From sunil at mahiti.org Sun Oct 5 21:20:55 2008 From: sunil at mahiti.org (Sunil Abraham) Date: Sun, 05 Oct 2008 21:20:55 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] [asiasource2-participants:196] Some news regarding software patents in India Message-ID: <1223221855.7646.36.camel@goli.lan.deeproot.in> Software Patenting http://www.timeoutbengaluru.com/aroundtown/aroundtown_feature_details.asp?code=14 In August this year, the US Patents and Trademarks Office granted Microsoft ownership of “page up” and “page down”. So in theory, no other company can scroll without permission and acknowledgement to Microsoft in monetary terms. A number of seemingly ubiquitous software ideas have been patented: the use of tabs to shift from one hyperlink to another on a web page, the “Add to Shopping Cart” function that appears on every online store, automated online loan requests, and even reducing image size to make a webpage load faster. “Most companies register defensive patents to protect themselves, not offensive ones,” said Sunil Abraham of Centre for Internet and Society. “Not many actively pursue patent infringement, but it is still very scary for a small-time entrepreneur.” At a time when the Indian Patent Office is in the process of putting together a new Manual of Patent Practice and Procedure, the Centre for Internet and Society is holding a one-day consultation on the issue of software patenting in the city. Participants include the Delhi Science Forum, RedHat, IT for Change, Open Space, as well as the Alternative Law Forum. >From mobile phone technology to pacemakers in healthcare, everybody is dependent on software. “Each software patent is a 17-year monopoly on an idea,” said Anivar Aravind of the Free Software User Group Bangalore. “If formulaic Hindi films were protected by patent laws, we would be able to make only one film,” joked Abraham. The system of software patenting wipes out smaller businesses and innovation, he said. “Software, like poetry and literary works, is already protected by copyright. After all, Bill Gates made his fortunes from copyright and not patents. But many software companies are trying to get additional protection.” Copyright and patents are both part of intellectual property rights, but copyright restricts the expression of an idea while patents restrict the idea itself, according to Abraham. Under a patenting regime, even before a kid writes one line of code he has to read many patents.” Kiran Patil of Turtle Linux Lab agreed. “If every little thing is patented, there’s nothing a developer can do.” He cited Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU (a recursive acronym for GNU’s Not Unix) Project, who likened patents to explosive devices: “Software patents are the software project’s equivalent of land mines: each design-decision carries a risk of stepping on a patent, which can destroy your project.” Worst of all, the world sees those with patents as the innovators, said Patil, which, according to him, is a big misconception. While corporate giants like Microsoft and IBM fix exchange deals through cross-licensing, smaller companies get left out of the loop entirely. Despite not having many patents of their own, several Indian software companies support software patenting because they have huge contracts with the large software companies in the United States and Europe who do. The Indian Patent Act of 1970 did not allow for software patents until 2002 when an amendment, which ironically excluded “computer programmes per se” from the scope of patenting, was introduced. The amendment implied that while computer programmes themselves were not eligible for patents, programmes used in combination with hardware were. The Act was further amended through an ordinance in 2005 to narrow the scope of software excluded, but the ordinance was rejected by the Indian Parliament and the Act effectively reverted to what it was after the 2002 amendment. “The law has left it somewhat ambiguous,” said Abraham. “Nobody is sure what can or cannot be patented. Many people are using the clause “computer programmes per se” to get pure software patents.” This occurs either due to incompetence among patent officers or by accident, he said. “While many of the patent officers have expertise in the area of industrial inventions or medical inventions, very few know enough about software patents at the moment.” -- Akhila Seetharaman Software patenting will harm industry, consumer http://www.hindu.com/2008/10/05/stories/2008100559810400.htm BANGALORE: Living up to its status as the country’s Information Technology (IT) capital, Bangalore played host to a different kind of “software lobby” here on Saturday. Unlike most lobbies, this one had no vested interests and no hard-line agenda. In a bid to raise awareness about software patenting and generate a debate among stakeholders, the Free Software community from across the country participated in a national-level meeting against software patents. Public hearings This open meeting comes in the wake of the public hearings being conducted by the Indian Patent Office to discuss the recently formulated patent manual. The office has shelved all discussion on software patents and promised an exclusive meeting with stakeholders. Nearly 20 organisations and various stakeholders who participated in the hearing threw up issues ranging from patent laws and principles in general, to specific issues of the “software per se” clause in the patent manual. Submissions made by many stakeholders to the patent office were also discussed. The meeting was held to discuss the recent modification to the manual, which is being interpreted as a move to make “software in combination with hardware” patentable. As of now, software comes under the copyright law. This move is significant because a similar ordinance was scrapped by the Parliament in 2005. The Free Software community feels that the clause panders to the powerful IT and multi-national companies lobby that has been rooting for this legislation. Copyright Speaking at the meeting, Venkatesh Hariharan of Red Hat said that software was protected by copyright and additional protection was more harmful for the industry and the consumer as a whole. “Patent is a state-granted monopoly, but copyright protects the expression of an idea and a code is safe as long as one can prove that he has arrived at it independently,” he said. As a sole representative of any government body, Joseph Mathew, Special IT advisor to the Government of Kerala, made a presentation of his government’s stand on software patents. “The manual should not have brought this up again, considering Parliament scrapped it in 2005. We hope it is a clerical error and the Kerala Government will consider writing to the Union Government and the patent office informing them of our opposition to this issue,” Mr. Mathew said. Small and medium enterprises which use Free Software such as Zyxware from Trivandrum, Deep Root Linux and Turtle Linux from Bangalore, among others made presentations at the meeting. Several research and advocacy organisations such as the Centre for Internet and Society and the Delhi Science Forum put forth various facets of this debate. Lack of clarity “The lack of clarity in the Patent Act results is being wrestled aggressively and effectively by corporate interests, patent attorneys and the patent office in favour of granting software patents. This meeting helped bring together the counter-opinions in this matter, and we will go ahead and participate in any meeting that will be called for by the authorities,” said Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society. Watch http://www.cis-india.org for more on this. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Asia Source 2" group. To post to this group, send email to asiasource2-participants at googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to asiasource2-participants+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/asiasource2-participants?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~--- From anivar.aravind at gmail.com Mon Oct 6 04:37:34 2008 From: anivar.aravind at gmail.com (Anivar Aravind) Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 04:37:34 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] =?utf-8?b?RndkOiBbR3JlZW5Zb3V0aF0gU0hJVkVS4oCmIERP?= =?utf-8?q?WN_THE_SPINE=2E?= In-Reply-To: <35f96d470810051606y6ac47947id6ad35d3a1c0ac4f@mail.gmail.com> References: <9131a120810032011h6da07d68h493c7512f8696efb@mail.gmail.com> <35f96d470810051605n5ff04ad5tf9291844350b091b@mail.gmail.com> <35f96d470810051606y6ac47947id6ad35d3a1c0ac4f@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <35f96d470810051607v46c696b2s618f1a63d3798125@mail.gmail.com> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From sunil at mahiti.org Tue Oct 7 17:41:02 2008 From: sunil at mahiti.org (Sunil Abraham) Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:41:02 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Open Access Day Message-ID: <1223381462.6627.38.camel@goli.lan.deeproot.in> With the usual apologies for x-posting! Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and Cente for Internet and Society, Bangalore, request your presence at the celebrations of the first Open Access Day on 14th October 2008, at Tagore Hall, Dayar-i-Mir Taqi Mir, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi Agenda 1400 – 1415 Welcome and Introduction – Prof. Biswajit Das, Director, Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia 1415 – 1535 Chair: Prof. Arif Ali, Head Dept. of Bio-Technology, Jamia Milia Islamia Panelists: 1. Mr. Zakir Thomas, Project Director - Open Source Drug Discovery 2. Dr. Anshu Bhardwaj, Scientist CSIR, New Delhi. 3. Dr. Andrew Lynn, Professor, Department of Bio-informatics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. 4. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society 1535 – 1600 Questions and Answers Open Discussion 1600 - 1615 Vote of thanks and closure by Sunil Abraham, Director – Policy, Centre for Internet and Society. End with Tea/Coffee About the Open Access Movement Open Access1 is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. It encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society. Open Access is the principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers put their weight behind it. The Open Access philosophy was firmly articulated in 2002, when the Budapest Open Access Initiative was introduced. It quickly took root in the scientific and medical communities because it offered an alternative route to research literature that was frequently closed off behind costly subscription barriers. Today, the OAIster search engine provides access to 17,799,314 Open Access records from 1015 contributors. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals – India publishes 105 Open Access journals. Both INSA and IASc have made their journals open access journals. Indian Institute of Science has an EPrints repository and it has over 11,000 papers and this year, the Institute's centenary year, the number is expected to cross 23,000. NIT, Rourkela, has mandated open access to all faculty research papers. There are about thirty OA institutional repositories in India today. The IITs and IISc have formed a consortium and are making their class lectures open access under a project called NPTEL. These lectures are available in web, video and YouTube formats. About Open Access Day October 14, 2008 will be the world’s first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science. Open Access Day will help to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public. Contact Details: New Delhi Vibodh Parthasarathi Reader/Associate Professor Centre for Culture, Media and Governance Nelson Mandela House, Mujib Bagh Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi 110 025 P.: +91 11 26933810. 26933842 M: +91 9873458688 E: ccmgjmi at gmail.com W: http://jmi.nic.in/ccmg Bangalore Sunil Abraham Director - Policy Centre for Internet and Society No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560 052 P: +91 80 4092 6283 F: +91 80 4114 8130 M: +91 9611100817 E: sunil at cis-india.org W: www.cis-india.org From nicheant at gmail.com Wed Oct 8 13:39:35 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: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 13:39:35 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Announcing Webiste of Primary Documents on India Message-ID: <4439ee330810080109kf28a5dbqe431d1912bf0cd5d@mail.gmail.com> Forwarded Message ---------------------------- Dear Friends I had a project on building archives of various primary documents and make it available in the public domain. The following documents are now available online: 1. Documents on Human Rights Movements (reports of CPDR, PUDR etc) 2. Documents on Employment Guarantee Scheme of Maharashtra 3. Documents on History of Sociology These are available on the following url in PDF http://cssh.unipune.ernet.in/ArchievesMain.html Another way to access it is by going to the website of University of Pune-www.unipune.ernet.in . Go to Schools and Departments and in the last section click on Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities. The archives are part of the Centre's documentation project. Please send this message to as many as you can. Thank you Sujata Patel Professor of Sociology Department of Sociology University of Pune Pune 411007 INDIA Tele 91-20 2569 0389, 91-20-2560 1305/6 (O), 91-20-2569 3625(H)._,_.___ __,_._,___ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20081008/e008f0fd/attachment.html From sunil at mahiti.org Fri Oct 10 00:12:49 2008 From: sunil at mahiti.org (Sunil Abraham) Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:12:49 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Outrage of the Month for December 2007 Message-ID: <1223577769.6188.3.camel@goli.lan.deeproot.in> Apologies if this has been posted on this list before. Cheers, Sunil http://www.thetruecosts.org/NR/rdonlyres/e7hhlbnypyhitmzp2s743bsknddqwo6aipuqpvhwflkwjda5ag7pu7ptr4mdgcqdmabijzzgwt4ndjnjccwc52yhsta/OutrageoftheMonthThe12DaysofChristmasDecember2007.doc.pdf AN INITIATIVE OF THE NATIONAL CHAMBER FOUNDATION, AN AFFILIATE OF THE U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE Counterfeiting and piracy impact us everyday. Each month, the Chamber features real stories about the impact of this growing problem--the “Outrage of the Month.” As the business community, we must continue to work together in demonstrating the expansiveness of this threat to Congress, the administration, enforcement officials, and consumers. Feedback is welcome. E-mail counterfeiting at uschamber.com with your thoughts. Outrage of the Month for December 2007 The 12 Days of Christmas On the first day of Christmas, the counterfeiters and pirates gave to me One bootleg DVD On the second day of Christmas, the counterfeiters and pirates gave to me Two exploding batteries, And one bootleg DVD On the third day of Christmas, the counterfeiters and pirates gave to me Three fake Tickle-Me-Elmos, Two exploding batteries, And one bootleg DVD On the fourth day of Christmas, the counterfeiters and pirates gave to me Four defective Durex condoms, Three fake Tickle-Me-Elmos, Two exploding batteries, And one bootleg DVD On the fifth day of Christmas, the counterfeiters and pirates gave to me Five sawdust brake pads, Four defective Durex condoms, Three fake Tickle-Me-Elmos, Two exploding batteries, And one bootleg DVD On the sixth day of Christmas, the counterfeiters and pirates gave to me Six tainted tubes of toothpaste, Five sawdust brake pads, Four defective Durex condoms, Three fake Tickle-Me-Elmos, Two exploding batteries, And one bootleg DVD On the seventh day of Christmas, the counterfeiters and pirates gave to me Seven sick senior citizens, Six tainted tubes of toothpaste, Five sawdust brake pads, Four defective Durex condoms, Three fake Tickle-Me-Elmos, Two exploding batteries, And one bootleg DVD On the eighth day of Christmas, the counterfeiters and pirates gave to me Eight children a-choking, Seven sick senior citizens, Six tainted tubes of toothpaste, Five sawdust brake pads, Four defective Durex condoms, Three fake Tickle-Me-Elmos, Two exploding batteries, And one bootleg DVD On the ninth day of Christmas, the counterfeiters and pirates gave to me Nine computers-a-crashing, Eight children a-choking, Seven sick senior citizens, Six tainted tubes of toothpaste, Five sawdust brake pads, Four defective Durex condoms, Three fake Tickle-Me-Elmos, Two exploding batteries, And one bootleg DVD On the tenth day of Christmas, the counterfeiters and pirates gave to me Ten extension cords a-blazing, Nine computers-a-crashing, Eight children a-choking, Seven sick senior citizens, Six tainted tubes of toothpaste, Five sawdust brake pads, Four defective Durex condoms, Three fake Tickle-Me-Elmos, Two exploding batteries, And one bootleg DVD On the eleventh day of Christmas, the counterfeiters and pirates gave to me Eleven erroneous diabetic testing strips, Ten extension cords a-blazing, Nine computers-a-crashing, Eight children a-choking, Seven sick senior citizens, Six tainted tubes of toothpaste, Five sawdust brake pads, Four defective Durex condoms, Three fake Tickle-Me-Elmos, Two exploding batteries, And one bootleg DVD On the twelfth day of Christmas, the counterfeiters and pirates gave to me Twelve fire extinguishers malfunctioning, Eleven erroneous diabetic testing strips, Ten extension cords a-blazing, Nine computers-a-crashing, Eight children a-choking, Seven sick senior citizens, Six tainted tubes of toothpaste, Five sawdust brake pads, Four defective Durex condoms, Three fake Tickle-Me-Elmos, Two exploding batteries, And one bootleg DVD HAPPY HOLIDAYS from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Global Intellectual Property Center! To get involved in our efforts in the new year, visit www.thetruecosts.org. U.S. Chamber of Commerce | 1615 H Street, NW |Washington, DC 20062 www.uschamber.com From pranesh at cis-india.org Sat Oct 11 18:29:04 2008 From: pranesh at cis-india.org (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:29:04 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Incisive Ars report on dodgy piracy statistics Message-ID: <4785f1e20810110559y554e7af9o4510315bd55ffe2d@mail.gmail.com> From Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/dodgy-digits-behind-the-war-on-piracy.ars 750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy By Julian Sanchez | Published: October 07, 2008 - 11:30PM CT A 20-year game of Telephone If you pay any attention to the endless debates over intellectual property policy in the United States, you'll hear two numbers invoked over and over again, like the stuttering chorus of some Philip Glass opera: 750,000 and $200 to $250 billion. The first is the number of U.S. jobs supposedly lost to intellectual property theft; the second is the annual dollar cost of IP infringement to the U.S. economy. These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus. "I have said it thrice," wrote Lewis Carroll in his poem *The Hunting of the Snark*, "what I tell you three times is true." And by that standard, the Pythagorean Theorem is but schoolyard gossip compared with our hoary figures. As our colleagues at *Wired *noted earlier this week, the 750,000 jobs figure can be found cited by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Customs and Border Patrol, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, among others. Both feature prominently on TheTrueCosts.org, an industry site devoted to trumpeting the harms of piracy. They're invokedby the deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. And, of course, they're a staple of indignant press releasesfrom the congressional sponsors of tough-on-piracy legislation. By more conventional standards of empirical verification, however, the numbers fare less well. Try to follow the thread of citations to their source, and you encounter a fractal tangle of recursive reference that resembles nothing so much as the children's game known, in less-PC times, as "Chinese whispers," and these days more often called "Telephone." Usually, the most respectable-sounding authority to cite for the numbers (the FBI for the dollar amount, Customs for the jobs figure) is also the most prevalent—but in each case, that authoritative "source" proves to be a mere waystation on a long and tortuous journey. So what is the secret origin of these ubiquitous statistics? What doomed planet's desperate alien statisticians rocketed them to Kansas? Ars did its best to find the fountainhead. Here's what we discovered. Looking for lost jobs First, the estimate of 750,000 jobs lost. (Is that supposed to be per year? A cumulative total over some undefined span? Those who cite the figure seldom say.) Customs is most often given as the source for this, and indeed, you can find press releases from as recently as 2002giving that figure as a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol estimate. Eureka! But when we contacted CBP to determine how they had arrived at that imposing figure, we were informed that it was, in essence, a goof. The figure, Customs assured us, came from somewhere else, and was mistakenly described as the agency's own. This should come as no great surprise: CBP is an enforcement agency, whereas calculating the total loss of jobs from IP infringement would require some terrifyingly complex counterfactual modeling by trained economists. Similar claims have appeared in Customs releases dating back at least to 1993, but a CBP spokesperson assured us that the agency has never been in the business of developing such estimates in-house. With Customs a dead end, we dove into press archives, hoping to find the earliest public mention of the elusive 750,000 jobs number. And we found it in—this is not a typo—1986. Yes, back in the days when "Papa Don't Preach" and "You Give Love a Bad Name" topped the charts, *The Christian Science Monitor* quoted then-Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge, trumpeting Ronald Reagan's own precursor to the recently passed PRO-IP bill. Baldridge estimated the number of jobs lost to the counterfeiting of U.S. goods at "anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000." Where did that preposterously broad range come from? As with the number of licks needed to denude a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know. Ars submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Commerce this summer, hoping to uncover the basis of Baldridge's claim—or any other Commerce Department estimates of job losses to piracy—but came up empty. So whatever marvelous proof the late secretary discovered was not to be found in the margins of any document in the government's vaults. But no matter: By 1987, that Brobdignagian statistical span had been reduced, as far as the press were concerned, to "as many as 750,000" jobs. Subsequent reportage dropped the qualifier. The 750,000 figure was still being bandied about this summer in support of the aforementioned PRO-IP bill. $250 billion? What's that in real money? What, then, of that $200 to $250 billion range? Often, it's attributed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and indeed, the Bureau routinely citesthose numbers. According to FBI spokesperson Catherine Milhoan, the figure "was derived through our coordination with industry, trade associations, rights holders, and other law enforcement agencies" at a 2002 anti-piracy confab. But neither the Bureau nor the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, which assembled the inter-agency powwow, could find any record of how that number was computed. At this point, it's necessary to get a little speculative. As with Customs, the FBI is not in the habit of doing sophisticated economic analysis in-house. And the last time the government conducted any sort of verifiably rigorous study of the costs of IP theft—about which more presently—it was a protracted undertaking that involved sending detailed questionnaires to hundreds of businesses, which government economists concluded was still insufficient to produce a reliable figure for the economy as a whole. However, $250 billion is about the number you come up with if you start with $200 billion in 1993 dollars and adjust for inflation to 2002. And that lower end of the range, $200 billion, happens to date back to 1993. Another group that routinely uses the $200 to $250 billion figure is the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, which (along with the FBI) is often given as the source of the number. That organization's white papers , as recently as 2005, footnote the figure to 1995 congressional testimony urging passage of what became the Anticounterfeiting Consumer Protection Act of 1996. So Ars dug into the archives at the Library of Congress to discover where the witnesses before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees got their data. Several of the witnesses were conspicuously vague about their sources. An IACC factsheet submitted for the hearings said the group itself "estimates the economic cost due to product counterfeiting to exceed $200 billion each year," a number repeated by the group's then-president, John Bliss. Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) gave the same figure without sourcing. But several witnesses pointed to *Forbes*magazine as the source of the number. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) noted that the International Trade Commission had placed the size of the counterfeit market at $60 billion in 1988 and that "a more recent estimate by *Forbes Magazine* says that American businesses are losing over $200 billion each year as a result of illegal counterfeiting." Finally, Charlotte Simmons-Gill of the International Trademark Association was kind enough to give a precise citation : the October 25, 1993 issue of *Forbes*. Ars eagerly hunted down that issue and found a short article on counterfeiting, in which the reader is informed that "counterfeit merchandise" is "a $200 billion enterprise worldwide and growing faster than many of the industries it's preying on." No further source is given. Quite possibly, the authors of the article called up an industry group like the IACC and got a ballpark guess. At any rate, there is nothing to indicate that *Forbes* itself had produced the estimate, Mr. Conyers' assertion notwithstanding. What is very clear, however, is that even assuming the figure is accurate, it is *not* an estimate of the cost to the U.S. economy of IP piracy. It's an estimate of the size of the entire global market in counterfeit goods. Despite the efforts of several witnesses to equate them, it is plainly not on par with the earlier calculation by the ITC that many had also cited. But here, at last, we have a solid number to sink our claws into, right? Sure, it's 20 years old, but the U.S. International Trade Commission at least produced a reputable study yielding a definite figure for the cost of piracy to the U.S. economy: $60 billion annually. Well, not quite. "Biased & self-serving" The number the ITC actually came up with, based on a survey of several hundred business selected for their likely reliance on IP for revenue, was $23.8 billion—the estimated losses to their respondents. That number was based on industry estimates that the authors of the study noted "could admittedly be biased and self-serving," since the firms had every incentive to paint the situation in the most dire terms as a means of spurring government action. But the figures at least appeared to be consistent and reasonable, both internally and across sectors. The $60 billion number comes from a two-page appendix, in which the authors note that it's impossible to extrapolate from a self-selecting group of IP-heavy respondents to the economy as a whole. But taking a wild stab and assuming that firms outside their sample experienced losses totaling a quarter to half those of their respondents, the ITC guessed that the aggregate losses to the economy might be on the order of "$43 billion to $61 billion." The survey also, incidentally, asked respondents to estimate the number of job losses they could attribute to inadequate intellectual property protection. The number they came up with was 5,374. If we assume, very crudely, that job losses are proportionate to dollar losses, then the ITC's high-end estimate of $61 billion in total economic costs would correspond to a loss of not 750,000 jobs, but 13,774. If we want to be very precise, however, we should note that the ITC was not calculating losses from IP "theft," but rather "inadequate protection" of intellectual property. And "inadequate protection" was interpreted to mean protection falling short of the level provided by U.S. law. The protection provided by a foreign country might be deemed "inadequate," the study explained, if "exceptions to exclusive rights are overly broad"—for example, if a country's law contained "broad exceptions for public performances in hotels or film clips" or "too broad exceptions for educational photocopying." A legal regime could be "inadequate" because "terms of protection are too short" or because of "inadequate" civil or criminal remedies, meaning monetary damages or criminal penalties for infringers were not high enough. Calculating the net cost of piracy to the economy One final, slightly theoretical point deserves emphasis here. All the projections we've discussed, the rigorous and the suspect alike, calculate losses in sales or royalties to U.S. firms. This is often conflated with the net "cost to the U.S. economy." But those numbers—whatever they might be—are almost certainly not the same. When someone torrents a $12 album that they would have otherwise purchased, the record industry loses $12, to be sure. But that doesn't mean that $12 has magically vanished from the economy. On the contrary: someone has gotten the value of the album and still has $12 to spend somewhere else. In economic jargon, charging *anything* for pure IP—which has a marginal cost approaching zero once it has been produced—creates a deadweight economic loss, at least in static terms. The actual net loss of IP infringement is an *allocative* loss that only appears in a dynamic analysis. Simply put, when people pirate IP, the market is not accurately signaling how highly people value the effort that was put into *creating*it, which leads to underproduction of new IP. To calculate the *net *loss to the economy over the long run, you'd need to figure out the value of the lost innovation in which IP owners would have invested the marginal dollar lost to piracy, and subtract from that the value of the second-best allocation—which is to say, whatever the consumer of the pirated good spent his money on instead—and the value of the deadweight loss (free music or software is a net economic benefit to someone) incurred by pricing IP at all. If that sounds incredibly complicated, it is. And in fact, it's more complicated than that, because as Yochai Benkler has argued persuasively, IP is an input to innovation as well as the product of innovation. So under certain very specific conditions, "piracy" can produce net gains. While it seems extremely unlikely that this is the case in the aggregate—IP theft almost certainly does impose net economic costs—*simply* calculating lost sales and licensing fees, assuming someone could produce a credible figure, would not provide a complete picture of the economic impact of IP infringement. It would give us, at most, one side of the ledger. Conclusions But enough theory and speculation; here is what we can say for certain: the two numbers that are invariably invoked whenever Congress considers the need for more stringent IP enforcement are, at best, highly dubious. They are phantoms. We have no good reason to think that either is remotely reliable. Perhaps more importantly, both numbers are seemingly decades old, gaining a patina of currency and credibility by virtue of having been laundered through a relay race of respectable sources, even as their origin recedes into the mists. That's especially significant, because these numbers are always invoked as proof that the piracy problem is still dire—that everything we've done to step up international enforcement of intellectual property laws has been in vain. But of course, if you simply recycle the same numbers from 15 and 20 years ago—remember that IACC's *2005*publicationsstill cite that 1995 congressional testimony, from which it seems safe to infer that they have no more recent source—then it will necessarily seem as though no ground has been gained. Neither figure is terribly plausible on its face. As *Wired* notedearlier this week, 750,000 jobs is fully 8 percent of the current number of unemployed in the United States. And $250 billion is more than the *combined * 2005 gross domestic revenues of the movie, music, software, and video game industries. Still, anything is possible: The figures *could* happen to be more or less accurate. But given the shady provenance of the data, the one thing we know for certain is that we don't know for certain. And we're making policy on the basis of our ignorance. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20081011/98f64415/attachment-0001.html From jeebesh at sarai.net Mon Oct 13 13:13:34 2008 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh) Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:13:34 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] In Defense of Piracy - Lawrence Lessig Message-ID: OCTOBER 11, 2008 Essay In Defense of Piracy Digital technology has made it easy to create new works from existing art, but copyright law has yet to catch up. By LAWRENCE LESSIG http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122367645363324303.html In early February 2007, Stephanie Lenz's 13-month-old son started dancing. Pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, Holden Lenz started moving to the distinctive beat of a song by Prince, "Let's Go Crazy." He had heard the song before. The beat had obviously stuck. So when Holden heard the song again, he did what any sensible 13-month- old would do -- he accepted Prince's invitation and went "crazy" to the beat. Holden's mom grabbed her camcorder and, for 29 seconds, captured the priceless image of Holden dancing, with the barely discernible Prince playing on a CD player somewhere in the background. Ms. Lenz wanted her mother to see the film. But you can't easily email a movie. So she did what any citizen of the 21st century would do: She uploaded the file to YouTube and sent her relatives and friends the link. They watched the video scores of times. It was a perfect YouTube moment: a community of laughs around a homemade video, readily shared with anyone who wanted to watch. Sometime over the next four months, however, someone from Universal Music Group also watched Holden dance. Universal manages the copyrights of Prince. It fired off a letter to YouTube demanding that it remove the unauthorized "performance" of Prince's music. YouTube, to avoid liability itself, complied. A spokeswoman for YouTube declined to comment. This sort of thing happens all the time today. Companies like YouTube are deluged with demands to remove material from their systems. No doubt a significant portion of those demands are fair and justified. Universal's demand, however, was not. The quality of the recording was terrible. No one would download Ms. Lenz's video to avoid paying Prince for his music. There was no plausible way in which Prince or Universal was being harmed by Holden Lenz. YouTube sent Ms. Lenz a notice that it was removing her video. She wondered, "Why?" What had she done wrong? She pressed that question through a number of channels until it found its way to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (on whose board I sat until the beginning of 2008). The foundation's lawyers thought this was a straightforward case of fair use. Ms. Lenz consulted with the EFF and filed a "counter- notice" to YouTube, arguing that no rights of Universal were violated by Holden's dance. Yet Universal's lawyers insist to this day that sharing this home movie is willful copyright infringement under the laws of the United States. On their view of the law, she is liable to a fine of up to $150,000 for sharing 29 seconds of Holden dancing. Universal declined to comment. How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old? What is it that allows these lawyers and executives to take a case like this seriously, to believe there's some important social or corporate reason to deploy the federal scheme of regulation called copyright to stop the spread of these images and music? "Let's Go Crazy" indeed! It doesn't have to be like this. We could craft copyright law to encourage a wide range of both professional and amateur creativity, without threatening Prince's profits. We could reject the notion that Internet culture must oppose profit, or that profit must destroy Internet culture. But real change will be necessary if this is to be our future -- changes in law, and changes in us. For now, trials like Ms. Lenz's are becoming increasingly common. Both professionals, such as the band Girl Talk or the artist Candice Breitz, and amateurs, including thousands creating videos posted on YouTube, are finding themselves the target of overeager lawyers. Because their creativity captures or includes the creativity of others, the owners of the original creation are increasingly invoking copyright to stop the spread of this unauthorized speech. This new work builds upon the old by in effect "quoting" the old. But while writers with words have had the freedom to quote since time immemorial, "writers" with digital technology have not yet earned this right. Instead, the lawyers insist permission is required to include the protected work in anything new. Not all owners, of course. Viacom, for example, has effectively promised to exempt practically any amateur remix from its lawyers' concerns. But enough owners insist on permission to have touched, and hence, taint, an extraordinary range of extraordinary creativity, including remixes in the latest presidential campaign. During the Republican primary, for example, Fox News ordered John McCain's campaign to stop using a clip of Sen. McCain at a Fox News-moderated debate in an ad. And two weeks ago, Warner Music Group got YouTube to remove a video attacking Barack Obama, which used pieces of songs like the Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House." (Spokesman Will Tanous of Warner Music Group, which represents the Talking Heads, says the request came from the band's management.) Around the same time, NBC asked the Obama campaign to pull an ad that remixed some NBC News footage with Tom Brokaw and Keith Olbermann. We are in the middle of something of a war here -- what some call "the copyright wars"; what the late Jack Valenti called his own "terrorist war," where the "terrorists" are apparently our kids. But if I asked you to shut your eyes and think about these "copyright wars," your mind would not likely run to artists like Girl Talk or creators like Stephanie Lenz. Peer-to-peer file sharing is the enemy in the "copyright wars." Kids "stealing" stuff with a computer is the target. The war is not about new forms of creativity, not about artists making new art. Yet every war has its collateral damage. These creators are this war's collateral damage. The extreme of regulation that copyright law has become makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, for a wide range of creativity that any free society -- if it thought about it for just a second -- would allow to exist, legally. In a state of "war," we can't be lax. We can't forgive infractions that might at a different time not even be noticed. Think "Eighty-year-old Grandma Manhandled by TSA Agents," and you're in the right frame for this war as well. The work of these remix creators is valuable in ways that we have forgotten. It returns us to a culture that, ironically, artists a century ago feared the new technology of that day would destroy. In 1906, for example, perhaps America's then most famous musician, John Phillip Sousa, warned Congress about the inevitable loss that the spread of these "infernal machines" -- the record player -- would cause. As he described it: "When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chords will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape." A professional fearful that new technology would destroy the amateur. "The tide of amateurism cannot but recede," he predicted. A recession that he believed would only weaken culture. A new generation of "infernal machines" has now reversed this trend. New technology is restoring the "vocal chords" of millions. Wikipedia is a text version of this amateur creativity. Much of YouTube is the video version. A new generation has been inspired to create in a way our generation could not imagine. And tens of thousands, maybe millions, of "young people" again get together to sing "the songs of the day or the old songs" using this technology. Not on corner streets, or in parks near their homes. But on platforms like YouTube, or MySpace, with others spread across the world, whom they never met, or never even spoke to, but whose creativity has inspired them to create in return. The return of this "remix" culture could drive extraordinary economic growth, if encouraged, and properly balanced. It could return our culture to a practice that has marked every culture in human history -- save a few in the developed world for much of the 20th century -- where many create as well as consume. And it could inspire a deeper, much more meaningful practice of learning for a generation that has no time to read a book, but spends scores of hours each week listening, or watching or creating, "media." Yet our attention is not focused on these creators. It is focused instead upon "the pirates." We wage war against these "pirates"; we deploy extraordinary social and legal resources in the absolutely failed effort to get them to stop "sharing." This war must end. It is time we recognize that we can't kill this creativity. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using these tools to create, or make them passive. We can only drive it underground, or make them "pirates." And the question we as a society must focus on is whether this is any good. Our kids live in an age of prohibition, where more and more of what seems to them to be ordinary behavior is against the law. They recognize it as against the law. They see themselves as "criminals." They begin to get used to the idea. That recognition is corrosive. It is corrupting of the very idea of the rule of law. And when we reckon the cost of this corruption, any losses of the content industry pale in comparison. Copyright law must be changed. Here are just five changes that would make a world of difference: Deregulate amateur remix: We need to restore a copyright law that leaves "amateur creativity" free from regulation. Before the 20th century, this culture flourished. The 21st century could see its return. Digital technologies have democratized the ability to create and re-create the culture around us. Where the creativity is an amateur remix, the law should leave it alone. It should deregulate amateur remix. What happens when others profit from this creativity? Then a line has been crossed, and the remixed artists plainly ought to be paid -- at least where payment is feasible. If a parent has remixed photos of his kid with a song by Gilberto Gil (as I have, many times), then when YouTube makes the amateur remix publicly available, some compensation to Mr. Gil is appropriate -- just as, for example, when a community playhouse lets neighbors put on a performance consisting of a series of songs sung by neighbors, the public performance of those songs triggers a copyright obligation (usually covered by a blanket license issued to the community playhouse). There are plenty of models within the copyright law for assuring that payment. We need to be as creative as our kids in finding a model that works. Deregulate "the copy": Copyright law is triggered every time there is a copy. In the digital age, where every use of a creative work produces a "copy," that makes as much sense as regulating breathing. The law should also give up its obsession with "the copy," and focus instead on uses -- like public distributions of copyrighted work -- that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster. Simplify: If copyright regulation were limited to large film studios and record companies, its complexity and inefficiency would be unfortunate, though not terribly significant. But when copyright law purports to regulate everyone with a computer, there is a special obligation to make sure this regulation is clear. It is not clear now. Tax-code complexity regulating income is bad enough; tax-code complexity regulating speech is a First Amendment nightmare. Restore efficiency: Copyright is the most inefficient property system known to man. Now that technology makes it trivial, we should return to the system of our framers requiring at least that domestic copyright owners maintain their copyright after an automatic, 14-year initial term. It should be clear who owns what, and if it isn't, the owners should bear the burden of making it clear. Decriminalize Gen-X: The war on peer-to-peer file-sharing is a failure. After a decade of fighting, the law has neither slowed file sharing, nor compensated artists. We should sue not kids, but for peace, and build upon a host of proposals that would assure that artists get paid for their work, without trying to stop "sharing." —Adapted from "Remix" by Lawrence Lessig, to be published by The Penguin Press on Oct. 16, 2008. Copyright by Lawrence Lessig, 2008. Printed by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School, and co- founder of Creative Commons. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20081013/1bd8bd9e/attachment.html From prashantiyengar at gmail.com Mon Oct 13 13:46:16 2008 From: prashantiyengar at gmail.com (Prashant Iyengar) Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:46:16 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Music lands gym owner in trouble Message-ID: <908adbd0810130116r5ac94dbak71cba009dac5669e@mail.gmail.com> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Cities/Music_lands_gym_owner_in_trouble/rssarticleshow/3578559.cms MOHALI: A local gym owner and instructor were arrested on Thursday after they allegedly manhandled a licensing inspector of the Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS) when he asked them to produce license for playing music in the gymnasium on Wednesday. Licensing inspector with IPRS, Arvind Sharma, alleged that while he was on a routine check, he found a Phase VII gym playing music, but when he asked gym owner HR Sharma and instructor Yash Shani for the license, he was manhandled. He then got a complaint registered with the police. On Thursday, a police party raided the gym and arrested the duo on charges of manhandling. "We have arrested the duo for manhandling. We will first verify the facts of the license required to play music and only after that any further action could be taken," said Mataur police station SHO Tarlochan Singh. According to Sharma, under Section 33, sub section 3, of the Copyright Act, it is mandatory for every one to get a license for playing music in commercial establishments. He said earlier too notices were issued to the gym owner to apply for one. From the.solipsist at gmail.com Mon Oct 13 15:00:40 2008 From: the.solipsist at gmail.com (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:00:40 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] 150 hours of free Oxbridge lectures now on iTunes Message-ID: <4785f1e20810130230p4a8a9d31kcdbd6634612f0afc@mail.gmail.com> >From The Register: ---- Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/07/oxbridge_itunes/ Oxbridge lectures now on iTunes Grey matter shuffle By Kelly Fiveash Posted in Music and Media, 7th October 2008 11:22 GMT The universities of Oxford and Cambridge are to make lectures by well-known academics available through Apple's iTunes. Oxford will publish 150 hours of free video and audio podcasts of lectures and ideas from what it described as "world-leading thinkers". Academic types can now get their hands on education downloads that include a film about the University of Oxford's fundraising campaign "Oxford Thinking", featuring ex-Python and seasoned traveller Michael Palin. Oxford lecture and interview highlights include the former Chief Economist of the World Bank Professor Joseph Stiglitz speaking about the global financial crisis, Dr Craig Venter on genomics, Sir Nicholas Stern on the economics of climate change, and Professor Julian Savulescu on ethics. "We hope that this service will make Oxford's diverse range of audio and video material more widely accessible to applicants, alumni, supporters of the University, and the intellectually curious," said Dr John Hood, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Meanwhile the University of Cambridge, which prefers the tag "world-leading experts" for the range of material it's offering through iTunes, is making more than 300 podcasts available for free download. Celebrity historian Dr David Starkey features in a podcast about the history of the university, Cambridge said. Other highlights include interviews with some of Cambridge's Nobel prize winners and an exploration of the university's codebreaking efforts during World War II. More from Oxford here ( http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2008/081007.html), Cambridge here ( http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2008100702) and iTunes here ( http://www.apple.com/education/itunesu_mobilelearning/itunesu.html). (R) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20081013/fe66de91/attachment.html From the.solipsist at gmail.com Mon Oct 13 18:34:04 2008 From: the.solipsist at gmail.com (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:34:04 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Tomorrow (October 14) is Open Access Day Message-ID: <4785f1e20810130604h102dc0a1mb995ec209ca9be9c@mail.gmail.com> Dear All, This is to remind everyone that tomorrow is Open Access Day, and that the Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi) and the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore) are jointly organizing a meeting at JMI to celebrate the occasion. Details at: http://cis-india.org/advocacy/open-access/open-access-day/agenda A map for those attending: http://cis-india.org/advocacy/open-access/open-access-day/map.jpg Regards, Pranesh ---- Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and Cente for Internet and Society, Bangalore, request your presence at the celebrations of the first Open Access Day on 14th October 2008, at Tagore Hall, Dayar-i-Mir Taqi Mir, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi Agenda 1400 – 1415 Welcome and Introduction – Prof. Biswajit Das, Director, Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia 1415 – 1535 Chair: Prof. Arif Ali, Head Dept. of Bio-Technology, Jamia Milia Islamia Panelists: 1. Mr. Zakir Thomas, Project Director - Open Source Drug Discovery 2. Dr. Anshu Bhardwaj, Scientist CSIR, New Delhi. 3. Dr. Andrew Lynn, Professor, Department of Bio-informatics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. 4. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society 1535 – 1600 Questions and Answers Open Discussion 1600 - 1615 Vote of thanks and closure by Sunil Abraham, Director – Policy, Centre for Internet and Society. End with Tea/Coffee About the Open Access Movement Open Access is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. It encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society. Open Access is the principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it's gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers put their weight behind it. The Open Access philosophy was firmly articulated in 2002, when the Budapest Open Access Initiative was introduced. It quickly took root in the scientific and medical communities because it offered an alternative route to research literature that was frequently closed off behind costly subscription barriers. Today, the OAIster search engine provides access to 17,799,314 Open Access records from 1015 contributors. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals – India publishes 105 Open Access journals. Both INSA and IASc have made their journals open access journals. Indian Institute of Science has an EPrints repository and it has over 11,000 papers and this year, the Institute's centenary year, the number is expected to cross 23,000. NIT, Rourkela, has mandated open access to all faculty research papers. There are about thirty OA institutional repositories in India today. The IITs and IISc have formed a consortium and are making their class lectures open access under a project called NPTEL. These lectures are available in web, video and YouTube formats. About Open Access Day October 14, 2008 will be the world's first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science. Open Access Day will help to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public. Contact Details: New Delhi Vibodh Parthasarathi Reader/Associate Professor Centre for Culture, Media and Governance Nelson Mandela House, Mujib Bagh Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi 110 025 P.: +91 11 26933810. 26933842 M: +91 9873458688 E: ccmgjmi at gmail.com W: http://jmi.nic.in/ccmg Bangalore Sunil Abraham Director - Policy Centre for Internet and Society No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560 052 P: +91 80 4092 6283 F: +91 80 4114 8130 M: +91 9611100817 E: sunil at cis-india.org W: www.cis-india.org From lawrence at altlawforum.org Tue Oct 14 22:28:03 2008 From: lawrence at altlawforum.org (Lawrence Liang) Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:28:03 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] President Bush Signs New IP Enforcement Bill Into Law Message-ID: A new entry has been posted to the Intellectual Property Watch website. ******************************************************************************************************** October 14, 2008. President Bush Signs New IP Enforcement Bill Into Law By Catherine Saez President Bush on Monday signed into law a bill strengthening civil and criminal laws against counterfeiting and piracy, boosting resources for enforcement and prosecution, and changing coordination of IP enforcement issues within the Executive Branch. Under the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act of 2008, copyright registration would not be a prerequisite to criminal action, and a civil infringement action could be brought regardless of errors in registration unless those errors were made knowingly. Link to the article: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1268 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20081014/52d6fd49/attachment.html From pranesh at cis-india.org Wed Oct 15 14:48:08 2008 From: pranesh at cis-india.org (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:48:08 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Google Image Search in Copyright Trouble in Germany Message-ID: <4785f1e20810150218h2dca0808p8b67235606121659@mail.gmail.com> Dear All, Does anyone have links to translated judgments? It would be interesting to see how exactly the court(s) rejected transformative use. Does anyone know more about that area of German copyright law? Cheers, Pranesh >From http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/152218/google_will_appeal_german_copyright_decisions.html Google Will Appeal German Copyright Decisions Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service Tuesday, October 14, 2008 6:40 AM PDT Google will appeal two German court decisions that found it violated copyright law by showing thumbnails of works by two artists in search results, the company said Tuesday. Google has fought this battle before in other countries, sparring in court over the fine line between limited, legal use of copyrighted material and violating intellectual property laws. The case, which involved Google's Image Search feature in its search engine, concerned a photograph and artwork from two artists. Google will file a single appeal covering both cases to Germany's Supreme Court, according to a company spokesman. "We believe that services like Google Image Search are entirely legal and provide great value and critical information to Internet users," the company said in an e-mail. "Today's decision is very bad for Internet users in Germany." Google argued in its statement that the ruling is bad for Web sites that generate traffic from people using its Image Search as well as other services. Google has had mixed results in copyright clashes. Google lost a challenge by Belgium publishing group Copiepresse over the indexing of news stories on Google News. In the U.S., Google was sued by Perfect 10, a nude model photo publisher, over thumbnails of material owned by the publisher that were returned in search results. But a U.S. appeals court ruled in May 2007 use of the material qualified as fair use, the principle that a limited portion of copyright material can be legally used without permission. The court said full-size images weren't stored by Google and that the search engine merely directs a person's Web browser to third-party sites. From patrice at xs4all.nl Wed Oct 15 20:04:19 2008 From: patrice at xs4all.nl (Patrice Riemens) Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:34:19 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [Commons-Law] On Lawrence Lessig and 'piracy'... Message-ID: <19762.82.233.50.198.1224081259.squirrel@webmail.xs4all.nl> from the mind-boggling blog http://b1ff.org (cancell a few of yr usual blogs and take up this one... ;-) http://b1ff.org/2008/10/13/578/news-flash-yes-you-do-defend-piracy/ (long for: http://tinyurl.com/3so43n) refer to the above for all links... (+ 1 pic of 'the other Lawrence'...;-) Enjoy & Cheers from patrizio & 2 Diiiinooos! ---------- NEWS FLASH: yes you do “defen[d] piracy” WSJ publishes a commonsensical defense of “piracy” by Lessig, who bridles: Sorry to disappoint, but my new book, Remix, is not “A Defense of Piracy,” whatever the Wall Street Journal’s headline writers may think. Note to Larry: “Piracy” is defined by the Content Cartels, not by WSJ headline writers—and, according to the CCs, you’re defending piracy. If you don’t like their definition of it, it’s time to rethink your role as a market apologist. Your proposals make sense all the sense in the world, in the sort of warm-fuzzy way that ensures they’ll never happen, even under a fabled Obama presidency (unless you think he’ll risk alienating the CCs as he tackles more pressing issues). IPR liberalization won’t come about by persuading CCs to moderate their ultraist demands, no matter how hard you think. The CCs will moderate their demands when, and only when, their privileges have been stripped and the question turns to how many of those privileges should be restored. Those privileges are slowly being stripped de facto if not de jure, with the result that our legal systems increasingly describe worlds that no longer exist—except for the unfortunate few who are subjected to selective enforcement. And, yes, enforcement is literally selective. These are civil suits, filed by private plaintiffs according to their own, private criteria. Ask yourself how the CCs choose their targets. Is it on the basis of “merit”—for example, merit as measured by quantifiable violations? Clearly not. When the rule of law becomes the haphazard result of “strategies” and “initiatives,” for the many the law will appear as the rule of terror. If you must use the term “pirate,” try for a moment assigning it to the CCs: roving opportunists with sketchy claimed affiliations who use inscrutable methods to choose where and when to strike with force in order to extract paltry takings from larger flows of traffic. Of course you can think of all kinds of objections to this equation; but so can those you accuse of “remixing”—a piss-poor term for describing what it means to enjoy the pleasures of a mediated world. The issue isn’t whether you’re defending piracy; it’s whether you understand the situation well enough to be truly effective. Your defense against the accidental (but no less accurate for that) accusation that you defend piracy shows that you don’t. Yet. The facts on the ground are moving, but your calculations haven’t caught up. Yet. From mdnair at vsnl.com Thu Oct 16 11:54:08 2008 From: mdnair at vsnl.com (mdnair) Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 14:24:08 +0800 Subject: [Commons-Law] JIPR Special Issue Message-ID: <001601c92f57$cc6fd0b0$0501a8c0@youra9279112e3> I have edited the September issue of Journal Of Intellectual Property Rights which is a Special issue on "TRIPS and Pharmaceutical Industry" published by the National Institute of Science Communication & Information Resorces (NISCAIR), CSIR, New Delhi. The 167 pages volume contains 17 Articles from eminent authorities in the field and addresses nearly all the contentious issues on the subject . The details can be obtained from the website of NISCAIR , www.niscair.res.in or through e-mails to sahnim at niscair.res.in; madhu.sahni at gmail.com or mdnair at vsnl.com Dr.M.D.Nair, Consultant to Healthcare Industry, A-11 Sagarika, 15, 3rd Seaward Road, Valmiki Nagar, Chennai 60041, India -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20081016/9d0b0d66/attachment-0001.html From prathibha.siva at gmail.com Sat Oct 18 15:48:16 2008 From: prathibha.siva at gmail.com (prathibha siva) Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2008 15:48:16 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] =?windows-1252?q?Update_on_the_Novartis_case_=96_He?= =?windows-1252?q?arings_on_Novartis=92_appeals_to_commence_in_Nove?= =?windows-1252?q?mber_2008?= Message-ID: Dear friends and colleagues, Greetings from Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit! We write to bring you an update on the Novartis case. As many of you may recall, patients' groups won an important battle in the struggle for affordable medicines in August 2007, when the Madras High Court upheld the validity of a key public health safeguard—section 3(d) of India's Patents Act, 1970. Section 3(d) prohibits patenting of new forms of known drugs unless there is a significant increase in efficacy. The challenge to section 3(d) was brought by Novartis AG, a multinational pharmaceutical company, after the Patent Office at Chennai rejected its patent application for the beta-crystalline form of imatinib mesylate (also known as *Gleevec*), a crucial anticancer drug. In January 2006, after hearing pre-grant oppositions filed by Cancer Patients Aid Association and several Indian generic pharmaceutical companies, the Patent Office rejected the patent application on several grounds including section 3(d). Applying section 3(d), the Patent Office held that the beta-crystalline form of imatinib mesylate for which Novartis sought a patent was a new form of imatinib—which was an already known substance—and that Novartis had not satisfied the Patent Office on the increase in efficacy. In response to the rejection, Novartis filed several cases against the Government of India, Cancer Patients Aid Association and the Indian generic pharmaceutical companies. The first set of cases challenged section 3(d). Novartis lost those cases in August 2007. The second set of cases challenged the Patent Office's rejection of Novartis' patent application for the beta-crystalline form of imatinib mesylate. These cases will now come up for hearing before the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB). The IPAB is to comprise of two members: a judicial member and a technical member. Novartis' appeals were held up due to procedural reasons since April 2007. Though Novartis had filed the appeals before the Madras High Court, the cases were transferred to the IPAB in April 2007 when the Government notified that the IPAB would hear appeals relating to patents. When the Government issued the notification in April 2007, it appointed Mr. Chandrashekar as the technical member to hear appeals relating to patents. However, when the hearings commenced before the IPAB in June 2007, Novartis objected to this appointment. Novartis' objection was on the ground that as Mr. Chandrashekar had filed an affidavit on behalf of the Government in the appeals supporting the Patent Controller's rejection of Novartis' patent application, he had already formed a view on the merits of the case and therefore would be biased. The IPAB rejected Novartis' plea on the ground that Mr. Chandrashekar was the only technical member who was competent to hear appeals relating to patents. Novartis then approached the Madras seeking the removal of Mr. Chandrasekhar from IPAB. The Madras High Court, pursuant to the suggestion of the Government, decided that a two-member bench consisting of the Chairman (Judicial Member) and Vice-Chairman could hear the appeals without a Technical Member. Natco Pharma Ltd, one of the generic companies involved in the litigation, approached the Supreme Court challenging the order of the Madras High Court. It contented that it would be difficult for the IPAB to arrive at a proper decision without a Technical Member because the matter was too technical and involved chemistry of complex compounds. At the commencement of proceedings before the Supreme Court of India, the court stayed the proceedings before IPAB until the matter was finally disposed of by it. This stay order brought the proceedings before the IPAB to a halt. After hearing both sides, the Supreme Court of India directed the Government to submit a list of qualified persons who could be appointed as a Technical Member for the purposes of hearing the appeals filed by Novartis. On 1 October 2008, the Supreme Court of India appointed Dr. P. C. Chakraborti, Deputy Controller of Patents and Designs, as an ad-hoc technical member on the IPAB, to hear Novartis' appeals against the rejection of its patent application. The Supreme Court has directed the specially constituted IPAB to list the appeals on 3 November 2008. The order further directs hearing on a day-to-day basis, preferably in November 2008. The order of the Supreme Court in this case (*Natco Pharma Limited v. Union of India and Others*) is available at www.lawyerscollective.org. All other documents relating to the case will be made available shortly on our website. In the coming weeks, we will update you further on the developments in this case. In solidarity, Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/defanged-42 Size: 13641 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20081018/b84a6f42/attachment.bin From sunil at mahiti.org Fri Oct 31 00:41:18 2008 From: sunil at mahiti.org (Sunil Abraham) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:41:18 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Fwd: Anthony So: Is Bayh Dole Good for Developing Countries? Lessons from the US Experience Message-ID: <1225393878.7482.96.camel@goli.lan.deeproot.in> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Is Bayh Dole Good for Developing Countries? Lessons from the US Experience Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:40:58 -0400 From: Anthony So To: anthonys at duke.edu Dear Colleagues, We wanted to let you know of today's publication of a jointly authored article in /PLoS Biology/, "Is Bayh Dole Good for Developing Countries? Lessons from the US Experience." We anticipate that this may stir controversy in some quarters, but hope this article will serve as a useful, constructive contribution to these policy debates, particularly as they are unfolding in places like India. Under separate cover, we have sent a copy of this article to various colleagues in Indian civil society as they face the imminent introduction of a Bayh-Dole style bill into the Parliament there. PLoS Biology also makes the manuscript freely available on-line under a Creative Commons Attribution License at: http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060262 The blog on this site may carry responses to the article, and we hope that you all will weigh in as well there and elsewhere. We have also prepared a wiki targeted for the use of developing country civil society groups. The wiki posts resources and references that might be useful in researching the US Bayh-Dole Act and related issues. It is meant to be an *invitation-only site* that primarily serves as a place for developing country civil society groups to share in this information, with inputs also added from a few select Northern NGOs and university academics. It also would evolve over time with your contributions, corrections and revisions as well as those from the community. As we or others develop fact sheets, legislative analyses or other materials, they also might be posted here. One can also create new pages where the on-line community might critique presentations, fact sheets, or certain lines of argumentation. Collectively, we might also track there news clippings or blogs where this debate is unfolding. If you might be interested in contributing, please let us know of your interest, what hat you're wearing, and what contribution you might wish to make, and we can send an invitation (perhaps one or two point persons or representatives per Northern NGO). Requests should be sent to Corrina Moucheraud Vickery (cm108 at duke.edu). If there are a lot of your members that might wish to participate in the wiki, we can also work to help create a parallel one for your group. We hope that this article will make a timely contribution to the discussions now taking place. Best regards, Anthony -- ________________________________ Anthony D. So, MD, MPA Professor of the Practice of Public Policy Studies Director, Program on Global Health and Technology Access Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy Duke University Rubenstein Hall, Room 196 201 Science Drive, Box 90314 Durham, North Carolina 27708-0314 Tel: 919-613-9258 Fax: 919-684-9940 E-mail: anthony.so at duke.edu