Research seminar by professor Miquel Peguera at UOC headquarters about cyberlaw, focussing on ISP liability related to Intellectual Property Rights (mainly under the Spanish law).
Webs with links to P2P files
The case of Sharemula.com: main entertainment firms claim IP violation, because the site links (eD2k links) to files protected by copyright, shared in P2P networks. As Sharemula does not host itself the files, the site is not liable for copyright infringement.
Google Cache
The case of Megakini.com: quoting text in the search results is fair use; forbidding caching would be extending authors’ rights beyond its purpose.
(Surface) links
The case of Iura Rech: linking a web site is not a crime, but the link should be removed under petition.
Adwords
The conflict between organic...
A widely cited report from the International Labor Organization (2002) estimates that 70 percent of workers in developing economies operate in the informal sector. Throughout the 1990s the sector generated a majority of jobs across Latin America, a story with which CIPE is very familiar. A new story in Good Magazine renews the vivid, dynamic informal economy that emerged from the “shadows” thanks to Hernando de Soto and others. It’s a story set in Paraguay’s Ciudad del Este, but recurring around the world:
A fat Lebanese man emerges from a room behind the cash register holding an AK-47 as though it were a full cup of coffee.
“Four fifty,” he says, sucking on a toothpick. “American. And if you want help getting it across the border, that can be arranged.”...
In ten days time, the World Health Organization's IGWG will get together to finalise its Plan of Action on IP and health. When I last checked, talk of a 'Medical Research and Development Treaty' was still in the document.
Today my colleague Paul Howard (from the Manhattan Institute) and myself have an op-ed explaining why this treaty will actually undermine drug research.
One would have thought the Soviet Union had provided ample evidence of why centralised planning can never work: yet twenty years on from the collapse of Soviet communism we find ourselves still having to explain why such ideas are bad....
After years of campaigning, activists have narrowed the debate about
health care in poor countries to a single premise: Patents drive up the
cost of medicines, so patents are bad.
As part of this campaign, activist groups such as Medecins sans Frontieres and Knowledge Ecology International regularly cite the fact that few drugs have been developed for several tropical diseases. On the basis of this, they claim that markets are incapable of providing drugs that people need.
It takes quite a distortion of the evidence to support this claim. Nevertheless, the NGOs argue that the current market-based system through which drugs are developed needs to be dismantled, and replaced with a system where government experts decide what needs to be researched. They would then allocate...
Daniel Drezner of the University of Chicago has recently published an interesting paper which questions the power that 'global civil society' has to influence international health policies.
Taking the genesis and progress of the TRIPS agreement as a case study, Drezner makes a compelling argument that challenges the orthodox view that activists and NGOs were mainly responsible for the reform of TRIPS.
In fact, a host of other reasons, including US security considerations, were responsible for the reforms. And those reforms often differed considerably than those demanded by the NGOs.
Having said that, it is also true that members of civil society are now colonising many supranational bodies such as the UN and its agencies. In this way, they are able to get their hands...