2008 Four years ago, Peter Rost was vice president of marketing at Pfizer, the world's largest drug company, when he posted a book review on Amazon.com. The review was for Dr. Marcia Angell's The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It. Rost wrote: "Drug companies are their own worst enemies. They have antagonized grannies all over ... with their work to stop reimportation of cheaper drugs into the US, a practice that has been in place for many years in Europe." The review changed Rost's life. USA Today was the first to take notice. A slew of newspaper stories were followed by appearances on 60 Minutes and before Congress, where he attacked the drug industry's claim that re-importation (buying less expensive pharmaceuticals from other countries) was unsafe. But it wasn't just controversial practices like re-importation that Rost began speaking out against. He also spoke out about illegal practices, filing Qui-Tam suits (also known as False Claims or "whistleblower" suits) against Pfizer for the off-label marketing of Genotropin, a human growth hormone, and Wyeth, his previous employer, where he alleged tax fraud. In just months, Rost went from anonymous corporate executive to Big Pharma's number one whistleblower. But his speaking out proved to be an act of self-immolation, banishing him from an industry he had worked in for almost 20 years. According to Rost, Pfizer retaliated by removing all of his responsibilities and isolating him before finally cutting him loose six months after his 60 Minutes segment aired—which prompted Rost to file another suit, this one for wrongful termination. Jobless, Rost turned to writing. In 2006, he published the first of two books critical of the pharmaceutical industry. The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman was an autobiographical expose that recounted Rost's days at Pfizer and his attempts to speak out against the illegal and unethical behavior he says he witnessed there. In 2007, he released Killer Drug, a novel about a fictional drug company called Xenal, which develops a biological weapon for the military. He also keeps a blog and has done stints as a blogger/columnist for both The Huffington Post and Brandweek. And he recently launched another career as a litigation consultant on drug marketing issues. While Rost's critics have attached selfish motives to his whistleblowing—he seeks to make a fortune through litigation, he's a publicity hound—his allegations continue to be proven true. One industry insider summed him up this way: "Rost is a bit of a carnival act, but he's not a liar." —Jake Whitney for Guernica Guernica: Take us through your last days at Pfizer. Peter Rost: Well, Pfizer kept me isolated—there were literally construction crews tearing down walls around me—and they told me that I didn't have any formal responsibility. Nobody at all contacted me except an occasional lawyer or HR person who would tell me I had nothing to do. I was outside the country at a drug reimportation seminar in Costa Rica when the New York Times and other news organizations called and asked for a comment. I didn't know what they were talking about. It turned out I had finally been fired but Pfizer hadn't been able to find me. That happened November 30, 2005. When I got home there was an envelope from Pfizer taped to my front door. So somebody from Pfizer had been here. That's when I started speaking out more and talking about what had been going in Pharmacia and Pfizer. Prior to that I had only spoken about reimportation in general. I hadn't spoken about anything specific going on inside Pharmacia/Pfizer. Guernica: By speaking out, you mean publicly? Because you had already filed a Qui Tam suit while you were with Pharmacia. Peter Rost: Yeah. I had filed the suit after I had informed [Pfizer management] about different issues on several occasions and they were either not receptive or they ignored me. Pfizer managed to get the suit dismissed initially—a year and a half or two years ago. Then we appealed and won. I think we have a very good chance of prevailing and the suit proceeding ahead. We have already been partly proven right since Pfizer was forced to pay a $34 million fine in April 2007. They plead guilty to illegal marketing the way I had described it, which was quite nice because they had basically been telling the world that I was bullshitting. So they plead guilty to illegal marketing, but not that the government would have been fraudulently paying false claims. That's the other part of this litigation and that's what we're moving forward with. We're also moving forward with the wrongful termination suit. Only an idiot would want to lose a base pay of $250,000-plus per year in order to maybe "win" a lawsuit that will almost always only pay dimes on the dollar... Guernica: Your critics accuse you of being a publicity hound. They say these lawsuits—and your whistleblowing, in general—have been more about seeking fame and big financial settlements than helping people. What do you say to them? Peter Rost: My critics are idiots. Only an idiot would want to lose a base pay of $250,000-plus per year in order to maybe "win" a lawsuit that will almost always only pay dimes on the dollar versus real losses many, many years later. Pfizer can easily drag out the entire process for close to a decade even if, and when, I win. You gotta be real dumb if you get into that voluntarily. As for "fame" and being a "publicity hound," I didn't really have a choice when Pfizer called 60 Minutes, The New York Times, and the others to tell them that they'd fired me. Normally people in litigation stay mum, because that's good legal strategy; in this case I was forced to respond. Before that I did speak out about reimportation, and the funny thing is perhaps it has had an impact. Pfizer's CEO is now a die-hard democrat and the republican presidential candidate wants reimportation. It only took me four years to be right on that one! Guernica: At the end of The Whistleblower, you offer an extensive list of recent drug company corruption. It's a surprisingly large list. What do you think it is about this industry that makes companies break the law so often? Peter Rost: I think, number one, because it is highly regulated, so there are lots of laws that can potentially be broken. And I think it's an industry that... I'm not sure if it's an industry that's more corrupt than other industries, but there is more regulation and there is a higher price when something untoward happens. When somebody cheats in this industry, lots of people die. If somebody cheats in another industry, you'll get a product malfunction or whatever; but you don't normally have disastrous consequences. So that means there is probably more focus on these issues in this particular industry. Guernica: As there should be... Peter Rost: As there should be, absolutely. I think we're still seeing just a tiny percentage of crimes being prosecuted. We're seeing just the really easy cases. If you look at the statistics in terms of what really brings in the big bucks to the government—which is the False Claims Act, or Qui Tam cases—the government only intervenes in something like 10 or 15 percent of them. In the cases where the government doesn't intervene, about 90 percent of them fade away. Whereas in 90 percent of the cases when the government intervenes they do recoup a penalty. But I think it's clear that Congress is not all that interested in expanding the resources to fight this. Because, of course, you have the same companies giving campaign contributions to these politicians. So in a way, it's like the old Russia; where the Russians used to say: "You pretend to pay us and we'll pretend to work." Here it's like, "We pretend to chase you, and you pretend to follow the laws." It's the same thing; it's a game. A significant part is for show. Guernica: Also in The Whistleblower, you have a chapter called "Sexual Liasons." In it you discuss rumors of sexual affairs among Pfizer management, which you say you heard about through colleagues and former Pfizer employees. Given the serious issues that you were trying to draw attention to by your speaking out—reimportation, illegal marketing, tax fraud—why did you include a chapter that some might consider petty or beside-the-point? Peter Rost: These issues, if true, could be an indication of violations of company policy. Consider that the Boeing CEO was fired for the same alleged policy violations and that several other CEO's have also been impacted or terminated, so this is not petty or beside-the-point; it is serious. At a minimum, the fact that these issues were brought up repeatedly by Pfizer employees show a serious internal disrespect for management. Please also note that virtually no one from Pfizer management at the time these allegations were made remains with the company today, four years later. It is scary how many similarities there are between this industry and the mob. Guernica: You've described the pharmaceutical industry as mob-like. What did you mean by that? Peter Rost: It is scary how many similarities there are between this industry and the mob. The mob makes obscene amounts of money, as does this industry. The side effects of organized crime are killings and deaths, and the side effects are the same in this industry. The mob bribes politicians and others, and so does the drug industry—which has been proven in different cases. You could go though a 10-point list discussing similarities between the two. The difference is, all these people in the drug industry look upon themselves—well, I'd say 99 percent, anyway—look upon themselves as law-abiding citizens, not as citizens who would ever rob a bank. Not as citizens who would ever go out and shoplift. And the individuals who run these companies would probably not do such things. However, when they get together as a group and manage these corporations, something seems to happen. Just look at all of these billion-dollar fines—Schering Plough, I think is in the lead now with $1.2 or $1.3 billion in fines; and number two is Bristol-Myers Squibb. It's pretty scary that they're committing crimes that cause [the government] to levy those enormous amounts of fines against them. So there's something that happens to otherwise good citizens when they are part of a corporation. It's almost like when you have war atrocities; people do things they don't think they're capable of. When you're in a group, people can do things they otherwise wouldn't, because the group can validate what you're doing as okay. Guernica: Do you think this kind of groupthink is more prevalent in the pharmaceutical industry? Peter Rost: It's hard to tell. I've only worked in the drug industry so I don't know about the others. But it's been the drug industry and the defense industry that have been getting hit with the most fines. But it is mainly the drug industry today. I think there are so many things one could do wrong—opportunities for one to cheat—in the drug industry. You know, if you build a car and you cut corners, you're going to have a bad-quality car and the Japanese are going to take away your market. But in the drug industry, that's not how it works. You get a situation like the ENHANCE trial with Schering Plough [The ENHANCE trial was supposed to show that Schering Plough's cholesterol-lowering drug Vytorin, which is made up of both Zocor and Zetia, was better at reducing plaque in the arteries than Zetia alone. But, after an infamous two-year delay, the results ended up showing just the opposite]. The only thing that happened there was that Fred Hassan [CEO of Schering Plough] made a $13 million bonus that he wouldn't have received if he released the data earlier. So, for the individual managers, there is very little downside to cheating. Guernica: You said one similarity between the drug industry and the mob was that in both the side effects are "killings and deaths." As that pertains to the drug industry, I'm assuming you mean in unintentional deaths resulting from unforeseen side effects—unlike the mob, which intentionally kills people. Peter Rost: Clearly, the drug industry doesn't want to kill people. But at the same time, I'm not sure if it's always completely unintentional. Yeah, they don't want to kill people because it's bad for business, right. But if you look at a number of these cases where people inside the company knew they had problems. If you look at Merck with Vioxx, for example; if you look at Bayer and the lipid-lowering drug they had that caused liver failure, Baycol. Those guys knew that these drugs were causing major problems. And they knew these problems resulted in serious side effects, including death. Yet they kept on selling the drugs. So is that intentional or not? Guernica: In your 2007 book, Killer Drug, you have a character named Torrance who's the head of security at a fictional drug company called Xenal. Torrance is an extremely shady character who won't hesitate to murder enemies of the company. The book is a novel, of course, but did you come across anyone in your career who gave you the feeling that he could possibly act like Torrance? Peter Rost: The book is fiction. But it is using some of what I've seen and experienced, and taking some of the different people and putting them in a thriller environment. I'm not aware of individuals conducting themselves the way Torrance does. At the same time, I am aware that the kind of background he has is very common in the drug industry for someone who is heading up security. Pfizer has a former FBI agent, John Theriault, heading up its security department. And he has lots of law enforcement officers working under him. We have to recognize that these big companies are all building small paramilitary organizations inside the companies that answer to no one except the company itself. Look at Hewlett Packard, how they abused security consultants by getting phone records and information about journalists... and you know we only know a tiny fraction about what really happens—we only find out when these companies happen to get caught. It shows that there aren't really any limits to what big companies—in the drug industry and others—will do. Guernica: You look at movies like The Constant Gardener and The Fugitive, which have drug companies as villains, and then there's Killer Drug. Why does this industry have such a bad reputation? Peter Rost: It is unnerving, especially considering how important the industry is. You look at how these companies have behaved. Usually they transform to do whatever is best for the company. The chemical company that made the poison gas used in the concentration chambers, Zyklon B, became a drug company. They are now trying to disavow that as part of their heritage. IG Farben was the company. And one of their subsidiaries became a couple of the German drug companies—Bayer and some others. They now claim that they weren't actually the legal entity, so there is debate over it, but I believe they paid some money to the victims. So most of these companies are going to do whatever it takes to survive under their current political management: If it's democracy fine; if it's not democracy, they're going to play along. It's very amoral. Guernica: What specific industry changes would you like to see? Should anything be done about the way drugs in this country are tested? For instance, I understand new drugs only have to be proven more effective than placebos, not more effective than existing drugs. Should that be changed? And how do you feel about TV drug ads? Peter Rost: In Europe, new drugs are generally tested against existing drugs. TV drug ads, the direct-to-consumer ads, I was originally in favor of, but now I think the reality is that they're a disservice to consumers. As far as changing the industry, quite frankly I'm pretty cynical. You get new regulations, you get new rules, but then you get the same type of behavior again and again. Yes, fines and deterrents work because companies don't want to be embarrassed. But I'm not sure how much will really change. I read a book by a whistle-blower at Roche, Roche Versus Adams by Stanley Adams. It was chilling, because many of the same things that I have revealed about fraud within these companies, and other ways they operate: it was the same stuff, the same things, and the book was written 25 years ago. When I read the book, I was like, "You know what; nothing much really changes." Thirty years from now people will be having the same discussions you and I are having today. I do think the press can change things, to an extent. That's pretty much the only way. But then again, I read this book and I thought, "Things aren't changing very much." We have to recognize that these big companies are all building small paramilitary organizations inside the companies that answer to no one except the company itself. Guernica: You mentioned the direct-to-consumer ads—the TV drug ads—and you said you once were in favor of them but not anymore. Why? Peter Rost: Basically I'm in favor of the free market, free information, letting people make their own decisions while minimizing any cumbersome regulations. But I think there is a reason doctors are the ones deciding treatments. And that is because they've had years of schooling. It certainly doesn't help anyone to dump 30-second commercials on people who have no idea about anything they see in them and then they go to their doctors, who often give them any drug they want. That's how we got the Vioxx debacle. In other countries it wasn't as bad. [Only the U.S. and New Zealand allow direct advertising of pharmaceuticals to consumers.] So these ads don't really help patients. There was a study done that was published in the Washington Post a few years ago where they had actors going into doctors' offices pretending to have depression. Most of the actors who pretended to have depression and asked for Paxil got it. But the scary part is that a lot of the actors who did not exhibit signs of depression but asked for Paxil also got it. The numbers were pretty scary. Guernica: As a native of Sweden, you've had firsthand experience with two very different kinds of healthcare systems. Which works better? Peter Rost: When I was a doctor in Sweden, I didn't like socialized medicine. I thought it was terrible. I really did. Because of the big bureaucracy, the long lines for certain procedures; it's not really service-oriented. I just didn't think it worked very well. And then I came over here and saw how things worked—or didn't work. (Laughter.) And I saw it was even worse. So it's really like choosing between two evils. But in the end, you just have to be a smart buyer. If you look at the costs of the US healthcare system—it's two to three times as high per person as any other place in the Western world. It's a complete waste of money. The US can have shoddy care and the US can have the best care in the world. It depends on things like where you go, whether you're lucky or not, if you know what you're doing, if you're on the right HMO, and so on. The bureaucracy here is even worse than it is in the socialized systems, which are really unbureaucratic, comparatively speaking, when you try to deal with an HMO and getting claims approved and hospital billing systems; it's just a mess. The movie Sicko describes it pretty accurately. Although I would add that Michael Moore sees things through rose-colored glasses when it comes to the British, French and Canadian systems. But yes, overall, we would be better off with universal healthcare. Guernica: Do you think the US will ever move to a universal system? Peter Rost: Not in the next 30 years. But you never know. Perhaps fifty years from now this system will simply come crashing down under its own weight. But considering the money that people can make here—from doctors to insurance companies to HMOs to hospitals—the way the political system works here, these groups have so much power, it's going to be a very hard system to change. Guernica: Does that mean you'd consider a move back to Europe, or do you plan to stay in the U.S. for the rest of your life? Peter Rost: I will go wherever somebody gives me a decent job to do. I'm flexible. Guernica: On that note, how has your transition to author/blogger/journalist/legal consultant worked out? Peter Rost: Things have worked out relatively well. Basically, I'm trying to be as smart as I can about it. So far, the book sales have helped create some attention around what I've been trying to do lately [writing expert reports for law firms on pharmaceutical marketing issues]. And that has really generated interest from these law firms. There's no question that in the U.S. working on the legal side of things offers a lot more money than book sales do. But books are a good promotional vehicle. So it all works together. Guernica: Do you have any regrets about speaking out? Peter Rost: Not really. It's been quite entertaining to do this. You know, I could have simply blown the whistle internally and stayed quiet otherwise. But since I spoke up, I think more people may have learned about the issues involved. I guess you'll have to ask me ten years from now if it was the right thing to do. (Laughter.) As far as the attention goes, the media is so fragmented now... quite frankly, the only time people ever recognized me on the street was for a few weeks after my 60 Minutes segment. Another reason I'm not very well known is because people in the US don't read newspapers. I don't think any of my neighbors get newspapers. People don't read anything. They don't even watch news these days. They watch football. Yes, everybody in the drug industry knows about me and the issues I've spoken about. But the general population, they have no idea what's going on. So generally speaking, the attention has been fine. I was trying to get people to wake up about these issues. I figured I didn't really have anything to lose. I had hoped to affect things internally and eventually move up into a position where I could create change and have an impact. I realized this was my last shot to do something. I can't complain. From chansoobak at yahoo.com Thu Jun 19 18:54:58 2008 From: chansoobak at yahoo.com (chan park) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:24:58 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Commons-Law] Paediatric nevirapine application rejected by Indian Patent Office Message-ID: <784922.68328.qm@web50708.mail.re2.yahoo.com>   INDIAN PATENT OFFICE REJECTS AIDS DRUG PATENT APPLICATION     Adopts strict interpretations of patentability criteria in rejecting application for critical AIDS drug     New Delhi, 19 June 2008 - The Indian Patent Office in New Delhi has rejected a patent application filed by the multinational pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim claiming a paediatric form of the anti-AIDS drug nevirapine.  In May 2006, the Indian Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS (INP+) and the Positive Women's Network (PWN) had filed a pre-grant opposition against this application.  The rejected patent application covers the syrup form of nevirapine, which is particularly important for children living with HIV who are unable to swallow tablets.  This is the first decision from the Patent Offices on 13 patent oppositions filed by Indian civil society groups against HIV-related patent applications, and will set an important precedent for the others that are still pending.     “PWN has been involved in looking at the issues of women and children in the context of HIV. We opposed the patent application on nevirapine hemihydrate to ensure that it remains available for our children and to make sure that the government doesn’t say it is too expensive to provide. This is important not just for us but for PLHIV across the world,” said P. Kousalya, president of PWN.  "Accessing appropriate paediatric formulations of AIDS drugs has been a particular problem around the world, and we hope that this decision can be a step towards making them more available."     The Indian Patents Act contains some important safeguards designed to ensure that frivolous patent applications are not granted at the cost of public health.  These include section 3(d) of the Patents Act, which prevents many "new forms" of known substances from being patented unless there is a significant improvement in efficacy, and section 3(e) of the Act, which prevents "mere admixtures" of substances from being patented.     The opposition filed by INP+ and PWN had argued, among other things, that the particular application was not patentable under Indian law because the hemi-hydrate form of nevirapine was obvious to a person skilled in the art; that it was just a "new form" of an already known substance without any increased efficacy; and that the manufacture of nevirapine hemihydrate in an aqueous solution was just a "mere admixture" of ingredients that did not demonstrate any synergistic effects.     The Patent Office agreed with INP+ and PWN on all these grounds.  In considering these arguments, the Patent Office considered as a "fact of law" the need to "give a strict interpretation of patentability criteria, as decision…thereof shall affect the fate of people suffering from HIV/AIDS for want of essential medicine."  The Patent Office also cited approvingly to the Madras High Court's judgment in Novartis v. Union of India, which had observed that the "object which the [Patents (Amendment) Act, 2005] wanted to achieve [was] to…provide easy access to the citizens of this country to life saving drugs and to discharge their Constitutional obligation of providing good health care to its citizens."     "For many of us living with HIV/AIDS, low cost generic antiretrovirals offer hope of continuing treatment. With patents interfering with our lives we have no choice but to oppose them.  The patent order sets an important precedent for the examination of other drug patent applications," said K.K. Abraham, President of INP+.  "We hope that the other Patent Offices in Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai will take note of this decision, and subject other patent applications on important medicines to strict scrutiny," he continued.     The hearing on the opposition had been held in August 2007, and the parties were directed to submit written submissions to the Patent Office shortly thereafter.  In its Decision, the Patent Office adopted large portions of the Opponents' legal arguments.  For instance, the Patent Office agreed with the Opponents that under section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act, which states that "new forms" of known substances may not be patented unless there is a significant enhancement of "efficacy," the burden is upon the patent applicant to put forth evidence of the therapeutic efficacy of both the known substance and the "new form" of the known substance.  In doing so, the Patent Office made clear that other "improvements" to an existing drug, such as improved stability, would not be sufficient to meet the standards of section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act.     A copy of the Opponents' Written Submissions and the Patent Office's Decision can be found at: http://www.lawyerscollective.org/content/patent-nevirapine-rejected     For more information, contact Anand Grover at +91.9820184788, KK Abraham at +91.9840066386, P. Kousalya at +91.9444035203, and Prathibha Siva at +91.9968050357. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080619/c77e84e6/attachment-0001.html From the.solipsist at gmail.com Thu Jun 19 23:04:17 2008 From: the.solipsist at gmail.com (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:04:17 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Fwd: [A2k] AP faces copyright row with bloggers In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4785f1e20806191034u4646d1cekad362f17af5f60a8@mail.gmail.com> This seems very interesting. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Barbara Stratton Date: Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 19:09 Subject: [A2k] AP faces copyright row with bloggers To: "A2K List (a2k at lists.essential.org)" The US news agency Associated Press has found itself at the centre of a furious debate over the fair use of material by bloggers after its lawyers issued a takedown notice to a small, independent news site that it claims had quoted too heavily from its news stories.... Guardian 16/06/08 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/16/digitalmedia.pressandpublishing See also IPKat http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2008/06/copyright-and-blogging-ap-drudge-retort.html Information World Review http://blog.iwr.co.uk/2008/06/is-the-associat.html NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/business/media/16ap.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin Barbara Stratton Senior Policy Adviser CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, UK CILIP, 7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE Tel: +44 (0)20 7255 0500 Fax: +44 (0)20 7255 0501 E-mail: info at cilip.org.uk Web: www.cilip.org.uk _______________________________________________ A2k mailing list A2k at lists.essential.org http://lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/a2k -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080619/881415d8/attachment.html From sunil at mahiti.org Fri Jun 20 00:23:29 2008 From: sunil at mahiti.org (Sunil Abraham) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:23:29 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] I Me Mine Message-ID: <1213901609.5763.34.camel@sunil-laptop> -------- Forwarded Message -------- From: Amulya Gopalakrishnan http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=2b354d15-f127-4893-8788-f76f4e3c8d9d The urge to make the work our own is elemental to the act of encountering art, and we try to satisfy it in many ways. We look at a painting or listen to a piece of music and take it in, hoping that it will prove to be not only an expression of human feeling but also a stimulus to it; we expect art to move us in a personal way. Or we buy the artwork or a copy of it, making our ownership literal (if not always legal, in case of downloading bootleg digital files). Or we wear our esteem for the work like a fashion label, for the social or professional status it confers. Or we draw inspiration from the work and apply it to things we make ourselves, using whatever of it serves our needs. In one way or another, to experience art of any kind is to appropriate it, and to be a devotee of any art or artist is to be a claimant. In the music world, recording technology has greatly complicated the issues of ownership, authorship, and proprietary rights by simplifying the acquisition of creative property. Since the rise of sampling and downloading, digital technology has transferred many of the privileges of authorship from what was once an elite of professional musicians to the iPod-ed masses. Anyone with a laptop and home mixing software such as GarageBand (a substitute for both the garage and the band) or Pro Tools (an electronic kit to help amateurs sound as if they are not) can put together technically impressive multi-track recordings. To generate the music for those tracks, home producers have for some time now been able to extract snippets from any recordings in the digital domain, doctor them electronically, edit them, and perhaps even use traditional instruments and vocal tracks. The exponential growth in the popularity of such home recording over the past several years has helped fill the pages of MySpace with fragmentary sound-alike songs, while providing countless musical neophytes with gratifying quasi-creative experiences and inflated conceptions of their musical talent. As the record industry burns to ash, record-making is thriving in the same sense that moviemaking, of a sort, is booming on YouTube--that is, in the diminished form of derivative, perfunctory goofing around, the products of which may have momentary entertainment value, especially to their creators. Some rock acts that made their reputations as sonic experimenters a long decade ago, such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, seem humbled in the presence of the shape-shifting creature that popular music has become in the digital age. Both those bands recently made high-profile attempts at Web innovation that are essentially acts of capitulation, if not desperation. Radiohead made lots of news when the band released its first album since 2003, In Rainbows, through its website in a plan that allowed downloaders to pay whatever price they chose--a great publicity stunt in the form of a vast, universal tip jar. After too many listeners decided to drop in too few coins, the band released another version of the album, priced conventionally. More recently, Trent Reznor made the new Nine Inch Nails album The Slip available through the band's website, for free. In an announcement of the release on his site, Reznor wrote, "thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years--this one's on me." A CD release of The Slip, at a price to be determined, will follow in July, at which time Reznor and the latest incarnation of his band will have begun a national tour, for which seats will likely cost at least four or five times the price of a CD. There is nothing wrong with--or new about--giving away samples to entice customers to pay for other, profitable goods. The technique has long been common in the narcotics trade and in the marketing of supermarket cheeses. More interesting than the fact that Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have provided albums to listeners for free or for cheap are the efforts that both bands have recently made to come to terms with the phenomenon of home record-making. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have each now ventured into "open-source remixing, " a growing sphere of digital play in which enthusiasts are granted access to the stems of a song--the individual parts of a multi-track recording, each of which might have, say, the drums or the bass line or a guitar part--in order to manipulate them or add to them at home. In differing ways and to differing degrees, both bands are opening up their processes, making public the component parts of their music to give fans the feeling of collaborating with their idols--shadow-dancing with the rock stars. Through open-source remixing, music fans who might have been just listeners are assuming a kind of ownership which is, on its face, revolutionary, but which is, ultimately, illusory. Radiohead, in April, made available for purchase through iTunes the five stems, one for each of the five band members' instruments, that make up "Nude," a single from In Rainbows. (Side note: in the group's native Britain, more than half of all singles are still released as seven-inch vinyl records, as well as on CD and as downloads; it seems to me that the survival of 45s there has to do with both an English reverence for the tradition that vinyl represents and a frugal English reluctance to throw away perfectly good record players.) With each of the stems going for iTunes's usual per-song price of 99 cents, "Nude" costs five times as much to buy in parts as it costs as a song. This is to be expected. To break anything sellable into bits is to grant each of those bits a value that justifies a price. "Nude," like several of the songs on In Rainbows, is one that fans of the band have long known in multiple earlier incarnations. At concerts in 1998, the tune was a soul ballad framed around the sound of a Hammond organ. By 2005, Thom Yorke was doing the song in solo performances, strumming it gently on the acoustic guitar and murmuring it like an emo navel-gazer. On In Rainbows, it opens with a swirling cloud of synth effects and settles into a shuffling bass- driven groove. (The terse lyrics center on the phrase "Don't get any big ideas/ They're not gonna to happen," a blunt plea to resist the sexual imagination.) A wisp of a piece unaligned to a fixed arrangement, it is suited to remixing; indeed, Radiohead has itself been toying with the song for ten years. To encourage remixes of "Nude" (and purchases of its stems), Radiohead sponsored a competition and started posting submissions on the band's site. By mid-May, more than 2,200 remixes of the song had been posted and voted on by fans (and, presumably, also automatic-voted on by the digital ringers that hackers can conjure and viral-marketing services can provide for pay). I started listening to the posted remixes (and casting votes, nay and yea, for some of them) shortly after the first went up in April, and over a month's time I got to hear about two hundred versions of "Nude." I did the listening in spurts, taking in a post or two when I felt in the mood, to prevent the repetition of the tune from having the effect of torture. A great many of the "Nude" remixes I have heard are attempts to change the overall mood of the song by doctoring the tonal colors and redistributing the weights of the musical elements. In a high number of cases, the bass line that dominates the In Rainbows version recedes, and new beats of all sorts take over: intricate and realistic-sounding drum patterns are among the easiest things to generate with software such as GarageBand. The gently pulsing waltz pattern of the official release gives way to heavy beats, often in the propulsive 4/4 basic to rock and hip-hop. Since GarageBand can change the time signature, the tempo, or the key of a song with a few mouse clicks, all those features of the composition get transformed in various "Nude" remixes, with results that can only with a snicker be called mixed. Much of the alteration and ornamentation in the "Nude" remixes seem arbitrary, stunty, or inappropriate. In nearly a dozen of the hundred remixes ranked highest on the Radiohead site, fans added keyboard tracks that oversimplified the already simple chords of the tune or simply got the chords wrong. Re-harmonization is not at all uncommon in the realm of interpretive music; but its point is generally to reconsider, rather than to reduce or to misrepresent, the original music. The way GarageBand works, the process of personalizing music is highly regimented--that is, depersonalized. For each creative decision involved in customizing a track, the software provides a handy drop-down menu of options. What kind of guitar sound would you like, "Arena Rock" or "Glam" or "Clean Jazz"? What sort of vocals, "Female Basic" or "Epic Diva"? The system transforms music-making into shopping, and it provides the same illusion of individual expression that we find in the mall. Now we can make our sound in the same way we create our own look--by mixing and matching a handful of items from the racks of the same stores that everyone else in America is choosing from. After all, what does "Clean Jazz" mean, other than "Banana Republic"? Trent Reznor, in a grand gesture of magnanimity, has made the stems of the last several Nine Inch Nails albums (including White Teeth from 2005 and Year Zero from last year) available for remixing, at no cost, through the NIN site. A longtime hero among rock techheads for the loving noisy artifice of his one- man-band recordings, Reznor is so eager to be aligned with the home-remixing phenomenon that he has sponsored a compilation album of fan remixes of songs from White Teeth and Year Zero. Called The Limitless Potential, the album of twenty-one selections is free for downloading, although the individual stems of the tracks that the fans contributed are not accessible for further remixing through the Nine Inch Nails site. (Evidently the "open" in open-sourcing has its limits.) Most of the Nine Inch Nails remixes posted, like the "Nude" remixes, are efforts to move the songs from one mode--industrial rock, the style Reznor practically invented in the 1980s--to some other style: house music, or psychedelia, or an approximation of funk. The remixes tend to take lateral steps, hopping across category lines from stylistic box to box. They do not, as a rule, try to differ from the originals in point of view or depth or aesthetic value; they seek to differ primarily in kind. Despite its obvious debts to the Web era, home remixing in one sense suggests a return to the musical culture of the days before sound recording on wax cylinders, around the turn of the last century. In their capacity as remixers, members of the musical public are again assuming participatory roles, interpreting compositions at home, much as late Victorians played sheet music in parlor musicales. There is also a social component to both spheres of participation, as remixers post their efforts, listen to one another's, and vote on them. I spent a good part of a weekend making my own remix of "Nude." (For the record, I added some wan obbligato lines on guitar and concocted a vocal counter-melody, which I sang with the essential assistance of a pitch- correction plug-in.) Dissatisfied with the results, I decided not to post them, and I feel as if my remix, as one unposted, is not real in the same way that the worst remixes on the Radiohead website are. In the ballooning community of remixers, as in the rest of the Web universe, to post is to be. was further deterred from submitting my remix to the "Nude" competition by the "terms and conditions" of submission. Despite the fact that remixers can not only amend the elements of the Radiohead recording but also add tracks of their own devising--new beats, different chords, additional melodies (such as the admittedly weak guitar and vocal lines I made up), even whole new sets of lyrics (or spoken language)--Radiohead claims full ownership of every part of the remixes sent its way. Every part: not just the original stems, but every bit of music anyone might add to a submitted track. The fine print specifies, "All rights in and to any remixed versions ('Remixes') of the song 'Nude' ('the Song') created by the Entrant shall be owned by Warner/ Chappell Music Ltd ('WCM') and to the extent necessary the Entrant hereby assigns all rights in the Remixes of the Song to WCM throughout the World for the full life of copyright and any and all extensions and renewals thereof.... Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway will be registered and credited as the sole writers and WCM the publishers of the Remixes of the Song created by the Entrant." If this is legal, it is also extortionate and an act of terrible hypocrisy--a revocation of the promise of creative ownership that is drawing people to remixing, the promise that Radiohead has been eager to exploit, in large print, to sell its stems. The very idea of remixing implies remaking, and that carries with it a legitimate claim of ownership--aesthetic, ethical, and legal. If most of the remixes on both the "Nude" site and Nine Inch Nails's The Limitless Potential* album speak unpersuasively for remixing's potential, they are not definitive proof of remixing's limits. For the moment, Yorke and his band have a message for fans loaded with GarageBand and an urge to own a part of Radiohead: Don't get any big ideas. They're not going to happen. But more troubling even than the hypocrisy of a few rock stars is the narcissism at the heart of the phenomenon of home remixing--the notion that to take a work of creative expression and make it "ours" is to improve it. It is a colossal mistake to coerce an expression of others into an expression of ourselves. The premise of open-source remixing is that finally we can admire nobody so much as ourselves. But in music, as in all art and love and politics, there is usually more to gain in trying to understand what belongs, uniquely and idiosyncratically and serendipitously, to somebody else. David Hajdu is the chief music critic for The New Republic. From patrice at xs4all.nl Mon Jun 23 12:53:51 2008 From: patrice at xs4all.nl (Patrice Riemens) Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:23:51 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [Commons-Law] UEFA's IP Gestapo ... Message-ID: <5069.86.91.173.154.1214205831.squirrel@webmail.xs4all.nl> In Le Monde Diplomatique of this month (june), a fairly hilarious piece on how the Europ. Football federation (UEFA) is 'robustly' enforcing its 'intellectual property rights' (basically on anything and everything even remotely connected with 'football'). Small shopkeepers lost in the Engadin or Appenzell InnerRhoden get sued, and three restaurants in Basel who happen to be situated in the 'Fan-zone' and refused to sell the 'EU2008' brand of beer (the green & yellow horsepiss made in DK) together with paying the exorbitant franchise rate (1-5K /day) got themselves isolated thru a Berlin wall contraption so you could only reach them from outside of the zone ... Together with "Apple sues kids writing letters to the company" (WIRED, march issue's article on Steve Jobs), that was favorite 'IP dystopia' item for this month... From nicheant at gmail.com Tue Jun 24 00:42:18 2008 From: nicheant at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?Q?Nishant_?= =?UTF-8?Q?|_=E0=A4=A8=E0=A4=BF=E0=A4=B6=E0=A4=BE=E0=A4=81=E0=A4=A4?=) Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:42:18 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Massive Cancer Information Giveaway Message-ID: <4439ee330806231212v46314d1as64bd68a0ff0c0855@mail.gmail.com> Massive Cancer Information Giveaway By Aaron Rowe June 21, 2008 | 9:01:44 PM Scientists at GlaxoSmithKline spent a small fortune studying cancer cells, and then gave most of their precious information away -- for free -- to the research community. That massive donation, which was announced on Friday, could accelerate the discovery of new oncology drugs and blood tests by giving brilliant, but underfunded, researchers a chance to pick through boatloads of data. For the pharmaceutical giant, sharing makes a lot of sense: They rely upon academics and small companies to do pioneering work -- identifying new targets for medications, discovering early warning signs, and figuring out the underlying biological malfunctions that cause cancer. Once those groundbreaking studies have been done, Glaxo and other large corporations can step back into the picture and create new products. Most of the data was gathered by microarrays, chips that can record lots of biological information. Its new home is the caBIG website, a massive repository of genetic information run by the National Cancer Institute. Glaxo gave the online community information from three hundred different sets of cells, which were taken from diseased breast, prostate, lung and ovarian tissues. (http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/massive-cancer.html) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080624/9fcc1e84/attachment-0001.html From siddharth.narrain at gmail.com Mon Jun 23 15:09:25 2008 From: siddharth.narrain at gmail.com (siddharth narrain) Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:09:25 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Bengaluru Pride Pamphlet In-Reply-To: <52cddec0806230227j50e8baf4x9bb2869cc4138286@mail.gmail.com> References: <52cddec0806230227j50e8baf4x9bb2869cc4138286@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1773a06d0806230239l3ccd6c9cucb0472c9d918ce95@mail.gmail.com> *Gender-Sexual Choice * *Gender-Sexual Freedom * * Repeal IPC 377* Bengaluru Pride 2008 *Bengaluru's First pride rally to commemorate Stonewall Riots Day* * For the Visibility and Liberation of Hijra, Kothi, DoubleDekker, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex people...* On 29th June, 1969, police raided Stonewall Inn, a bar in Greenwich Village, New York City, USA frequented by sexual minorities. Enraged by the police raid and fed up with routine harassment by the police, sexual minorities rioted after the police raid. The Stonewall riots are generally seen as the birth of the sexual minorities movement internationally. Each year sexual minorities and their allies organize pride events and march on the streets of cities across the globe to observe Stonewall riots day and is a celebration of diverse sexuality and gender identities. This year pride events are being organized not only in Bangalore but also in Kolkata and Delhi. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code criminalizes consensual sex between adults by terming all sexual acts other than penile-vaginal intercourse as 'against the order of nature'. This archaic statute was introduced in India by the British in 1860. Through Britain got rid of their anti-sodomy law a long time ago, India continues to carry forward this colonial legacy. Criminalization of sexual minorities through this law acts as the main structural reason for the horrendous human rights violations against sexual minorities. Police and goondas take advantage of this law and harass, abuse (verbally, physically and sexually), blackmail and extort money and other valuables from sexual minorities. Unfavourable laws coupled with stigma, discrimination and social rejection block most sexual minorities from accessing various social entitlements including voter ID, ration card, passport, driving license, housing, education, employment, savings and credit facilities, insurance, old age pension and old age shelter homes. One of the major issues that hijras and other transsexuals face is that sex change is not legally recognized in India and there are no procedures for legal change of a person's sex after going through sex change. As a result. Hijras and other transsexuals cannot prove their identity as their bodies and gender expression do not match their 'sex' on official documents. Unable to prove their identity, hijras and other transsexuals have been completely marginalized vis-à-vis employment, education, inheritance, ration cards, savings and credit facilities and housing. In this context, we demand that: 1. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code should be amended to exclude all forms of sex between consenting adults from the definition of the offence. 2. State should accord choice of gender/sex to people who have undergone sex reassignment surgery, including persons who have undergone male castration or bilateral mastectomy (surgical removal of both breasts) or hormonal therapy as part of sex reassignment procedures. 3. State should take steps to prevent police/ goonda violence against sexual minorities and take effective measures to punish those who perpetrate offences against sexual minorities. 4. State should initiate special measures for the welfare of hijras and other transsexuals (the most marginalized section of sexual minorities) E.g. education, employment, savings-credit facilities, housing, skill development etc. 5. Sexual minorities should get all social entitlements without any discrimination. This includes voter ID, ration card, passport, driving license, housing, education, employment, savings and credit facilities, insurance, old age pension and old age shelter homes. *PRIDE MARCH on 29th June, 2008 (Sunday) STARTS from National College Grounds, Basavangudi at 2 PM PUBLIC MEETING at Town Hall at 4 PM* All are Welcome! Join us in large numbers!! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Organizers*: Alternative Law Forum, Aneka, Good As You, Karnataka Sexual Minorities Forum, Karnataka Sexworkers Union, LesBiT, Sadhane, Samara, Sangama, Suraksha, and Swabhava. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080623/22991370/attachment.html From prashantiyengar at gmail.com Wed Jun 25 11:27:19 2008 From: prashantiyengar at gmail.com (Prashant Iyengar) Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:27:19 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] =?windows-1252?q?What=92s_obscene=3F_Google_could_h?= =?windows-1252?q?ave_an_answer?= Message-ID: <908adbd0806242257m1467864dk1cbd4adac188dca4@mail.gmail.com> http://www.indianexpress.com/printerFriendly/327061.html What's obscene? Google could have an answer New York Times Posted online: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 2235 hrs IST Washington, June 24 Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards? That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community's tastes and values. The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defence in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbours have broader interests than they might have thought. In the trial of a pornographic website operator, the defence plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like "orgy" than for "apple pie" or "watermelon". The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defence lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics. It is not clear that the approach will succeed. The Florida state prosecutor in the case, which is scheduled for trial July 1, said the search data may not be relevant because the volume of Internet searches is not necessarily an indication of, or proxy for, a community's values. But the tactic is another example of the value of data collected by Internet companies like Google, both from a commercial standpoint and as a window into the thoughts. Walters last week also served Google with a subpoena seeking more specific search data, including the number of searches for certain sexual topics done by local residents. A Google spokesman said the company was reviewing the subpoena. He is defending Clinton Raymond McCowen, who is facing charges that he created and distributed obscene material through a website based in Florida. The charges include racketeering and prostitution, but Walters said the prosecution's case fundamentally relies on proving that the material on the site is obscene. Such cases are a relative rarity. In the last eight years, the Justice Department has brought roughly 15 obscenity cases that have not involved child pornography, compared with 75 during the Reagan and first Bush administrations, according to Jeffrey J Douglas, chairman emeritus of the First Amendment Lawyers Association. (There have been hundreds involving child pornography.) The question of what constitutes obscenity relies on a three-part test established in a 1973 decision by the Supreme Court. Essential to the test has been whether the material in question is patently offensive or appeals to a prurient interest in sex— definitions that are based on "contemporary standards". Lawyers in obscenity cases have tried to demonstrate community standards by, for example, showing the range of sexually explicit magazines and movies available locally. A better barometer, Douglas said, would be mail-order statistics, because they show what people consume in private. But that information is hard to obtain. From chansoobak at yahoo.com Fri Jun 27 17:37:10 2008 From: chansoobak at yahoo.com (chan park) Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:07:10 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Commons-Law] Opposition filed against Roche's Patent on Valganciclovir in India Message-ID: <595999.82955.qm@web50705.mail.re2.yahoo.com>   New Delhi, 27 June 2008 - The Delhi Network of Positive People (DNP+), an organization run by and representing the needs of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHAs), filed a post-grant opposition against a patent for valganciclovir, a treatment for a common infection that can cause blindness or death to people living with HIV/AIDS.  Roche, a Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company was granted the patent last year by the Chennai Patent Office.     Valganciclovir is a treatment for cytomegalovirus (CMV), a virus that often attacks the retina of people with compromised immune systems, such as PLHAs.  Left untreated, CMV retinitis leads to irreversible blindness.  CMV infection can also attack other parts of the person's body, such as the gastro-intestinal system or brain. Such systemic CMV infection is serious, and without treatment, will progress and invariably result in death in a person whose immune system is weakened by HIV.      CMV can be effectively treated with oral doses of valganciclovir.  However, Roche, which owns the patent on valganciclovir in India and other countries, charges as much as US$ 10,000 for a four-month supply of oral valganciclovir.  In India, the price for a full course of treatment is over Rs. 2,70,000.  Due to the patent that was granted in India, Indian companies are blocked from manufacturing generic versions of the drug.      Due in part to the high costs, for most people in India and throughout the developing world, no treatment for CMV is available at all, or is substituted with invasive and extremely painful injections of other drugs directly into eye or through intravenous, twice-daily treatment requiring a long stay in the hospital.     "The exorbitant price that Roche is charging for valganciclovir shows how the patent system has failed in making treatments accessible for those most in need," said Loon Gangte, President of DNP+.  "Thousands of people are unnecessarily losing their vision and their livelihoods - or worse - as a result of what is otherwise a treatable condition, simply because the treatment is too expensive," he continued.     In December 2006, two other patient groups had filed a "pre-grant" opposition against the patent application for valganciclovir.  Despite this, the Chennai Patent Office granted the patent to Roche, even without giving the patients groups an opportunity to present their arguments to the Patent Controller.      "Indian law requires that the Patent Controller provide the opponents an opportunity to be heard," said Anand Grover, Director of the Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit.  "We still have not received a clear explanation from the Chennai Patent Office as to how they proceeded to grant this patent without giving the opponents a fair hearing."      The opposition filed by DNP+ argues that valganciclovir is a known compound, that it is insufficiently inventive, and that it is, at most, a "new form" of an already known substance that shows no improvement in efficacy.  Remarkably, the opposition also points out that many of the claims that the Chennai Patent Office granted were rejected by the United States Patent Office, which operates under laws that are generally considered to be far more liberal than the standards in India.     [A copy of the opposition will be made available on www.lawyerscollective.org shortly]      For more information, contact Anand Grover at +91.9820184788, and Loon Gangte at +91.9871029514. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/defanged-55341 Size: 10804 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080627/e6ff4ca5/attachment-0001.bin From artresourcesteaching at gmail.com Wed Jun 25 11:16:43 2008 From: artresourcesteaching at gmail.com (Art, Resources & Teaching Bangalore) Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:16:43 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Urbamisation and Tourism in Kerala - A Lecture by Dr. Annapurna Garimella Message-ID: Airtel Manthan Arts & Culture Series Bangalore International Centre cordially invites you to a talk on *Brief description of the talk * Regional urbaniszation in Kerala has fuelled the growth of tourism which in turn is further reshaping the state's urbanization and globalization. Dr. Garimella's talk will examine Kerala's renowned backwater tourism industry and the histories that it highlights and obscures. Using her fieldwork among tourism workers, government officials and residents of the backwaters, she will present a nuanced portrait of the conflicts, contradictions and benefits of changing local economies through the service and culture industries. Presided over by *Prof. P K Michael Tharakan*, Shri Ramakrishna Hegde Chair in Decentralisation and Governance, Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bangalore Art, Resources & Teaching 79 Hutchins Road IInd Cross St Thomas Town, Bangalore 560 084 +91.80.2580.0733 info at artscapeindia.org www.artscapeindia.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080625/228a1615/attachment-0001.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 3963 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080625/228a1615/attachment-0005.gif From hassan.enjay at gmail.com Fri Jun 27 10:53:43 2008 From: hassan.enjay at gmail.com (hassan.enjay at gmail.com) Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:53:43 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Be a Linux Expert in 3 days Message-ID: <76cb57397f94ad7d837b3c1204e8e846@gmail.com> Be a Linux Expert in 3 days -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080627/ff6cba57/attachment-0001.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 139389 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20080627/ff6cba57/attachment-0001.jpe