There is at least one bright spot in the recently passed health care reform legislation. Well, sort of.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act finally established a much-needed regulatory pathway for “biosimilars.” Those are the generic versions of “biologics,” complex drugs made from living (or products of living) organisms, such as vaccines, insulin, human growth hormones and many others.
Innovator companies will get:
12 years of data exclusivity for their products, providing reasonable intellectual property protection;
An arbitration mechanism to settle patent disputes; and
A transition pathway to approve biosimilars, which have been regulated like traditional drugs despite their greater complexity.
That’s all good as far as it goes, but the legislation doesn’t address a number of issues. Read More...
Intellectual property (IP) has become a controversial topic in the past few years, but thankfully there was very little controversy in the Joint Strategic Plan. It seems that one of the few truly non-partisan policy issues today is the recognition of the importance of intellectual property protection to our nation’s economy. Read More...
Piracy and Counterfeiting are back in the news again.
On piracy, there’s a new round of lawsuits against people who have been illegally sharing copyright-protected materials, although this time it’s movies, including the Oscar-winning film “The Hurt Locker.”
And on counterfeits, a cache of over seven million counterfeit pills, including counterfeit Viagra and other common prescription drugs, was just seized in Dubai, a central distribution port for destinations all over the world.
Two weeks ago, a Canadian man was arrested for selling counterfeit cancer medication through his Canadian Internet pharmacy website.
Oh, and the same guy was selling pirated business software. So he’s adept at both piracy AND counterfeiting. Read More...
Having just watched highly controversial legislation become law along painfully partisan lines and cause political fractures that may last for years, it’s nostalgic to be reminded of the good old days when Congress acted less along partisan lines and more in the interests of the majority of the American people—like way, way back in 2008 when the House of Representatives passed the PRO-IP Act by a vote of 410 to 11, and the Senate passed it unanimously.
What kind of legislation passes with such a broad, bipartisan majority? Legislation that is designed to solve widely recognized problems in a way that makes sense to the American people. The PRO-IP Act was such a bill, designed to enhance intellectual property enforcement in order to protect the interests of those who work in the innovative and creative sectors of the U.S. economy, and the health and safety of all Americans. Read More...
In many developing countries, including most African countries, as much as 60 percent of prescription drugs sold are actually counterfeit, containing little if any of the active molecule, and in some cases containing toxins and other harmful substances.
That's just one of the many frightening statistics that emerged from a conference last week in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, sponsored by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the benefit of government officials in the East African Region. IPI was pleased to be able to co-sponsor and participate in the conference.
Designed to help justice and customs officials intercept counterfeits and prosecute the perpetrators, the conference was a terrific example of cooperation between “north and south” in improving the health and welfare of East African populations. Read More...
When you watch a dog chasing its tail around and around in circles, the obvious question posed to the dog is “what are you going to do with it if you ever catch it?”
Well, politically liberal activist groups have been chasing their own tails for years, criticizing content and media companies for, well, just about everything they do, and of course all in the name of “protecting consumers.”
But in their latest attack, these activists have caught their own tails, and in the course of doing so have demonstrated that their real agenda is anything but innovation and consumer benefit.
The activists’ latest complaint is a new video service called TV Everywhere. Read More...
Even while you are preparing to once again feast on turkey and mashed potatoes, the European Union (EU) is preparing to once again feast on U.S. industry. And while the EU had set the table to dine this week, it has now changed the reservation to late January. What is on the menu? Two American companies, Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
Oracle is seeking to merge with Sun in order to be more competitive now and in the future. The U.S. Department of Justice approved, stating that, "Several factors led the Division to conclude that the proposed transaction is unlikely to be anticompetitive."
But earlier this month the EU issued a "Statement of Objections" to the proposed merger. With this statement the EU has made clear that it has decided to continue its push to be the global regulator, apparently thinking that regulation of the global software industry (which is vastly domiciled in the U.S.) is the way to demonstrate European-style innovation. Read More...
The delegate from India requested that language be inserted into a particular project explaining that "IP has inherent anticompetitive elements" and that the project needs to "address anticompetitive behaviors such as refusal to license."
The member of the WIPO Secretariat, in response, explained to India that "if you make it illegal for rightsholders to refuse to license, you destroy the IP system."
Which is undoubtedly the India delegate's point. Read More...
The Obama Administration has earned kudos for their vision of using of technology to be a primary part of the solution to policy challenges from improved healthcare to efficient energy usage.
And while considering the application of existing technology to current problems is ahead of typical political thinking, it is still fairly two dimensional. The true promise of an information technology-based health system or of a smart grid for greener energy is the ongoing innovation, the promise of better and better solutions.
The administration and Capitol Hill need to broaden their thinking beyond particular solutions and begin considering ways to foster and empower a solution economy.
What makes up the solution economy?—a society that allows the freedom to innovate and experiment with ideas.
That requires an environment that encourages, or certainly allows, risk by providing reward. Read More...
Somewhere lost in all of the heated rhetoric about whether or not to move the country to a government health insurance plan are the patients—those who are and who will be ailing but who could be helped by advances in technology if that technology were deployed and not hindered.
Lost in all the rhetoric is that all the pieces of health care must work together to work in the interests of patients—not politicians or bureaucrats.
While the healthcare reform debate goes on, other parts of government are acting to the detriment of a better healthcare system and causing near and long term harm to those whose future well-being depends on innovation.
Perhaps the greatest threat is the FCC’s newly suggested heavy regulation of the Internet. As currently proposed the new regulations could hinder network providers from giving priority to healthcare applications. Read More...
Now, there's nothing particularly unusual about spoiled college students protesting. They've become accustomed to subsidized tuition at the expense of the working population of the state, and it makes sense to them that taxes should be raised on their parents and grandparents rather than ask them to go out and get a part-time job or something to help pay for tuition. A job would get in the way of frat parties, after all.
But I was particularly struck by the chant that "education should be free." Seems to me that it's a logical extension of the philosophy they've been taught that "information wants to be free," and that music should be free. Read More...
I’ve just returned from an overseas trip, and once again I was reminded of how pervasive American entertainment media is around the world.
Wherever you go in the world, you find American television shows and movies on TV, American movies in the theaters, and American music on the radio. Looking beyond entertainment, you’ll see American-made software on their laptops and on the computers in the hotel business center.
And the medicines they’re taking are mostly made by American companies as well.
You don’t find American plumbing fixtures in the hotel bathroom, and you don’t see people wearing American-made clothes. They’re not driving American cars, and they’re not using American-made electrical appliances. But they’re consuming American creative goods almost to the exclusion of anything else. It’s striking, actually. Read More...
As most states have watched their coffers dwindle over the last couple years, state revenue authorities have become increasingly creative in finding ways to drain more money from the citizens via fees and taxes.
The healthy way to generate more revenue is to grow the tax base by attracting more businesses or residents to the state.
And attracting more businesses involves having appropriate infrastructure, skilled workers and competitive educational systems, but most of all maintaining a minimal tax and regulatory burden. For some reason, this seems beyond the reach of many state governments these days. Instead, it’s easier to go on a “tax grab,” looking around for easy new sources of cash.
But some sources of new revenue have the downside of also leading to new costs. Read More...
A common theme in science fiction literature and movies is technology run wild. The machines take over, bioweapons researchers accidentally release an engineered virus into the population, or nano-sized machines suddenly develop intelligence and start malevolently chewing through the biosphere, leaving a sea of “grey goo” in their wake.
There’s just enough of a nugget of truth in the setup of these dramas to make them remotely believable. But that’s where science fiction doomsday scenarios depart from human experience. The fact is that innovation and technology have led to the creation of wealth, better health, greater access to knowledge, and thus overall greater quality of life.
But there are still parts of the world that innovation hasn’t reached—where people don’t have access to clean water, adequate health care, basic energy and educational resources. Read More...
There's a big of a dust-up going on between some liberal Democratic activists who are angry at Howard Dean because he's
Now, I'm no fan of Howard Dean, and beyond that, as a conservative and as a Republican I get a kick out of internecine warfare on the other side of the aisle. I thought it was only Republicans who turned the knives on each other, so it's fun to see that it happens on the other side, too.
This is happening within a context where the anti-intellectual property activists within the Democrat Party were convinced that the new Obama administration was going to hand them their IP skeptic agenda on a silver platter.
But it isn't happening, and I didn't think it would happen. The IP case for the American economy and for American innovation is so strong, such a slam dunk, that even Democrats get it (sorry, couldn't resist). Read More...
Well, it didn't take long. Only 40 minutes into the WIPO conference on global challenges, the speaker from Brazil has suggested compulsory licensing for patented green technologies.
I'm attending an important 2-day conference of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on intellectual property and public policy issues. The key policy issues are climate change, public health and access to medicines, and food security.
I'm here braced for arguments that patents are an obstacle to pressing public policy issues in these three areas.
These green technologies are being referred to as "adaptation and mitigation technologies."
The speaker from Brazil, Haraldo de Oliveira Machado Filho, concluded "An agreement along these lines is crucial to 'seal the deal' in Copenhagen."
Mr. Taxali, an illustrator based in Toronto whose work has appeared in publications like Time, Newsweek and Fortune, received a call in April from a member of Google’s marketing department. According to Mr. Taxali, the Google representative explained that the project will let users customize Google Chrome pages with artist-designed “skins” in their borders.
“The first question I asked,” Mr. Taxali said in a recent interview, “is ‘What’s the fee?’”
Mr. Taxali said that when he was told Google would pay nothing, he declined.
In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. Read More...
Google’s “experiment” in using Wikipedia as a news source on Google News is over, at least in the U.S. and Canada. The experiment was obviously a success, because Google has confirmed for us that the idea has been expanded. Says Google spokesperson Gabriel Stricker:
“As with many features on Google News, these links were initially launched as an experiment. Now they’ve been rolled out to all English language editions of Google News.”
Do I even need to explain why this is just WRONG? Read More...
Commerce Minister Eduardo Samán announced on Saturday that “patents have become a barrier to production” and stymie access to medicine, placing the interests of multinational pharmaceutical companies ahead of the welfare and needs of the Venezuelan people. With President Hugo Chávez calling patents a “trap,” the government will now revise its patent system, annulling certain pharmaceutical patents and allowing domestic manufacturers to produce licensed medicines. This action follows a recent reform in intellectual property laws authorized by President Chavez.
Patent reform has been stalled on Capitol Hill for years. Nearly everyone agrees that reform of the system is needed to some extent. From patent fees being diverted away from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for better, more innovative operations, to great concerns over how damages in lawsuits are apportioned, there is room for improvement in this critical area.
Yes, critical. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) about 40 percent of current U.S. economic growth tends to be attributed to intangible assets. As a result, in part, the Department of Commerce has had an innovation metrics committee, which along with BEA, has tried to identify the value of intangible assets. In absolute terms, intangible assets have accounted for approximately 4.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) during the post-WW II era, but in the last few years have swelled to between 6.5 percent and 8.5 percent of GDP. Read More...
On your local oldies radio station, when you hear Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons’ hit song “December 1963 (Oh, What a Night),” neither Frankie Valli nor The Four Seasons receive any income from the broadcast of their performance.
Now, Bob Gaudio, the songwriter/composer, makes some small royalty for his musical work (the song itself). When the song is included in the stage production of “Jersey Boys” along with the background history of the song, the playwright is compensated. If “Jersey Boys” was ever made into a movie, that audiovisual work would enjoy a full performance right. If the book Jersey Boys by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elise is ever made into a book on tape they will get compensated for that, as will whoever performs the reading. But for the over-the-air broadcast of the sound recording, the basis of all the derivative products, performers do not get compensated for their creativity. Read More...
Okay, so justice has prevailed (thus far), and criminals who gleefully thumbed their noses at the law and who recruited others to do the same have been found guilty of breaking laws that they undoubtedly broke.
It would have been an outrage had it turned out any other way.
Let me just ask a question: Do we think Bernard Madoff should be convicted for bilking his investors out of their money?
You said "yes." I heard you say it.
I agree with you. But I'd like to point out that, at the very least, his investors willingly chose to trust him with their money and apparently at least had the ability to do due diligence on the person they gave their money to.
While the Pirate Bay crooks stole from people who did NOT willingly give their money or property to them. The Pirate Bay crooks stole money from others, and encouraged others to engage in similar theft on a massive scale.
We’re firm believers that the 25-year economic expansion that started in 1982 and lasted through 2007 was due in large part to adoption of policies that rewarded investment capital, by encouraging its formation, incentivizing its deployment, and resisting the devaluation of inflation.
But it’s also undeniable that a key driver of the increase in productivity that buoyed the economic expansion was technological innovation and its adoption throughout the economy.
We would argue that, in fact, this was a virtuous cycle, with increased investment capital helping to fund and to drive innovation in the American economy.
Innovation also requires human capital—where knowledge and understanding, thinking, experimenting, trying and failing, and eventually succeeding result in innovation.
In other words, human capital + investment capital = innovation, and innovation drives increased productivity and economic growth. Read More...
It's not big surprise that the CopyLefties would be arguing that it's perfectly fine for an artist to find a licensed photo on the Internet and use it without paying or even acknowledging the owner of the photo. That's pretty much standard for the CopyLeft. They feel free to take what they want, because, you see, that's really what creativity is. Creativity isn't the hours of work and the years of experience that go into creating the original creative work. Creativity is taking someone's creation and splashing a little yellow paint on it. THAT's creativity. You call it a mash-up, and you're on the cutting edge of creativity, and you are so much more creative than the person who did the original work that they aren't even worth mentioning, unless they have agreed to abandon all their rights and use the borrower's licensing system, Creative Commons. Read More...
The economic consequences of sites such as the Pirate Bay, which attempt to find loopholes in the existing intellectual-property system, will be dire – and even more so in a downturn. The knowledge economy is based on a trade-off in which the investments and time put into the creation of new content allow their owners to sell it for a price, not least in order to recover their own costs. But when this side of the equation is not respected then the entire rationale of the system is lost.
On this, the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birthday, I thought I'd briefly review Lincoln's view on intellectual property.
Lincoln was a firm believer in intellectual property. He is famously quoted as saying that "the patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius."
Lincoln also called called the introduction of patent laws one of the three most important developments "in the world’s history," along with the discovery of America and the perfection of printing.
Lincoln was the only American president to himself hold a patent. Abraham Lincoln received Patent #6,469 for "A Device for Buoying Vessels Over Shoals" on May 22, 1849. Read More...
Except that there is a terribly important point in the piece regarding IP and "green tech." Namely, that there is an emerging international argument that "green tech" technologies are too compelling to allow them to be covered by patents in the traditional sense, because, in their philosophy, that locks the knowledge away from the developing countries most in need of this critical "tech transfer."
Huawei Technologies Co., a major telecommunications company based in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province in southern China, filed 1,737 international patent applications under WIPO's Patent Cooperation Treaty in the reporting year, followed by Japan's Panasonic Corp. with 1,729, the report said.
The U.S. is still the largest filer of patents by country. Read More...
"Liz Kennedy, deputy director of communications for the Recording Industry Association of America, said the industry makes every effort to be evenhanded in each download case.
"This is about deterrence," she wrote in an email, "protecting the rights of labels and artists and helping the legitimate marketplace."
Music piracy causes $12.5 billion in losses each year, according to the association, citing a study by the Institute for Policy Innovation..."
If you follow technology issues, you know that 2009 is the year that all of the various “privacy” issues are expected to mature and bloom into new attempts at legislation and regulation.
A basket of issues falls under the rubric of “privacy,” from Internet filtering, packet inspection, behavioral advertising, and data collection and retention policies, and there are legitimate policy problems in each of these areas.
But before getting into the weeds of these various debates, let’s remember some first principles that should govern privacy discussions.
The primary concern of our Founding Fathers, and thus the primary purpose of the Constitution, was to protect private citizens from their government. Read More...
The Chicago Tribune cites IPI’s music piracy study in an editorial discussing the threat of music piracy, enforcement and more.
An excerpt:
“The Recording Industry Association of America says 7.8 million U.S. households a month steal music online. That means singers, songwriters, musicians, producers and others don't get compensated for their work. The Institute for Policy Innovation, a pro-business think tank, says illegal music sharing costs the U.S. economy $12.5 billion a year.
The music industry's preferred method of fighting this—filing large lawsuits against a tiny percentage of downloaders—has earned the RIAA plenty of bad publicity, with little deterrent effect. The RIAA seems finally to have realized that. It announced last week that it would stop filing lawsuits against individual music thieves Read More...
Amid all the current concern over our economic downturn, it's important to remember that in the most recent decade the U.S. economy has gone through a productivity revolution. Despite all the news about rapid economic growth in places like China and India, there is still no country that can approach the productivity of the U.S. economy.
And according to Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson, this recent U.S. productivity increase is almost entirely due to the impact of information technology (IT) on business functions throughout the economy.
Indeed, IT has transformed almost every sector of the U.S. economy, with one glaring exception—government, and those sectors dominated by government, such as health care and education.
It's widely understood that government agencies are still using outdated technology as they attempt to do their missions. And government spending on IT has often simply been a waste of taxpayer dollars. Read More...
Before the financial mess, Congress was debating a bill that would establish new rules for an incredibly promising field of medical technology. The Pathway for Biosimilars Act includes new rules for intellectual property protection for "biologics," or pharmaceuticals derived from living organisms. Most of what you know about traditional prescription drugs doesn't apply to biologics. They usually come in a vial, not a pill. They are as effective as they are complex; indeed they are effective because they are complex. Biologic drugs have proven effective against diseases like cancer, multiple sclerosis and diabetes.
The Act is a step in the right direction. A robust legal framework for the industry will keep investment dollars flowing and preserve incentives for firms to develop treatments. Read More...
In a brand new op/ed published today in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, IPI senior research fellow Chris Israel discusses what’s at stake for green-tech innovation if the next administration fails to protect the industry’s intellectual property.
An excerpt:
"The need to achieve technological breakthroughs to provide cleaner, more efficient, cheaper and more abundant sources of energy is not just a campaign issue for the next two weeks, but a paradigm-shifting challenge for an entire generation of Americans.
John McCain and Barack Obama have issued long lists of policy objectives to address America’s energy challenges and stimulate the nascent clean-energy technologies that will provide the answers. Read More...
The basics of this case are as follows: Sherry Lenz posted a short video of her small child dancing to Prince; Universal, Prince's label, generated a notice-and-take-down; Lenz sought a judgment against Universal on various grounds. Ultimately, the case was resolved an interesting issue involving the DMCA, as follows:
Technically, fair use is a defense to a claim of infringement. Thus, Universal contended that all it need do to justify initiating a notice-and take-down procedure was claim infringement; any unauthorized copying would qualify. It would then be up to the defendant to dispute the procedure and get to the fair use issue.
I don't agree with the position that this is a *ridiculous* argument, although it might seem so to a novice or nonlawyer.Read More...
The user-generated video site Veoh achieved a victory in court on August 27th when California District Judge Howard Lloyd ruled that it was entitled to the protection of the DMCA's safe harbor provisions. Veoh was accused of copyright infringement by IO Group, a maker of adult films...
Like eBay v. Tiffany, another case in which one might trumpet a tech-side win... the tech gets at least some protection from liability. Read More...
Last month my comments on the Veoh decision went up on DRMWatch. This case ruled that a content provider that did not notify the "Internet television" provider Veoh of infringing film clips posted on Veoh's site by Veoh users, but simply sued Veoh for infringement, was entitled at most only to injunctive relief, because of the DMCA's safe harbor. Several incremental steps in the case are worthy of note.
One is the reference to Cablevision, the remote DVR case decided by the Second Circuit recently. The issue was, again, who made the copies? Was it the users, who choose the material and command the system in the instant case, or the service providers, who own the system that provides the mechanism? Read More...
In a brand new op/ed published today in The Shreveport Times, IPI resident scholar and health care expert Dr. Merrill Matthews discusses a “step in the right direction” to protecting intellectual property rights and therefore the future of a critical new frontier in medicine—biologics.
Matthews writes:
“Congress is currently debating a bill that would establish new rules for one of the most promising fields of medical technology this country has ever seen. The Pathway for Biosimilars Act includes new rules for intellectual property protection for "biologics," pharmaceutical drugs derived from living organisms.
Most of what you think you know about traditional prescription drugs doesn't apply to biologics. They usually come in a vial, not a pill. They are as effective as they are complex; indeed they are effective because they are complex. Read More...
Peter Sunde is now arguing that they were breaking the law by scraping the site multiple times without permission. “The Pirate Bay actually owns the copyright to its own database of torrents,” Sunde writes on his blog. Sunde further refers to the Pirate Bay’s Usage Policy, which the book publishers organization has violated.
As we noted in July of 2007, Rwanda filed a curious notification to the WTO TRIPS Council to compulsory licensing (CL) HIV/AIDS medications, despite continuing to receive no-cost drugs (and related infrastructure assistance) and also having no ongoing TRIPS obligations with respect to patents.
At that time, I pointed this out I asked why Rwanda would devote any of its scarce resources to a purely political process, which, by necessity, would divert funds from the actual treatment of patients?
No one contradicted this assessment.
However, IPI did receive heartfelt concurrence from two actively engaged individuals echoing the view that the problem is not fundamentally patents. These commentators pointed to intricately and deeply connected issues of culture, gender-equity and, of course, poverty. Read More...
“Free trade agreements (FTAs) between the U.S. and developing countries like Jordan and Mexico, to name just a few, have generated long-term social and economic benefits for both partners. Nonetheless, President Bush’s recent call to renew FTA talks in Thailand in recent days brought more jeers than cheers from so-called civil society groups.
Those activists reportedly fear that a U.S. FTA would curtail Thailand’s continued expansion of compulsory licensing, a controversial practice in which a country over-rides intellectual property rights (generally) associated with a brand name prescription drug. Read More...
IPI president Tom Giovanetti and Bartlett Cleland, director of the IPI Center for Technology Freedom, are featured today in 'The Hill' with a brand new op/ed entitled, "Innovation Salvation."
Giovanetti and Cleland write:
"Bad things usually happen in the waning hours of just about any Congress, as the pressure to clear the decks often overwhelms good judgment. Occasionally, however, an exception appears.
A bipartisan group of senators, led by Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), is leading an effort to enact The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act (S.3325), in order to strengthen significantly our government’s effort to protect American innovation and creativity.
The federal government has a tremendously important and unique role to play in intellectual property (IP) enforcement. Read More...
Amidst the headline grabbing economic crisis a bipartisan group of senators, led by Pat Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA), is fighting to enact The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act (S.3325), to strengthen significantly our government’s effort to protect American innovation, creativity and our future economic growth.
The federal government has a critical role to play in intellectual property (IP) enforcement. Only the government can:
bring criminal charges in cases of organized and prolific piracy and counterfeiting,
conduct the investigations necessary to build and prove these cases,
effectively engage our trading partners on behalf of U.S. rights holders and
provide comprehensive leadership on a problem that has reached global scale and affects millions of Americans.
This won't be a particularly content-rich blog entry, I admit . . .
So, we're halfway through Day 2 at the WIPO General Assembly meetings in Geneva, Switzerland. And they're still making opening statements.
I know I complained about this years ago, and ought to be over it by now, but I just can't get over it.
You see, at the very beginning, they elect a chairman for the meeting. Then, the first item on the agenda was accepting the election of the new Director General, Francis Gurry, and saying nice things about the outgoing DG, Kamal Idris.
Then, country after country gives opening statements congratulating the chairman of the meeting for his election, congratulating Gurry for his election, thanking Idris for his contribution, and pledging their support for WIPO.
But, every country does and says the same thing, slightly differently. Chad, Bhutan, Nepal, Nigeria, Trinidad & Tobago, Algeria, Bangladesh, Namibia . . . Read More...
For those who follow international IP policy issues, Francis Gurry (Australia) has been accepted by WIPO as the new Director General, without any negative interventions.
Gurry gave a truly interesting acceptance speech. He summarized the problems facing the IP system, including patent offices being overwhelmed with workload and backlog, and also the problems caused by filesharing.
It was refreshing to hear the new Director General using terms like "illegal" and "piracy and counterfeiting."
In his speech, Gurry demonstrated a vision for the future of the IP system with WIPO at the center, rather than being left behind because of failure to update the PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) system, or paralyzed because of political infighting.
Gurry clearly plans to restructure things at WIPO. He fears (I think) the organization being left behind unless significant changes are made, and he's right. There is nothing preventing the developed Read More...
“The world's intellectual property system is broken, stopping lifesaving technologies from reaching the people who need them most in developed and developing countries, according to a report released in Ottawa today by an international coalition of experts.”
So says the grandiosely entitled “International Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property.” But, in fact, the majority of these self-anointed experts hail not from international biotech hot-spots like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune but from various Canadian universities. And since the report was funded by the Canadian government, the “study” is really the perspective of the policy establishment in Canada, a nation that isn’t exactly known as a hotspot of IP production. Read More...
Continuing protests destabilizing Thailand’s democratically elected government appear to enjoy tacit support from the military and from former military rulers. Given continuing threats to democracy in Thailand, it may be timely to recall some of the controversial policies of the former military junta, the last time around, like the abrogation of rule-of-law protections for private intellectual property rights, also known as compulsory licensing.
Compulsory licensing is controversial practice in which a country over-rides intellectual property rights (generally) associated with a brand name prescription drug. On review, it turns out, this counterproductive move had little or nothing to do with urgent public health needs, and everything to do with the junta’s need to bite the hands of multinational companies to further their political ends. Read More...
The Second Circuit has authored an important opinion on whether Cablevision's remote digital video recording service infringes the copyrights of content providers like the Cartoon Network. I review the opinion here for DRMWatch.
My take in a nutshell--Cablevision won the battle, but the Second Circuit broadly hints that the irked content providers might have had better luck in the war with a theory of indirect infringement. Though it isn't that simple... the content providers might not be all that happy arguing that there is indirect infringement, because for that they must argue that the customers are directly infringing. And run into Sony's time-shifting fair use defense, among other issues (is this just a Tivo with a really long wire?). Read More...
IPI adjunct fellow Solveig Singleton is cited in today’s Washington Internet Daily, in an article entitled “‘Cloud’ Services Test Copyright, but Recent Rulings Offer Hope.”
An excerpt:
Cloud services are "pushing the outer boundaries of [court] precedent, but more gently" than predecessors did, by noting demonstrated DMCA compliance, Solveig Singleton of the Institute for Policy Innovation told us.
If a service itself "is not making an effort to promote that particular [infringing] use," courts may not be perturbed by demonstrated user infringement. Along with the Veoh ruling, eBay's recent victories over trademark infringement suits (WID Aug 14 p5) show that active deterrence wins with judges, she said. Read More...
There's this issue now related to intellectual property protection and consumer electronics (yes, another one) called "selectable output controls."
Suffice it to say that, yet again, the content industries are trying to protect their content against piracy, and the free culture geniuses like those over at Public Knowledge are against it.
In this entry I won't go into the details of the selectable output control issue. We'll be doing more on that later. My purposes here are to illustrate the (frankly) lazy thinking that lies behind much of the free culture movement.
How do the experts over at Public Knowledge come up with their policy positions? What kind of legal and economic research and background goes into their policy conclusions?
The post began with asking a question... "Why do you pirate my games?" And the author was surprised by the answers, which came down to
objections to intellectual property in principal
objections to price
objections to low game quality (bugs etc.) and
objections to DRM
objections to distribution channel (i.e. too cumbersome to outlets other than Steam and finally
people who admitted that they liked free stuff and they could get away with it.
The author intends to respond as much as he can, by improving the quality of his games, lowering the price, and leaving off the DRM. It will be interesting to see the results. Read More...
As a recent IPI Techbyte mentioned, there were a number of IP issues discussed on the margins of the recent WTO Ministerial Meetings in Geneva, including proposals for new, additional disclosure obligations relating to inventions based on genetic resources.
What is the harm, disclosure demandeurs in Geneva asked, with amending TRIPS to add formal requirements to state the source and origin of genetic resources, and related traditional knowledge in patent applications? Wouldn’t this add transparency and ensure against misappropriation and misuse of bio-diverse resources, generally known as “bio-piracy”?
Leave aside, for the moment, the “how-long-have-you-been-beating-your-wife” quality of these questions, where proponents have, to date, failed to define key terms and concepts, let alone document the scope or depth of the problem.
Instead, let’s look at the law of unintended consequences. Read More...
The Wall Street Journal recently ran has an important article by Stuart Weinberg, "Caught in the Crossfire." It describes the difficulties that small firms face in licensing patents to large firms. The fuss about bad patents and so called "patent trolls"--firms that own patents, but do neither research nor production, and that make their money from suing other firms--has lead legislators and courts to consider steps to make it easier to challenge and less disastrous to infringe patents. But the result is significantly less protection for small firms that do invent and then license.
"Caught in the Crossfire," describes the efforts of one firm, which was in the midst of negotiations to license its patents to Microsoft, when Microsoft initiated proceedings at the patent office questioning the validity of all its patents. Whatever the merit of the technology at issue, clearly this sort of proceeding has a bad flavor. Read More...
The apparent collapse of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Doha round of trade talks is indefensible. But at least one good thing came out of it: the (temporarily, at least) failure of an effort to amend WTO’s TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) provisions in some alarming ways.
A group of developing countries, with the assistance of the European Union, was fighting to make several substantive changes to TRIPS:
Establish an international register of geographical indicators (GI) for wine and spirits;
Extend GI protections for products other than wine and spirits; and, finally,
Bring TRIPS into compliance with the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
The international GI register has already been agreed to and seems to have little negative impact if it’s voluntary and nonbinding. Read More...
Since the annual meeting of the G8 is one of the most significant policy events of the year, it was a positive sign that “Protection of Intellectual Property Rights” was prominent on the list of global economic issues discussed by G8 leaders in Japan.
At the Summit, leaders reaffirmed their commitment to stepped-up efforts to combat piracy and counterfeiting, namely through support of the Standards to be Employed by Customs for Uniform Rights Enforcement (SECURE) initiative at the World Customs Organization, and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which is currently being negotiated by the U.S., EU, Japan and several other nations.
This support is important and well-timed. It should serve as a rebuke to an alarming campaign being waged by a group of leftist non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and academics that is almost impossible to explain. Read More...
A new proposal, currently called the “Organized Retail Crime Act of 2008,” is floating around the US Senate these days—a proposal to fight organized crime that involves “the theft and interstate fencing of large volumes of stolen retail merchandise.” That is to say that the purported purpose is to crack down on counterfeit and stolen goods that may be sold on the Internet.
Indeed, that sounds pretty good…for a title anyway.
The reality is that the proposal conscripts “operator(s) of an online marketplace.” So sites such as eBay and Amazon.com, which allow sellers to engage in business on their site, would be forced to be the cops of the Internet.
Worse, the proposal specifically reverses well-established law that makes clear that “interactive computer services” (any information service, such as a website or Internet service provider), are not liable for third-party content. Read More...
The need to achieve technological breakthroughs to provide cleaner, more efficient sources of energy may indeed be the race-to-the-moon for this generation of American inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs.
Clean energy technologies will come in hundreds of variations and will take billions to develop, test and deploy. To sustain this model there must be a global marketplace where intellectual property (IP) and innovation are rewarded according to economic drivers such as value, quality and demand. In essence, the clean energy revolution will only be as effective in solving our energy needs worldwide as the determination to promote and protect the underlying IP.
A proliferation of national strategies to promote the clean energy industry will develop, but there must also be a global approach that prioritizes real world impact while respecting IP and the innovation process.
What must some of the first steps in this global approach be? Read More...
As if we needed more, there is additional fodder today for us Wikipedia-haters. ctions to Wikipedia go far beyond inaccuracies, of course. Read More...
The U.S., Japan, the EU and a number of other countries whose economies and consumers are paying a heavy price because of the growing plague of piracy and counterfeiting are meeting this week in Geneva to discuss an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). ACTA would establish a high standard for intellectual property enforcement and would hopefully grow over time to include a wide range of countries committed to the fight against illicit trade.
Sounds like a reasonable idea and the type of leadership needed, right? Well, there are actually two caveats to that view. First, you have to believe in intellectual property rights in the first place, and second, you have to also support the effort to protect consumers, workers and businesses from piracy and counterfeiting.
The anti-IP activists don’t share these priorities and, therefore, are incredibly concerned about the work being done to develop ACTA. Read More...
In 2003 when I first visited Ranbaxy headquarters then located in downtown New Delhi, I was struck by the framed and prominently displayed Ranbaxy mission statement, developed a decade previously, that Ranbaxy would become a billion dollar firm, and an ''international, research-driven, pharmaceutical company.''
The framed statement in the lobby, I later learned, also sits in front of every Ranbaxy senior executive. Since that time, Ranbaxy has accomplished those goals and more through important, early research collaborations with GSK and more recently Merck.
Overnight the big news is that Ranbaxy has more than caught the eye of a major Japanese pharmaceutical company, Daiichi Sankyo Company, that seeks to acquire a major stake in Ranbaxy. Read More...
I'm known in IPI's offices and among friends for my distain for Wikipedia, which knows no bounds and admittedly has become almost irrational. I won't go into the reasons here, but it has to do with our society's rejection of accomplishment and expertise, and obsession with equality which has resulted in an ethic of "anyone can (and has the right to) write an encylopedia."
ACTA is an attempt to put together a treaty to ensure closer cooperation between governments in fighting piracy and counterfeiting, which is an increasingly important issue to countries, especially countries with developed economies, since they are more dependent on the creative industries, and thus incur significant economic damages from counterfeits and piracy.
Additionally, counterfeit medicines have become a serious health concern, especially in developing countries but also in developed countries.
As I said, the leftist IP skeptic community (commune?) is coming unglued. Read More...
Barry at Music Row Law considers a recent think tank report recommending a five point plan for the music industry.
In a nutshell, he points out key flaws with the proposal. It isn't helpful to call for the music industry to follow the path of Google and give away content for free—Whether one thinks of Google's content as its software or as the web sites one finds through Google, either way, Google is “not giving away their own content” and they don't pay to produce it (a basic point I blogged on at IPcentral some years back and which it would be rather embarassing for anyone to miss). Read More...
In 2006, the World Health Organization launched its International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce (IMPACT). The reason and importance behind this effort was clearly and succinctly captured in an IMPACT-produced brochure that reads, “Counterfeit Drugs Kill.”
How curious and disappointing then it is to see some influential nations oppose the IMPACT effort, and, in fact, question entirely the need for WHO and leading nations to step up efforts to combat the deluge of dangerous, illicit medicines.
At the recent World Health Assembly in Geneva, a group of developing countries that included India, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Thailand thundered loudly against the WHO’s IMPACT initiative because it may stand in the way of the parallel trade of generic manufacturers. Read More...
The Ninth Conference of the Parties (COP) concluding today in Bonn, Germany may signal an important mind-shift in the workings of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), an organization of some 190 countries that in the past has been called "a trade treaty negotiated by environmentalists."
For a time, it appeared that CBD COP (Ministerial) decisions with important economic ramifications were taken in isolation from practical considerations of how to move from the negotiation room to the marketplace, diminishing the impact of key policies and causing frustration all the way around. There was a feeling that the CBD was not a forum that was "open for business." To be blunt, it was simply not sustainable for CBD Members to tackle the nature and magnitude of current biodiversity challenges in isolation from the market. It is increasingly critical for business to be mainstreamed into CBD discussions, and we have seen exactly that trend in recent years. Read More...
H.R. 1201, the ill-named “Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship” (FAIR USE) Act, is the latest attempt to unravel the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), while taking the Supreme Court’s unanimous Grokster decision and recent U.S. trade treaties down with it in a single piece of legislation.
There was an interesting exchange at a reception held in Geneva this week by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA).
A Q&A session ensued after presentations on the challenges of developing and distributing medicines for neglected diseases by Dr. Chris Hentschel, President and CEO of Medicines for Malaria Venture, Dr. Bernard Pecoul, Executive Director, Drug for Neglected Diseases Initiative and Dr. Paul Herrling, Head of Corporate Research for Novartis.
Jamie Love, Director of the Consumer Project on Technology, asked whether the panel supported the (his) proposal for replacing the current structure of IP-based innovation and development with some mix of a global R&D fund and prize structure for new medicines.
Several good points where made, all of which cast doubt on Love’s proposals. Read More...
The World Health Assembly in Geneva is this week’s forum for those seeking to roll back incentives for innovation and strip away the value of intellectual property.
As predicted, a range of activist NGOs (non-governmental organizations) were back to pick up on a battle against intellectual property that had delivered them some notable setbacks in recent weeks. These setbacks include the election of Frances Gurry to lead the World Intellectual Property Organization and a recent meeting of the World Health Organization’s Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property that failed to embrace their agenda of targeting the global patent system. But the anti-IP crowd is already flying in the face of established trade policies, decades of proven innovation models and a proliferation of expansive programs by the private sector to provide access to medicines, so a couple recent losses are probably not that big of a deal. Read More...
Remember a couple of weeks ago when Francis Gurry won by a single vote over Brazil's candidate for the next Director General of WIPO?
Well, apparently, Brazil isn't going to take the results of a democratic vote sitting down.
From Geneva, we hear that Brazil has suddenly become noticeably contentious at the World Health Assembly, where delegates are trying to finish drafting language that came out of the IGWG process related to intellectual property and medical innovation.
In fact, the dynamic has been described to me as Brazil challenging virtually every proposal that the U.S. offers up, and that the discussions have been reduced to a U.S. vs. Brazil match. Reportedly, the E.U. and Canada have stated that they find Brazil's tactics troubling.
Speculation is that Brazil is trying to get back at the U.S. for engineering a successful vote for Gurry.
I recently reviewed the case of Atlantic Recording v. Howell for DRMWatch.
The coverage of this case by many journalists and bloggers has been extremely silly. Take this story by Richard Korman, entitled Court Ruling Could End P2P Music-Download Lawsuits,citing the author of the Recording Industry v. the People blog Ray Beckerman.
Simply put, the prediction that this will mean the end of such suits is flat out wrong. Most courts have not relied on the "making available" theory to find liability. In the future, if the case is followed by other courts (possible, but unlikely), it simply means that the plaintiff copyright owners will produce somewhat more evidence--something they Read More...
The IP-skeptic activist groups took it on the chin last week, as their plans for socializing the intellectual property (IP) system hit a setback.
For those of you new to the IP policy battles, several activist NGOs (non-governmental organizations) with a socialist worldview are trying to undermine the international IP system, as they see intellectual property as a public good, something that belongs to the entire public—regardless of who invents it or who pays for the development of that IP.
And so for several years they have worked within the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in an effort to weaken IP standards, especially on pharmaceuticals.
Their argument, all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, is that pharmaceutical patents undermine access to needed drugs in poor countries. Read More...
In October of 2006, I was privileged to participate as a plenary speaker at a high-level Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) conference organized by the State of Maharashtra on the convergence of Information Technology (IT) and Biotechnology (BT) as a vehicle for growth in Pune, India. At the IT-BT Conference, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Vilas Rao Deshmukh, awarded lifetime achievement awards to individuals who had dedicated their careers to doing one thing, and doing it extremely well, for a period of 30 years or more, including, among others, the eminent former head of the Indian Council for Science and Research, Dr. R.A. Mashelkar, Read More...
Good news! At least for all rational, right-thinking persons.
Recent days have seen two very encouraging events in some of the international fora where radical anti-IP activists have been trying to derail the intellectual property system. The radicals have experienced two major setbacks in their attempts to take advantage of tensions between developed and developing economies and use those tensions to further their radical anti-IP agenda.
Their most recent setback was yesterday's election of Francis Gurry to be the next Director General of WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization. Gurry was the chose of those nations who actually materially participate in the IP system, registering patents, creating and inventing things, and trying to share their creations with the rest of the world through trade.
Today is the day when the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) elects its new Director General.
If you think WIPO matters, then of course the leader of WIPO matters, so within international IP circles, this is a big deal.
Ideally, you would have someone who is not only free of corruption, but also someone who at least thinks intellectual property is an important concept. You might think that anyone who is a candidate for the DG position at WIPO would think IP was important, but you would be wrong, at least about several of the candidates.
In a very short time, in the process of a straw poll and then a couple of rounds of voting, the list of candidates has shrunk from 15 to three. Right now it's down to Francis Gurry (Australia), Masood Kahn (Pakistan), and José Graça Aranha (Brazil).
At the last vote, Gurry had 26 votes, Kahn 13, and Aranha 18. But that was before twelve of the candidates dropped out, Read More...
IPI senior research fellow Chris Israel is featured today with a new op/ed on Forbes.com, entitled, “Managing Against Illegal Content.”
In the op/ed, Israel discusses the recent Comcast/BitTorrent agreement and how the market-based resolution also offers better solutions to protecting intellectual property online.
An excerpt:
”Now we have a chance to manage against illegal content on the Web.
Indeed, the recent announcement made by Comcast and BitTorrent that they will work together to find a market-based solution to the network management challenges posed by the huge bandwidth demands of peer-to-peer file sharing is positive on two fronts.
First, as FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell pointed out in his response to the announcement, it clearly demonstrates that the market is truly the best vehicle for finding solutions to problems in a rapidly changing digital environment. Read More...
Should Internet application providers be liable for illegal material such as pornography, copyright violations and civil rights infractions that pass through their “pipes” or through their service?
The general principle has been that, so long as the provider passively allows traffic to flow through and does not look at or interact with the material, that provider exists within a “safe harbor” and is not legally liable.
But how passive is passive enough? This question is now in the weeds with recent decisions concerning civil rights and interactive web services like craigslist.
As a collector of arguments for and against intellectual property, I find that behind the rhetorical flourishes about monopoly and property, a good many of them turn on premises about empirical reality that are difficult to check. One subset (con) concerns enforcement costs--for nontangibles, these tend to be on the high side, especially in the digital age. Another subset (pro) concerns overall benefits. The difficulty is, how do we know what would have happened if the law being assessed had not been passed?
Studies that compare one country with other otherwise similarly situated countries help. So do studies that compare countries "before" and "after." Here is a recent, comprehensive effort issued under the auspices of the OECD:
A few weeks ago, we wrote about France’s expansion of its champagne region to sate the discerning palates of nouveau-riche Chinese and Indian consumers.
It gets better. In addition to brow-beating international producers of sparkling wine into giving up the commercially valuable “champagne” label, now France is going after use of the “de Champagne” label in Champagne, Switzerland, even for biscuits sold under the brand since the 1930’s. No joke. Read More...
In a new article today discussing New York attorney general Mario Cuomo’s proposal of a bill to put the heat on film pirates, Variety cites IPI’s 2006 study, “The True Cost of Motion Picture Piracy to the U.S. Economy.”
An excerpt:
At a press conference Monday morning in Gotham, New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo held up a pirated "Iron Man" DVD to introduce legislation for harsher penalties with the Piracy Protection Act.
"The movie 'Iron Man' came out, on Friday. This is already a bootleg stolen copy of 'Iron Man.' It was in the theaters this weekend, it's already been stolen, and it's already being distributed," Cuomo said.
Cuomo was joined by NBC U prexy-CEO Jeff Zucker, several industry members, state senators and "Baby Mama" thesp and Gothamite Tina Fey. Read More...
Here in Geneva at the World Health Organization’s Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property, there is a really bad idea floating around.
There is a small group of neo-Marxist activists who don’t like intellectual property (IP). Having lost the Marxist battle against real property rights many years ago, these neo-Marxists carry on the fight against intellectual property.
In essence they want to eliminate the economic incentives—the heart of capitalism—that propel individuals and companies to innovate and create, primarily because they see economic incentives as evil. In Geneva, that IP angst manifests itself in the loathing of patents.
Oh, they won’t say exactly that, but that’s what they mean. Read More...
A recent ruling by the German Constitutional Court highlights the differences between one European approach to privacy, and privacy in the United States, and the impact of privacy concerns on anti-piracy measures.
German recording studios had adopted the practice of reporting illegal online file sharing to the police, who could then match the online identities reported to them with the sharer's real identity. The German Court ruled, however, that under German law the police could only proceed with the data matching in the case of serious crimes, evidently not including music piracy. Relevant German laws included laws requiring ISPs and telecom providers to retain customer data, and another set protecting Germans' rights to anonymous, surveillance free communications. Read More...
Consistent with my curiosity about the enforcement end of intellectual property, I consider the GAO's recent report on federal IP enforcement efforts. Note that most of the efforts described in the report involve the reproduction of physical counterfeits (medicines, batteries, disks, manufactured goods) rather than copies downloaded across the aether. But as the sheer volume of international trade ramps up, the inability of traditional enforcement institutions to cope effectively begins to resemble their difficulties with the on-line world.
The GAO report confirms that is, however much federal activity has increased in recent years, it is still a very small drop in a very large bucket, with "the number of IP prosecutions by DOJ for fiscal years 2001 through 2005 hovered around 150 cases before increasing to about 200 cases in fiscal year 2006." Read More...
Not many people were aware of an insidious little thing that was going on related to the patent reform bill, which is why I decided to write an op/ed on the topic. It had to do with a handful of big banks who want to trample over the patent of a small Texas company which holds a battle-tested patent on check scanning technology.
I won't go into all the issues here. If you want the background, read my op/ed.
The European Patent Office is holding a very interesting event next month. Titled, European Patent Forum 2008 – Inventing a Cleaner Future, the conference claims to be the first global discussion dedicated to figuring out how “the fields of patenting and intellectual property” can support innovations that will address global energy needs and environmental concerns. The program can be viewed by clicking here.
There are a number of provocative questions and issues to be raised here.
First, there will be an explosion of “green tech” patents in the U.S. and around the world in coming years. Read More...
As several commentors have pointed out, there was an op/ed by Asa Hutchinson on the DataTreasury patent issue in today's Washington Times.
Several commentors want to know "what I think now" after the Hutchinson op/ed. The answer? I now think far less of Hutchinson's intellect and integrity than I did before reading his op/ed.
Several comments, not necessarily in order of importance:
1. As a conservative, Hutchinson's new-found faith in the accuracy and reliability of the New York Times is particularly amusing. The Times article conveniently omits the fact that the DataTreasury IS, in fact, the original filer of the patent. The patent filer lost and then RE-acquired the patent through his new firm, DataTreasury. To say that the only purpose of DataTreasury is to sue banks was misleading of the New York Times to assert, and is disingenuous of Hutchinson to regurgitate.
IPI’s recording music piracy study is cited today in a Chattanooga Times Free Press article discussing the piracy crackdowns occurring on many college campuses.
An excerpt:
…Those scofflaws are at the center of a Tennessee legislative debate on copyright infringement and universities’ responsibility to monitor their students’ online activities.
The state Senate last month passed legislation that could prevent college students from using campus Internet resources for illegal downloads. The bill requires universities with public funding to have a policy on copyright infringement and to report to the Tennessee Higher Education Commission when they have more than 50 copyright infringement violations.
“A lot of my friends are in the music business, and they are basically getting ripped off,” said state Sen. Tim Burchett, R-Knoxville, who sponsored the bill. Read More...
IPI is cited today in a new article from the Mississippi-based Daily Journal.
In the article, staff writer Patsy Brumfield discusses the music industry’s efforts to combat illegal downloading on college campuses. The IPI study, “The True Cost of Sound Recording Piracy to the U.S. Economy,” finds that worldwide theft of sound recordings costs the U.S. economy $12.5 billion and more than 71,000 jobs each year.
An excerpt:
OXFORD - You might say a fellow named John Brooks got off easy. Read More...
These are choices Google is making. You do what you think is important, and Google thinks it's more important to invade your privacy, photograph your house, and collect data on your web browsing than it is to make sure content on YouTube is legal. Read More...
Anyone who is interested in how they are personally connected to the countless negative impacts of global piracy and counterfeiting should mark April 16th on their calendars. That is when a powerful documentary film produced by National Geographic titled "Illicit" premieres on PBS. The film is an adaptation of Dr. Moises Naim’s book of the same name.
People often talk about the “dark underbelly” of this or that, but seldom do we really have our eyes opened to it as powerfully as we do in this film. That fake purse you bought on a whim (and admittedly feel a little guilty about) will leave a sick feeling in your stomach after Dr. Naim shows you who made it, how it got to your street corner and who really gets the $20 you paid for it.
If that doesn’t wake you up, how about cough syrup sold to developing countries that is made from chemical solvents. Read More...
Tim questions things in his blog entry that are established facts. By now he certainly knows the answers to his questions, and in fact knows that his skepticism as to the facts of the case was misplaced. But, of course, he's too busy with other things to do to update his blog with the facts.
You may be, as Tim is, highly skeptical of intellectual property at all, and thus particularly skeptical of such patents as the DataTreasury patents. That's fine; we can have a discussion about that.
A new oped published in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram entitled, “They’re Banking On Getting Away With It,” by IPI President Tom Giovanetti, says a potential move by Congress would reward some financial institutions for infringing patent rights by granting them retroactive legal immunity.
An excerpt:
Property rights protect the little guy. It doesn't matter how wealthy or politically connected you are -- you have control and full legal standing with regard to your property. Because of your property rights, you can't be run over and abused.
The same is true of intellectual property rights. There is something heroic, even romantic, about the small inventor who comes up with a breakthrough idea. The patent is his property right; his protection. It means that big companies can't just steal his idea and kick him down the road. Read More...
One point that is made in response is that the US issues more compulsory licenses than any other country. The US is certainly capable of hypocracy; nor would one want to start down the path of arguing that compulsory licensing is okay here but not elsewhere. It is rarely a good idea. Still, the idea that "the US does it, so everyone should" is misleading... most of the examples of compulsory licensing in the US are *not* pharmaceuticals (some are) and were issued in a quite different context. Examples include:
-copyright compulsory licenses, of which there are many. Read More...
Yesterday I read a very interesting paper by Francois Leveque and Yann Meniere, entitled "Patents and Innovation: Friends or Foes?" It included the following thoughtful foreword describing the trends in economic thinking about patents over recent decades, and how these have given rise to the perception that patents do not support innovation:
Economists are not innocent for this change in perception. 50 years ago they established (Nordhaus, 1969) that patent law tends to stimulate R&D too much in organizing races to patent first with too many firms. By contrast, during the 1990s, they pointed out that patents hinder innovation in reducing incentives for secondary inventors when research is cumulative and in raising an anticommons problem whereby patents are allotted to a multitude of small owners. For people unfamiliar with how economic theory goes, it may seem that economists also changed their mind and burnt today what they incensed over the past. Read More...
a leaked proposal that calls for those suspected of downloading illegitimate movies or music to get an initial warning e-mail, followed by a suspension for a second offense, then a termination of their service contract for a third offense. ..
Other coverage here.Similar proposals have been floated elsewhere.
Now, I suspect a large part of the reason that these proposals are moving is simply to bring ISPs to the bargaining table, which their current largely immune status gives them no reason to do. Read More...
Several longish comments, observations and opinions from the FCC's hearing on broadband industry network management practices at Harvard University in Boston on Monday:
About 100 people showed up too late to get into the room, and "too late" was an hour before the start of the event. Anticipating a crowd, I showed up about 90 minutes early, and got one of the few remaining seats in the room. It was clear from the applause that both Free Press and Comcast had gotten their crowds out.
It seemed to me that Kevin Martin had already made up his mind before he arrived at the hearing. It was clear to me from Martin's questions and demeanor that he has no patience for Comcast or their arguments. The entire day, there was only one speaker who was cut off, and that was when Kevin Martin pointedly cut off Comcast's Executive Vice President David Cohen. Martin also insisted on a particular line of inquiry several times, which indicates that it is compelling, at least to him. He kept asking people whether applications like Bit Torrent allow people to consume "more bandwidth than they are paying for." Read More...
IPI’s sound recording piracy study is cited today in a new article appearing in the Canadian newspapers Ottawa Citzen and Calgary Herald.
Reporter Vito Pilieci writes, “Canadian songwriters are proposing a type of web levy in exchange for free ‘illegal’ music,” but adds that not every track pirated would necessarily be purchased otherwise, citing economist Steve Siwek’s replacement ratio:
However, not every person downloading music illegally would buy that music if given the chance. Read More...
"We view copyright balance as finding ways for copyright holders to receive fair compensation, encouraging them to create new amazing songs, movies, and software, while allowing consumers and businesses the right to use, enjoy, make fun of, mash-up, experiment, play around with, and otherwise innovate with those same copyrighted works...
The [Business Coalition's] proposed package of reforms includes, among other things, expanding Canada's fair dealing provisions – permitting commonly accepted uses of copyrighted works including: parody, mash-ups, time-shifting and place-shifting. Read More...
The fate of this year's patent reform bill in the Senate is still unclear. The controversial legislation includes provisions stipulating how the courts are to determine damages, changes to the re-examination rules and provisions for post-grant review.
Assessing the interests lining up to support or oppose the legislation is much less difficult than figuring out the specific procedures in the bill. Big tech firms generally support the bill. Generally, high-tech ventures in biotech or nanotech, manufacturers such as Corning, pharmaceutical firms and inventors' representatives have opposed it.
Observers grant that the tech and software industries are experiencing a legitimate problem from the status quo, but that solutions proposed to mitigate software’s problems have the consequence of weakening protections crucial to biotech and pharmaceutical companies. Read More...
I've commented a number of times on news reports of how harmful copyright piracy is on creators in developing countries, and today's installment is a story in Ghana, where piracy is affecting not only musicians, but also is costing the government much-needed revenue.
In Ghana today, original musical works on compact discs (CD) are not patronised because of pirates who flood the market with counterfeit products which they sell at cheap prices to enrich themselves at the expense of the original owners.
Supposing this trend continues to gain support in future, this is happy news from the perspective of ... who? Is it the answer to the quest for the new business model? Maybe not. Much remains unexplained about the economic underpinnings of this trend.
IP supporters, including myself, have insisted that without an ability to collect from free-riders, content markets will wither. Were we wrong? Is the advertiser supported model the silver bullet (magic!) needed?
The answer is in doubt. Tying (to advertising, to other services) is tricky because of the ease with which ties can be digitally untied...the advertising stripped out or blocked, the product placements morphed, the concert bootlegged. Read More...
Discussing principal issues surrounding digital copyright protection, Bono Mack announced:
“According to the Institute for Policy Innovation, global music piracy causes $12.5 billion of economic losses every year, 71,060 U.S. jobs lost, a loss of $2.7 billion in workers' earnings, and a loss of $422 million in tax revenues, $291 million in personal income tax and $131 million in lost corporate income and production taxes.”
The “innovation agenda,” a promised commitment to keep America globally competitive, was discussed ad naseum on Capitol Hill a year ago as various politicians tried to prove they were committed to innovation and the future of the country. It was an important discussion. However, while politicians were talking about doing something, one of our most important policy drivers of innovation was left to expire.
The research and development tax credit was allowed to expire in December . . . again. When the credit was first enacted in 1981, the United States had one of the best research tax incentive programs in the world. The credit allowed a company to receive a tax credit for a portion of its allowable expenses for research or product development performed in the U.S., with more than 75 percent of the credit dollars going toward wages for highly skilled, highly paid workers. Read More...
Recently, a number of news stories have been complaining about the wireless industry. We are told that consumers:
Don't want long-term contracts when they sign-up for wireless phone service;
Don't like early termination fees when they want out of their contracts;
Don't like the fact that the Apple iPhone is only available from AT&T; and
Need the protection of new "net neutrality" government regulations.
We are further told that the main problem is that—brace yourself—there isn't enough competition in the wireless business.
Huh?
Consumers are, in fact, inundated with advertising by wireless companies, suggesting that there is VIBRANT competition in the wireless business. Read More...
The two countries that have been most aggressive in criticizing the intellectual property regime are Brazil and Argentina.
In Geneva, at both the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), Brazil and Argentina have led the charge against patents, claiming that patents are a barrier to access to technology, both health technology and software technology.
They don't like copyright, either, but that's another blog entry.
So I'm puzzled by these news items from Nature, which Julian Morris from IPN brought to my attention:
Brazil Invests in Science and Technology Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva recently announced a US$28-billion investment package for the country's science and technology over the next three years, equivalent to 1.5 percent of Brazil's gross domestic product (GDP). The investment is a part of a federal plan to improve academic research and to counter the lack of technological innovation in the industrial sector. There have been an increasing number of scientific papers published by Brazilian researchers over the past few years. Currently, 2% of the world's scientific publications are Brazilian - ranking it 15th in the world. Nonetheless, the country is responsible for only 0.1% of all the patents registered globally each year. With the increase in budget, the government hopes to fill this gap. Read More...
One of the criticisms we constantly hear from the critics of the pharmaceutical industry is that they "put profits ahead of patients."
Their heroes, on the other hand, are the health ministers of developing countries, like Thailand, who "stand up" to the greedy pharmaceutical companies.
It's a common stereotype--the government person who is trying to "help" through government power is the good guy, while the people who are trying to accomplish things through corporate organizational structures are evil, greedy and untrustworthy.
So, the question is, do you think this guy is an Authorized Business Partner with any of the software companies he is representing on the street corner in downtown Rio de Janeiro?
I spent 20 minutes in downtown Rio on Friday afternoon, and I saw this scene replicated a half-dozen times, on a half-dozen street corners, in that brief juncture.
I also saw two examples of kiosks obviously selling counterfeit music CDs, but in both cases they were being sold side-by-side with pornography, which I wasn't inclined to post photos of on this blog. Read More...
I mentioned in a previous blog entry that Intel and HP were cosponsors of the workshop on the need for exceptions and limitations to copyright.
In fact, at the workshop, Brad Biddle from Intel said that Intel has a "strong interest in a robust fair use and limitations regime for copyright."
We've noticed.
I have three questions for Intel, for Brad Biddle or for anyone else at Intel:
Question #1: Let's say I walk into an Intel building and announce to everyone that the public in the developing world has such a compelling interest in easy access to inexpensive computers, specifically for educational purposes, that we are going to start filing compulsory licenses on Intel technology and enlisting very low cost producers in Asia to produce chips for us, using your patents, at low cost. Read More...
Yesterday the IP skeptic travelling circus was here in Rio at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), where they are suddenly experts on digital education.
Last week they were in Geneva at the World Health Organization (WHO), where they were experts on health care. A few weeks ago they were in Geneva at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), where they were experts on economic development. Curious, that.
The circus set up its tent under a banner of education, and the basic theme of the workshop was that copyright is a barrier to education, so we need exceptions and limitations to copyright for educational purposes.
It was a completely balanced panel, with everyone on the panel believing that copyright is a real problem. Geidy Lung from the WIPO international division WAS on the panel, and she did a good job on a couple of occasions of pointing out outright inaccuracies in some of the other presentations.
The Miami Herald cites IPI’s music piracy study in the article: “Social Streaming: Music’s New Business Model?”
Staff writer Bridget Carey discusses a new business model for the music industry featuring up-and-coming social networking site Cyloop.com. The site is an example of a new kind of technology to make up for losses from recording music piracy. Read More...
This label was, apparently, not appreciated. Though I should note that it was not denied.
So I'd like to make the case that, in fact, these activist NGOs are, in fact, Marxists, or at least that they advocate what can accurately be described as a Marxist agenda. Read More...
At the World Health Organization, where a handful of Marxist NGOs have manipulated developing countries to push for the elimination of patents on pharmaceutical and medical products (much more on that later), the Mexican delegation is standing up for innovation and sound economic thinking.
I think a trip to Mexico City to give them all medals should be a part of my future travel plans.
Here is the anti-IP language that Mexico is rightly seeking to have deleted from the final document that will be produced by the Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health:
"Intellectual property, investment or trade agreements should not prevent a country from adopting measures necessary to prevent anti-competitive practices that may result from the abuse of intellectual property rights." (Mexico suggests delete)
" . . . urge active and effective participation of health representatives in IP-related negotiations in order to ensure Read More...
. . . the concept of intellectual property will be removed from the Constitution. The National Assembly committee assessing the changes advanced by President Hugo Chávez, decided to change Article 98 to obliterate de rights linked to the "economic derivations" of cultural creation.
I'll at least give the Venezuelans credit for properly understanding the philosophical basis for their opposition to intellectual property.
We are suppressing the capitalist commercial exploitation . . .
Do Pirates Make Money or Lose It? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says, it depends on whether you’re making films or stealing them.
While Pirates of the Caribbean has been a huge moneymaker for the film industry, film piracy is a huge money loser for the whole economy.
A new study from the Institute for Policy Innovation tries to calculate the impact of film piracy on jobs, income and government revenue. According to the study:
Film piracy cost the U.S. economy about 140,000 new jobs, with two-thirds of those jobs outside of the film industry.
That means it cost workers $5.5 billion in lost earnings.
And film piracy cost the government nearly $840 million in lost revenue.
At the end of Claudia's article, she mentions that WIPO's budget is largely paid for by private funds. In fact, almost all of WIPO's budget is paid for by companies through the fees they pay for patent applications through the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which WIPO administers.
Because patent filings are up, WIPO actually enjoys a budget surplus. Because of the financial mismanagement concerns, no one is comfortable with WIPO sitting on top of a big budget surplus. It is likely that budget surpluses will be spent wastefully or counterproductively.
Today’s edition of Roll Call features IPI President Tom Giovanetti firing back at Consumer Electronics Association President Gary Shapiro’s attack in last week’s oped “Time for Think Tank Funding Disclosure.”
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” says Giovanetti, regarding a new IPI piracy study disclosing the grave economic damages caused by global music piracy.
Yeah, piracy is a good thing, and only hurts those rich greedheads in the recording industry. What we should do to help developing African countries grow their economies is to obliterate this anachronism of intellectual property and start just giving all music away, because "information wants to be free," right?
Ghanaian Chronicle - AAGM: Country Loses U.S. $ 3.7 Million, Jobs to Music Piracy.
Joseph Coomson 18 September 2007 Ghanaian Chronicle
Piracy of recorded music costs Ghana, sound and video recording industries billions of cedis in lost revenue and profits. These losses, however, represent only a fraction of the impact of recorded music piracy on the Ghanaian economy as a whole. Combining the latest data on nationwide piracy of recorded music and study done by Musicians Union of Ghana (MUSIGA) have reveal that piracy costs Ghanaian workers significant losses in jobs and earnings, and government, substantial lost tax revenue. Read More...
Just back from a few days in Aspen at the PFF Aspen Summit tech policy conference, so I'm way behind on a bunch of stuff, especially related to our study this week on the impact of music piracy on the U.S. economy.
I hope to get caught up over the next couple of days, dealing with objections and characterizations of our study. But I just had to share this one.
Today I get an email from someone who self-identifies as a member of the "Pirate Party of Utah."
His complaint is that IPI isn't objective on the subject of music piracy.
Now, let me get this straight: Someone who self-identifies as a member of the Pirate Party of Utah is complaining that WE aren't objective on the topic of piracy?
Tonight, at the closing dinner of the PFF Aspen Summit, the speaker was Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google.
Schmidt gave a frankly unimaginative speech, though it is always a great opportunity to hear the Chairman of a major tech company talking to a tech and policy crowd.
Surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly), during Schmidt's speech he said nothing about intellectual property, and he stressed repeatedly the important responsibility of tech companies to do everything possible to preserve the critical freedom of speech.
I thought Schmidt got off easy during the Q and A period. I thought there were any number of tough questions that could and should have been asked, particularly by the PFF crowd.
So I raised my hand several times to ask a question, but also several times thought better of it and lowered my hand. Because I was in the back of the room, it wasn't easy for the fine folks with the microphones to see me.
So here is what I wanted to ask Eric Schmidt tonight: Read More...
IPI has no particular beef with the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). In fact, I imagine that most IPI employees are, as I am, eager and enthusiastic consumers of the latest consumer electronics.
I'm personally a big fan of the consumer electronics industry, and at least once in my life got to attend their incredible show.
But CEA seems to have a beef with anybody who asserts that intellectual property infringement is a problem, and seems to knee-jerk every time anyone starts talking about piracy. I've never really understood this, because compelling content is a prerequisite for the CE industry. If there isn't compelling content, people aren't going to want to consume it by using the products of the CE industry.
So it seems to me that the CE industry is in a symbiotic relationship with the content industries, and they ought to at least be civil with one another.
Today, a brand new study from the Institute for Policy Innovation reports the overall economic damage from global music piracy at a staggering $12.5 billion and a cost of 71,000 jobs per year. Read the study here.
China’s Central Committee would be forgiven if it looked with nostalgia on the 1990’s when it could seemingly do no wrong and when Western companies welcomed China in to the WTO (negotiated in the 1990s, effective in 2001), showered the country with foreign direct investment, outsourced manufacturing, and overlooked rampant piracy and counterfeiting.
Several news stories are reporting on the complaint by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that copyright warnings on movies and sports broadcasts are "trampling over consumers' rights to fair use of copyrighted content."
The story quotes a professor at Cardozo School of Law as saying that "the notion of fair use is expanding in the digital age."
Fair Use is a legal doctrine, not an expanding notion Well, there are plenty of "notions" floating around about a variety of things, but fair use is a legal doctrine, not a notion. Read More...
Memo to Susan Schwab, United States Trade Representative:
Susan,
You should overturn the International Trade Commission's ban on the import of wireless handsets containing disputed Qualcomm chips.
You should overturn it now--certainly before the August 6 deadline. Today would be good.
You should overturn it because the ITC's vote was wrong. The Chairman of the ITC himself dissented from the ITC's decision, saying that it was antithetical to the public good. And he was right.
Arguably, the ITC shouldn't even have this authority in the first place. The ITC's authority to ban import of foreign made products is derived from the now-infamous Smoot Hawley Tarriff of 1930, which arguably caused the Great Depression. It's a relic of all that is bad about U.S. trade policy. We've learned those lessons.
Authors George Pieler and Jens Laurson say European policymakers have developed an unsubstantiated fear with regard to genetically modified food and make the case against the “precautionary” policy which has instituted absolute bans on the products. Pieler and Laurson argue that “there is no practical limit to the application of the precautionary principle,” and that it is “dangerously vague.”
While the authors admonish EU officials to qualitatively assess the risks when it comes to GM foods, they also point out how illogical bans provoked by unfounded phobias could do real damage to the global agricultural market. Read More...
Sometimes you just have to groan at the hypocrisy in the battle over access to prescription drugs.
Medicines Sans Frontieres (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) has just published a new study in AIDS, the Official Journal of the International AIDS Society.
The new study looks at Thailand’s and Brazil’s recent efforts at compulsory licensing two anti-HIV drugs, liponavir and ritonavir. The article claims that Brazil paid too much—perhaps four times too much—when it negotiated a settlement with a drug manufacturer. Thailand got a much better price by compulsory licensing the drugs.
MSF’s point? Thailand has the model for other middle-income countries.
The Rwandan Government filed with the WTO on July 19th (yesterday) this request forwarded from the Rwanda's Government Centre for the Treatment & Research on AIDS (TRAC) containing a blanket waiver of intent to enforce WTO TRIPS patent obligations relating to a generic fixed-dose combination product of Zidovudine, Lamivudine and Nevirapine produced by Canada’s Apotex under the name Triavir.
I have to admit that my first reaction is to wonder whether entire exercise is a good use of resources for a least developed country that has no TRIPS obligations (as noted by IP-Watch) until 2013. Read More...
A jury found in Broadcom's favor and awarded Broadcom damages. But then the ITC issued an exclusion order banning the import of handsets containing the disputed chips.
My view has been that it is illegitimate for the ITC to essentially do an end-run around the legal process and issue an injunction. That is not a commentary on the merits of either Qualcomm's or Broadcom's cases; it's simply a commentary on process.
ITC does have within its mission handling certain patent disputes which involve imported goods. But this dispute was already working its way through the U.S. court system, and Broadcom took it to the ITC as well, as an end-around the legal process.
Essentially, Democrats on the Hill have fallen victim to a PR campaign by a cabal of anti-IP activists who persuaded them to start pressuring the office of the U.S. Trade Representative to stop pressing countries, in this case Thailand, to respect and enforce intellectual property laws.
In the 1980s, Congress, with a Democratic majority, instituted the Special 301 process for the U.S. Trade Representative to identify countries whose failure to protect intellectual property harms the U.S., making potential trade sanctions leverage for better protection. In the 1990s, the U.S. and Europe secured world-wide assent to greater IP protection through the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property) agreement that brought these issues within the world trade framework.
Ever since, however, a reactionary coalition -- composed of unions in declining U.S. industries, companies threatened by changes in the global economy, health activists seeking free or heavily subsidized access to innovative drugs, and Ralph Nader acolytes (financed by George Soros and left-leaning foundations) who reflexively prefer government control to markets and private property rights -- have endeavored to reverse protections for trade and IP rights. Read More...
As many may already be aware, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions has passed the The Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act of 2007, on June 27, 2007, which includes a 12-year period of data exclusivity for innovators of biologics. As noted previously, the House Bill lacks this key provision.
Although they have the most to gain from ending exclusivity for innovative biologics, the Generic Pharmaceutical Association (GPhA) and leading international generics giant Teva continue opposition to the 12 year data exclusivity term, which is much closer to the overall data exclusivity period for pharmaceuticals and biopharmaceuticals in Europe.
It has always been a bit strange to me that in the United States the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) administer unequal standards for protection of commercially valuable, and sensitive, clinical dossiers associated with applications for marketing approval for agro-chemical products vs. pharmaceutical products. Now it looks like at least the Senate may recognize the need to equalize data exclusivity periods for biologics.
In the case of agro-chemicals, the EPA currently provides a full ten years of protection (and the U.S. Trade Representative has negotiated similar terms with most trading partners in free trade talks). During this period, no one but the right holder is entitled to rely on the data submitted in support of the initial application for marketing approval. Read More...
I'm not going to comment so much on the work Lessig is leaving. I'm not going to dance a celebration dance (at least not publically), for various reasons, one of which is that I don't really believe he can leave it.
The other reason is that I can't dance.
What I want to comment on is the astonishing hubris of Lessig to assume that, because he hasn't been as successful as he thinks he should have been with his CopyLeft fight, the system must be corrupt.
Yes, that's what he says. It can't be that he is simply wrong, or misguided. It can't be that he has been peddling a juvenile message to juveniles. It can't be that he has been tilting at windmills. Read More...
Tom Friedman’s recent New York Times column identifying Israel’s high-tech entrepreneurs as Israel’s “oil wells” reminded me of the bilateral U.S./Israel Joint Economic Development Group (JEDG) I attended in Jerusalem in January 2001 at the height of the Soviet aliyah to Israel. At that time I was privileged to staff the legendary Herb Stein and Stan Fisher at the JEDG talks, a bilateral forum that brought Israel back from the brink of hyper-inflation in the mid-1980’s and was still in operation when I was a junior Foreign Service Officer. At the conclusion of the 1st Gulf War, Israel faced the prospect of absorbing a wave of Soviet immigration, described as like the U.S. trying to absorb a population the size of France.
This week I have been determined to write about something other than India. First, some updates relating to recent posts on Cipla and the Satwant Reddy Report:
Last week, I wrote about the release of the Satwant Reddy Report on protection of commercially valuable clinical dossiers submitted to government regulators. This sounds boring, but is critically important to the biotech sector, which was left in the cold by the Reddy Report. Read More...
A load of rubbish is coming out of the WIPO Development Agenda process this week, and I'm sorry to say that precious little is being done to stop it.
The diplomatic process is mind-numbing. You go into a negotiation dead-set against agreeing to something, and by the end of the week you've agreed to watered-down versions of everything you were originally against.
"Okay, well with that slight change of wording, we can now agree to a provision that is horrible. It was really horrible in the original proposal, but with the inclusion of this adjective and the replacement of that prepositional phrase with this one, we can now wholeheartedly agree to this abomination without alienating anyone."
There's this weird dialectic going on with proposals that we should never have even let see the light of day. Read More...
A new book has just come out, Creating New Wealth from IP Assets, which is a compilation of work by members of the National Knowledge and Intellectual Property Management Taskforce.
Over the years several books have been published addressing the issue of valuing intellectual property but this one is different in that the mission of the Taskwork is not to develop a proprietary standard that could only be sold tho clients but rather they are seeking a system of valuation of intellectual property and the creation of a true IP marketplace or exchange.
Few ideas could be as fundamental for our future economic success as unleashing the value of intellectual property. Today we live in a world where that value is most often locked up and is difficult to tap in the best of Read More...
I'm in Geneva, again, for a week of meetings at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) related to establishing a development agenda for WIPO.
If you want background information on this process, just type "development agenda" into the search bar at the top of this blog. No reason for me to recap it all in a redundant entry.
I'll be blogging anything faintly interesting that happens. That is, if my luggage arrives and I can actually show up at WIPO in something other than the clothes I'm wearing now. British Airways has managed to lose my luggage, but they charitably gave me a convenience bag with enough deoderant in it for one armpit and enough shaving cream for about a 4" x 4" section of my right cheek.
In the meantime, here is a picture of Lake Geneva (Lac Leman) on a hazy day.
This now famous declaration was the pay-off for over ten years of work by both the current Congress-led Union Government and the previous BJP-led coalition to forge a delicate consensus on patent protection that would approach, if not entirely meet, minimum international standards. And the Government of India did, before the end of that month, issue the Ordinance (later passed as legislation) that decisively changed India’s law and provided protection for pharmaceutical products for the first time in a generation. Read More...
"Let the multinationals go . . . . We will supply whatever drugs the Thai or other governments may want." Cipla CEO Yusuf Hamied, Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2007
Cipla, the Indian generic manufacturer, has earned a reputation as the drug company with a heart of gold, dedicated to the plight of poor HIV/AIDS patients in Africa. As is often the case, the truth is more complicated:
Cipla sells drugs to make money - - it is not a charity. Cipla’s deals, most recently with the William J. Clinton Foundation, guarantee the company large captive markets and comfortable profit margins. Read More...
Thailand’s health hinister, Mongkol Na Songkhla—he of compulsory licensing fame—was in Washington DC this week explaining why he needed to steal Abbott Laboratories’ patent on Kaletra, an AIDS drug.
According to a Washington Post story, the minister and his traveling companions stopped by the paper to meet with editorial writers and explain his case. However, as it turns out Thailand has its on intellectual property rights complaint:
Indonesia and Thailand, on the front line of the bird flu epidemic, say they never gave their permission for the virus samples to be used commercially and refused to send any more to the WHO until their interests are protected. Thailand wants all countries to be guaranteed a minimum supply of vaccine. Read More...
I hope you all enjoy the current crop of AIDS treatments, because I fear you aren't going to get many new ones.
Any company would be nuts to continue to pour millions of dollars into research on AIDS drugs when they know major, industrialized nations like Brazil are going to steal the formula and make them on their own.
But in an overall good editorial, the Journal criticizes Abbott for capitulating to Thailand and lowering their prices, instead of playing hardball, and pulling out ("withdraw from an offending country's market").
I've already blogged on this. Abbott was/is in a no-win situation in Thailand, and in my opinion made the right choice between capitulating on prices or giving Thailand every reason to proceed with compulsory licensing.
Furthermore, the Journal underestimates the pressure on pharmaceutical companies in the international community, and particularly in relation to the WHO. Read More...
I have an op/ed this morning in The Hill entitled "First, do no harm to the intellectual property system." It's a big week for IP issues, what with World Intellectual Property Day on Thursday, several patent reform hearings scheduled on the Hill, and the Health Minister of Thailand visiting DC on the heels of his theft of a portfolio of pharmaceutical patents.
I have a balanced relationship with the grocery store. My needs and the needs of the grocery store are not mutually exclusive. I go into the store, and I give them money in exchange for an equivalent amount of goods. My needs are balanced against the needs of the store, and we’re both happy.
What makes this possible? How can my need for groceries and the store’s need for revenue be balanced? Read More...
The latest news in the game of chicken between the military dictatorship in Thailand and U.S. pharmaceutical company Abbott over access to Abbott's AIDS drugs is that Abbott has decided to offer the most improved version of it's critical drug Kaletra to Thailand at a discounted rate if the Thai government will forgo its plan to issue a compulsory license. It's covered by an article in today's Wall Street Journal, which is also commented on at the WSJ's Health Blog.
Thailand, of course, is ruled by a military junta. Read More...
The minute you step onto my property uninvited, you are trespassing. Period, end-of-story.
However, because there are any number of reasonable and good and virtuous reasons for you to do so, such as to tell me my house is on fire or that my trash can has blown over in a windstorm, the law enumerates a number of specific exceptions to trespass, and also outlines principles to guide us in such matters.
But these are exceptions to the rule. The rule is still the right of the property owner to exclude trespass.
Copyright is the same. The minute you copy anything covered by copyright, you have infringed. Period, end-of-story.
But because there are several reasonable reasons for doing so, copyright law also gives us principles and standards for determining which infringements are "okay." These exceptions and standards are called "fair use."
But any of these specific exemptions are the exception, not the rule. Read More...
On Saturday morning, authorities across the country oversaw the destruction of more than 42 million smuggled, pirated or simply illegal books, newspapers, CDs, DVDs, software and other electronic media in a bid to crack down on counterfeiters.
Coordinated events were held in 31 provinces and regions, including Beijing, Guangdong, Tianjin and Guangxi, sources with the General Administration of Press and Publication said.
The article does a decent job of describing the damage being done by counterfeit drugs, which is truly a more significant problem than is appreciated by most of us in the developing world. But unfortunately, the article takes the easy way out and knee-jerk criticizes the pharmaceutical industry, rather than really describing the factors that contribute to widespread counterfeiting in the developing world.
* Counterfeit medicines are swamping unregulated markets in developing nations with unknown and sometimes fatal results. Not only are thousands dying needlessly, but patients are also becoming immune to the effects of the real thing. Counterfeit drugs occasionally contain small doses of the active ingredient - enough to induce resistance
In my work on intellectual property I often come across the assumption that IP is something that rich countries use as a battering ram against the developing world. People who make this argument are constantly arguing for weakening IP protection, and claim that IP protection is a barrier against development. IP is not a tool of development, they claim.
Which is nuts.
That's why I've been featuring articles from developing countries about how piracy is hurting creators in developing countries.
I strongly believe (and the evidence strongly demonstrates) that the best way to address economic problems is through markets. And since property rights are a prerequisite for functioning markets, my bias has always been that it's almost always the best thing to do attach a property right to something, and to create a market for it.
I'm thus a strong advocate of IP rights, and even of creating new IP rights and extending existing ones.
So I’ve been accused in the past of being an “IP maximalist,” and I suppose that’s pretty much true.
However, I’ve finally found a form of intellectual property that I can’t support.
The blogs are awash in outrage over the Copyright Royalty Board's (CRB) decision about the royalty rates that Internet radio broadcasters must pay for the use of songs protected by copyright.
The reactions in general are that, under pressure from Evil Owners of Property in the form of the RIAA, the CRB has set an exorbitantly high rate that will drive most web radio broadcasters out of business.
It's yet another move by evil owners of intellectual property ("The Man") to keep us pure and virtuous little guys down, and to homogenize and control the media.
Well, there is another side. Some observations:
First, there is such a thing as a business model that doesn't work economically. Not everything that someone might want to do is economically viable. Read More...
A letter to one Ohio University student told her that she distributed 787 audio files, putting her total minimum potential liability at more than $590,000. The minimum damages under the law is $750 for each copyright recording that had been shared, the letter said.
Now, I know this is going to generate much derision of the RIAA on various tech blogs and news sources. I don't even have to look.
But, really, what is RIAA supposed to do?
If Suzy College had copied and illegally distributed 787 copies of Adobe InDesign, wouldn't we expect the Business Software Alliance to go after her? Or would that be equally offensive to the CopyLeft community?
IPI is hosting an exciting World Intellectual Property Day Event on April, 26. If you are in the Washington, DC area and would like to attend, let us know. More details below (additional speakers and panel topics still to be announced):
SAVE THE DATE
••••••••••••••••••••• Annual World Intellectual Property Day Event
Intellectual property is the driver behind global economic growth and a key factor in the 21st century knowledge economy. On April 26, World Intellectual Property Day, join the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) at a policy forum exploring IP issues and solutions both in America and across the globe. Read More...
Although the actual name of the bill is a case study in Congress' hyperbolic and overly-cute legislative naming practices: The Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship Act of 2007. Get it? FAIR USa?
It will be news to most of the economy to hear that freedom and innovation need revitalizing right now, but it would be delusional to think that this legislation is a step in that direction. In fact, this bill will hinder innovation, at least in the creation of content.
We all (well, most of us, anyway) have to deal with the hormonal surges, erratic behavior and general delusion of youth.
"Youth is wasted on the young," it has been said.
We think the world revolves around us, and we think that for the last several thousand years humanity has had it all wrong, and while we can't figure out why humanity had it so backward until we arrived, now that we are here we can begin to set things right--to remake the world the way we think it ought to have been made in the first place.
But then, we all (well, most of us, anyway) grow up. We begin to understand why the world is the way it is, and why the dreams and delusions of our youth, ignorance and inexperience must mostly be given up. We realize that there really is nothing new under the Sun (well, not much anyway), and that the predicted new, new way of doing things almost never works out, because there really are not only physical but also moral and economic laws of the Universe against which we tilt at our own peril, not at the peril of the Universe. Read More...
When there are 120+ proposals on the agenda, and you only get one or perhaps two opportunities to speak before the WIPO assembly, you have to pick your targets carefully.
So this week I've been focusing on fear-mongering about the public domain; specifically about intellectual property as a threat to the public domain.
It is commonly and continually asserted by the CopyLeft crowd that intellectual property protections have recently been expanded to a dramatic degree, so much so that the public domain is under threat. In fact, it is asserted that the public domain is "shrinking," which is simply impossible. Newly-protected works are not taken out of the public domain, and unprotected works are constantly being added to the public domain, to say nothing about all the works which have their protection expire every day.
Now, all this is nonsense. There is no empirical evidence that the public domain is shrinking or in any danger. Read More...
So I'm in the Hotel Intercontinental Geneva tonight, and I'm going to order dinner from room service.
I peruse the menu and my eyes are drawn to "Filet de boeuf poele aux champignons", which translates to "Fillet of beef sauteed with mushrooms." Sounds good, I think. So I order it.
Here is what is delivered to my hotel room:
Sorry about the camera phone image quality.
Now, if I were writing the menu, I would call this whatever in French means "Giant plate of French Fries with a small portion of steak on the side."
Here's an update that will probably only be of interest to those already familiar with the WIPO Development Agenda discussions. I'll write in chronological order, but there is breaking news near the bottom.
If you're not already familiar, but would like to be, I suggest you use this blog to get up-to-speed. Either use the search bar at the top of this blog to look for "development agenda", or follow the navigation tree at the left, beginning with Intellectual Property.
There were over 120 different proposal items to be considered for a potential Development Agenda for WIPO. Because many of the proposals were similar and even redundant, this was pretty unmanageable.
So over the last two years the 120+ proposals have been collected and organized several times in several different ways, each of which managed to displease some member states, but usually displeasing the Friends of Development.
This is the text of the intervention I just gave at the end of the Wednesday session for the WIPO PCDA/3 meeting.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We appreciate this further opportunity to participate in the discussion and to add our perspective for the benefit of the member countries. We also thank the delegation from Chile for intervening on behalf of NGOs.
In my earlier intervention I cautioned against WIPO being led too far from it's current narrowly-focused mandate. I would like to reiterate that concern. It is outside of WIPO's mandate to involve itself in competition policy, or in bridging the digital divide. There are already at least two UN specialized agencies, the ITU and the Internet Governance Forum, that have the digital divide well within their mandates.
Our concern is that WIPO will function most efficiently and effectively if it maintains the discipline of a narrowly-focused mission.
The following is the text of an intervention delivered by IPI president Tom Giovanetti at the Tuesday morning session of WIPO's third PCDA meeting.
[PCDA stands for "Provisional Committee on Proposals Related to a WIPO Development Agenda].
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Representing the Institute for Policy Innovation, I have had the privilege of attending the last two years of meetings related to the proposed Development Agenda. This week we are beginning our third year of deliberations on the question of whether WIPO should adopt a Development Agenda, and if so, what such an Agenda should look like.
WIPO is one of many specialized agencies within the United Nations.
As a specialized agency, WIPO has a narrowly-defined mission. The mission of WIPO is to promote the protection of intellectual property around the world, and to administer certain treaties related to IP.
I'm once again in Geneva attending a session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a UN agency devoted to intellectual property.
As a UN agency, diplomacy reigns supreme. The language is always very careful, and, well, diplomatic.
Many times a country will give an intervention (floor speech), and other countries will give short speeches like this:
The government of [Country B] wishes to associate itself with the intervention given by [Country A].
This kind of intervention goes on all the time. Typically, the major country in a region or the lead country of a particular country bloc will give the position intervention for that bloc, and then other countries in that bloc will associate themselves with the intervention given by their bloc's leader.
What I have never heard in three years of WIPO attendance is a country that goes out of its way to disassociate itself with the intervention given by the lead country of its bloc.
The report further estimated that piracy of all goods in Los Angeles siphoned $2 billion in sales from retailers in 2005, based on police and customs seizure data. In all, it cost state and local governments at least $483 million in tax revenue.
Last year IPI held our first annual World IP Day event in Washington DC. To the best of our knowledge this was the first World IP Day event ever held in DC.
The event was a smashing success, and we're following up this year with a bigger and better event. If you're able to attend DC-area events, mark your calendars.
Next week I'll be attending the first of several meetings this year on a proposed Development Agenda for WIPO. IPI is an accredited observer organization, so we'll be participating in the discussions as permitted by the Chairman.
I'll be live-blogging here all week on the discussions, and other topics.
If you want to get up-to-speed on this issue, I suggest you simply search on "development agenda" in the search box at the top of this blog. You'll finds lots . . . Read More...
Millions of dollars have been spent on this effort, and while lessons have no doubt been learned, it is a tremendous setback for those who have been funding this effort, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Before I go on, I want to make it clear that I take no glee in the failure of an anti-AIDS effort. My comments should in no way be interpreted as glee at the failure of this study.
But here is the point: Right now we have a bunch of activists who are constantly arguing that pharmaceutical companies are flatly lying when they talk about how expensive it is to develop new successful drugs. People who have never developed anything in their lives--people who have never so much as picked up a mortar and pestle, think they know better than the research-based pharmaceutical industry what goes into developing a drug that actually works, and that doesn't do more harm than good in the process. Read More...
Widening the interpretation to include a patented cardio-vascular blood-thinning preventative drug, when many more affordable and off-patent alternatives are available, weakens that consensus and could end up making the rules tougher in future.
While Thailand remains relatively poor, it and other emerging economies such as India (also currently subject to a legal challenge to its patent regime) also have a growing middle class that can increasingly afford to pay for medicines and should begin to help share the cost of future drug innovation.
Thailand is almost unique among developing nations in that the country's leadership has generally valued economic growth driven through innovation and protected by intellectual property.
Until lately, that is.
The King of Thailand, His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej, is a noted musician, bandleader and composer. He holds numerous patents, copyrights and trademarks, and is the creator of over 1,000 creative works.
I have highlighted my favorite portions in bold. Where I can't resist commenting, I'll do it in a comment box.
Is everyone on this campus a copyright criminal?
Cory Doctorow, doctorow@craphound.com
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Computers present a myriad of possibilities for your average totalitarian megalomaniac, whether he be a despotic ruler, a corporate overlord, or merely in charge of the local IT department.
A quick perusal will suggest that the students are going to get anything BUT a balanced presentation on digital copyright issues.
Here's a sample:
When the computer, the network, publishing platforms, and property can all be magicked away with the Intellectual Property wand, we're all of us pwned, 0wnz0red, punkd. Our tools are turned against us, the law is tipped away from our favor.
This is what passes for a university class these days? Things have certainly changed.
Should a known partisan and activist on an issue be teaching a subject to students? Doesn't his activism pretty much undermine him as someone who can present an objective curriculum?
Oh, and he includes a link at the bottom to IPI's IP Blog, which Read More...
"Cisco entered into negotiations with Apple in good faith after Apple repeatedly asked permission to use Cisco's iPhone name," said Mark Chandler, Cisco senior vice president and general counsel, in a statement. "There is no doubt that Apple's new phone is very exciting, but they should not be using our trademark without our permission." Read More...
I tried it out with a couple of vanity searches, like most of us do when we're searching the Internet. I designed several patented products in a previous career, and had the burden as a non-lawyer of writing the patent description.
The Wall Street Journal has an article today about a new company, called Attributor, that claims to be able to efficiently search the entire web for specific copyright violations.
Essentially, the service would examine all the content of a particular client (which is no small feat in itself), establish unique characteristics for each piece of media (which the article calls "digital fingerprinting"), and then search the web for content containing these unique characteristics.
This is basically a search engine, albeit apparently a much more powerful one than we are accustomed to. And it's a welcome development. Read More...
In 1984 the top ten firms listed on the London Stock Exchange had a combined market value of £40 billion and net assets of the same value. Advance twenty years and the asset stock of the largest firms has doubled while their market value has increased nearly ten times. The difference in value is accounted for by intangible assets: goodwill, reputation and, most importantly, knowledge capital. Knowledge based industries have become central to the UK economy – in 2004 the Creative Industries contributed 7.3 per cent of UK Gross Value Added, and from 1997 to 2004 they grew significantly quicker than the average rate across the whole economy. Read More...
The U.K. Gowers Review of Intellectual Property is out. The report is available here in PDF format, although before you send it to the printer note that it's 150 pages long.
There are already several press notes out there, most of them noting the relatively unimportant observation that the report thinks that the "rise and fall of creativity in hip-hop" might have been created in the U.S. because of the fair use exception for transformative works, which allegedly does not exist in the U.K. and which was tightened in a 1991 court decision.
Of course, from the perspective of my personal musical tastes, this points to a strength in U.K. copyright law and a weakness in U.S. law . . . Read More...
Pharmaceuticals are not tobacco. There is no reason to rejoice in putting pharma on the ropes if its business reversals hurt the very consumers they are trying to serve. The medical advances of the past 30 years are not just a matter of dumb luck. They are very heavily dependent on the patent law, pricing freedom, and marketing strategies that have allowed these firms to bring a wide variety of vital products to market.
The champions of further regulation argue that their efforts won't limit innovations or curtail the widespread use of new drugs. But there are no free fixes. Read More...
But whether Google produces economic benefit to the copyright owner is for the owner to decide, not Google. Google claims "a legal safe harbor" from copyright infringement under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows Internet firms to provide a thumbnail of copyrighted material. The firm also asserts a right to reproduce and distribute intellectual property without permission as long as it promptly stops the trespass if the copyright owner objects. That's like saying you have the legal right to hop over your neighbors' fence and swim in their pool -- unless they complain.
I keep hearing that only the RIAA cares about piracy, and that it's actually a very sophisticated thing for musicians to give their music away. It's a "new business model."
From The Financial Times Limited. Asia Africa Intelligence Wire:
Members of the Ashanti Regional branch of the Musicians Union of Ghana (MUSIGA) last Tuesday went on a five hour demonstration in the Kumasi Metropolis in protest against piracy of their works
This is relevant to the Second Life controversy about copying, in that, gradually, the value of IP is being confirmed. Technical developments over the past few years created temporary disruptions in this value system, but gradually the system is being reasserted.
Tony is right. Value has value. And free is usually worth what you paid for it.
A Nation of Laws—Or Corporate Pardons? On October 20, the 11th Circuit, United States Court of Appeals issued a permanent injunction against EchoStar Communications for illegally retransmitting local broadcast network signals. Breaking this law (Title 17 of the US Code) requires the “death penalty”—that the violator can no longer send a signal to anyone receiving a “distant network signal” (people outside of a certain broadcast radius of a market). This permanent injunction takes effect December 1, 2006.
This means that on December 1, EchoStar (DISH Network) will have to cut off distant network programming to 850,000 customers. And those customers aren’t going to like it.
A FOSS project has run into trouble precisely because a commercial firm argues that the FOSS project's free provision of their source code invalidates any claim to copyright. The commercial firm's lawyer argues that the only valid recourse available to the FOSS project is under contract law, not copyright.
At its first official meeting in Bonn, Germany, IMPACT will release the most recent estimates of the number of counterfeit products currently circulating on the world's markets, launch pilot programmes in three countries, and present a tool to strengthen countries' legislative capacity to deal with medical counterfeiting.
IMPACT is focused on five action areas embracing the different national and international sectors related to counterfeiting. These are: legislative and regulatory infrastructure; regulatory implementation; enforcement; technology; and risk communication.
Granted, Sherman has a dog in this fight, but he has explained what is really driving the CEA in this regard.
Like a trademark that becomes generic, the fair use doctrine is in danger of losing its meaning and value if CEA's self-serving claims are taken at face value. CEA has twisted and contorted "fair use" beyond its true intent, turning it into a free pass for those who simply don't want to pay for creative works.
Over at Hot Air, where the lovely and talented Michelle Malkin produces really cool and compelling video commentaries on politics, I was just watching the Nov. 13 edition. Michelle is starting a riff on how the Democrats are like Bruce Banner transforming into the Incredible Hulk.
Of course, to make it really cool, you run a clip from the old Incredible Hulk TV show, right? So she does.
Now, this material is of course covered by copyright. And you can even see the logo for the SciFi channel in the lower right hand corner of the video.
How does Hot Air attribute or credit this copyright material? Across the bottom of the screen they put "Courtesy YouTube."
Our friend Tony Healy in Australia has noticed that Samba, an open source company, doesn't like the recent agreement between Microsoft and Novell regarding the interoperability of Microsoft software with Novell open-sourced Linux.
One of the fundamental differences between the proprietary software world and the free software world is that the proprietary software world divides users by forcing them to agree to coercive licensing agreements which restrict their rights to share with each other, whereas the free software world encourages users to unite and share the benefits of the software.
The patent agreement struck between Novell and Microsoft is a divisive agreement.
Consumers Benefitting from Communications Competition
For decades, deregulation opponents predicted the devastating effect that divestiture and deregulation would have and yet, the market place has once again proved that competition inevitably accrues to the consumers’ benefit—in a big way and a recently released study by Microeconomic Consulting and Research Associates, Inc. (MiCRA) concurs.
With cable lines accessible to almost 99% of all U.S. households, and as a result of deregulation, cable companies are competing aggressively with telecom companies for voice service.
Now, they do it in a nice, friendly, Googly, don't-be-evil kind of way:
A trademark is a word, name, symbol or device that identifies a particular company's products or services. Google is a trademark identifying Google Inc. and our search technology and services. While we're pleased that so many people think of us when they think of searching the web, let's face it, we do have a brand to protect, so we'd like to make clear that you should please only use "Google" when you’re actually referring to Google Inc. and our services.
Interesting how Google cares very muc Read More...
In another IP enforcement case, a 23 year-old is going to prison for providing infringing works to a BitTorrent site. Now, it is truly heart-rending to see such a young person go to prison, at least Read More...
Microsoft has done the right thing and taken legal action against criminals who steal their property and fence the proceeds onto unsuspecting consumers. AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq Read More...
According to this story, a man has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for a conspiracy to sell millions of dollars worth of counterfeit and illegally imported prescription drugs. Cruz pleaded guil Read More...
I have nothing against free and open source software (FOSS). My belief has always been that if people want to freely band together and put a lot of work and creativity into a valuable product and then Read More...
Now, who could possibly be opposed to so such a warm, fuzzy thing like "digital freedom"?
But digital freedom shouldn't mean the right to steal digital content, any more than "financial freedom" doesn't mean the right to steal money. Read More...
So, last night my wife says to me, "Hey, come over here and tell me what this is on my computer." I looked where she was pointing on her laptop, and she was pointing to a new button that had appeare Read More...
This blog is built on a design by a great
guy in the UK, Steve
Castledine. Steve created this
design to fill the need that users of Lotus Notes/Domino (such as IPI)
had for a blogging system. Ther Read More...
From the Institute for Policy Innovation Do Pirates Make Money or Lose It? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says, it depends on whether you’re making films or ste Read More...
Washington Post Broadcasting & Cable New York Times Hollywood Reporter Washington Times Arizona Republic Business of Cinema (India) BBC News Gulf News (Dubai) CBC News (Canada) Video Bus Read More...
IPI has gotten a lot of media coverage
on our new econometric study estimating the economic impact of movie piracy,
including a
pretty good story in the Washington Post by Frank Ahrens.
One thin Read More...
It's a big day for piracy talk.
In addition to the U.S.
Chamber's event on piracy and counterfeiting,
today the Bush administration has released
the
"2006
Report to the President and Congress Read More...
And no, the Creative Commons is not the answer. Nor is a treaty on "access to knowledge."
I reproduce the article below in case the link goes down.
New Vision (Kampala) Sept. 26, 2006
Kampala
"WE are not playing. We want to make money and live well through music," Richard Kawesa said during a Music Forum Foundation (MFF) press meeting at Blue Africa Bar recently.
Kawesa, the MFF's president, said creative people are rich because their rights are protected unlike Ugandan artistes.
For long Ugandan recording artistes have had to do with poor payments for their crea Read More...
It's true that piracy has a major harmful impact on the creative industries in the United States and Europe, but it's helpful to be reminded that piracy has perhaps an even more harmful impact in developing countries.
We don't downplay the impact of piracy on the U.S. and Europe; in fact, we're actively engaged in quantifying exactly how harmful this piracy is.
But piracy in the developing world can literally kill the creation and distribution of creative work. And no, the Creative Commons isn't the solution.
We have commented in an
earlier blog entry on the status
of the Broadcast Treaty, and on the fact that the Treaty's language not
only doesn't seem ready for prime time, but that it also contains so Read More...
This Friday, September 29th, IPI will be
releasing a new paper on the impact of global motion picture piracy on
the U.S. economy.
This paper is truly unique, in that
it goes beyond the losses du Read More...
I'm proud to announce the release of a
new book by IPI, entitled Overdose:
How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation.
The author is our good friend and legal genius Read More...
This is the intervention delivered by IPI
at the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) 2006 General Assembly:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Institute for Policy Innovation is a 19 y Read More...
There are a number of objections to the proposed Broadcast Treaty at WIPO.
The first group of objections comes from a group of radical activists who either don't believe in property rights at all, don't believe in intellectual property rights, only believe in particular kinds of intellectual property that they themselves have invented, or who believe that anything corporations do is evil.
I discount their objections, as you might guess. They are illegitimate.
The second group of objections comes from those who believe in intellectual property, but who think that there is great danger in "too much" IP rights, and thus are uncomfortable with creating new rights, which the Broadcast Treaty would do.
That's a legitimate debate to have, but it's not really this objection that is threatening the Broadcast Treaty.
A third group of objections comes from strong supporters of intellectual property. These are the objections tha Read More...
It's always been the case that the main
driver behind the free and open source software movement was animosity
against ownership, control, and profit. That's why Richard Stallman came
up with the i Read More...
Right now we're being lectured by Gilberto
Gil, Brazil's Minister of Culture, popular musician, and commons radical.
Here
is a little background on Mr. Gil.
Here's
some more. And
here's a bit m Read More...
One interesting note: the anti-IP chavistas
here at WIPO are gleeful at the prospects of the U.S. killing the Broadcast
Treaty.
This is because they don't believe in property or property
rights Read More...
. . . but I'm in Geneva, Switzerland for
the 42nd General Assemblies of the World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO). This is the annual meeting where business is actually conducted
and deci Read More...
On Wednesday in Geneva, WIPO's Standing
Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) approved a recommendation
that the proposed "Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations"
move ah Read More...
We've been told for months now by consumer groups and by some of our politicians in Washington that what consumers want from cable is "ala carte" pricing--in other words, they want to be able to pay for the channels they want, and they don't want to have to pay for channels that they don't want. I Read More...
Here's a good article
on how India's adoption of strong IP protection is creating a culture of
innovation.
The Indian IP scenario
has undergone huge transformation over the last three decades. T Read More...
One of IPI's Senior Research Fellows, George
Pieler, has a great commentary on CNET News today entitled "New
Vistas for Microsoft, so why not Europe?"
George's point, that the EU's fines
and reg Read More...
A little while ago I came across a page
of portraits of Georg Greve, who runs the Free Software Foundation Europe,
and who is one of my earnest sparring partners on intellectual property
matters at Read More...
Some weeks ago I wrote an op/ed in the San Jose Mercury News where I posited a future where critical applications over the Internet were not dependable because of net neutrality regulations. Specifi Read More...
I did an interview a couple of weeks ago with a reporter from KERA, the public radio station in Dallas, and the story ran last week. Here's a transcript. A representative quote: Tom Giovanetti, Institute for Policy Innovation: The one thing that we've learned from the Internet is that content is k Read More...
Here's
an article from Malaysia where
the Minister of International Trade and Industry, Datuk Seri Rafidah Aziz,
understands that adequate IP protection is the key to foreign investment.
"If we Read More...
Today the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a Naderite, left-leaning consumer group, has released a study called "Following the Money (II): The Role of Intermediaries in Adware Advertising." It's really not a big deal to anyone, probably other than to CDT and to some of the companies men Read More...
Last year, when the Government of India
adopted its patent amendments as required by TRIPS, health activists carried
out concerted campaigns to try to avert what they characterized as a "public
hea Read More...
The
Malaysian Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Minister says that heavier
fines and faster court processing are needed to combat piracy and counterfeiting.
Mohd Shafie said raids
on six facto Read More...
I sure hate to see such nuttiness as this in The Hill, but I'm growing accustomed to reading nutty op/eds on the topic of net neutrality, which is turning out to be an inherently nutty issue. The Hi Read More...
By the way, I'll be speaking this Friday
morning (July 21st) in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). I'm on a panel discussing intellectual
property, which is a keen area of interest.
Here's
more information on the agenda.
I get a kick out
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Do Pirates Make Money or Lose It?
Author: Merrill Matthew Jr. || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA