I was invited to a WIPO workshop at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) tomorrow and decided to spend a few minutes of this mother day compiling my notes and references.
Judging from the titles of the sessions, the workshop will provide some background on patents and innovation (not the same thing of course), [...]
Rumours had been making the rounds since Sunday evening, but now it’s confirmed that a fundamentally flawed standardisation process has — not surprisingly — resulted in a fundamentally flawed new ISO standard for open documents ISO 29500. Faced with all of the lobbying might of a powerful international corporation, many standard bodies in smaller countries [...]
The open access movement has had tremendous success increasing the amount of self-archived journal articles. Self-archiving means that authors can negotiate with publishers the right to keep a copy of their peer-reviewed article on a personal (or institutional) web-site for public download. Self-archived journal articles are usually covered by copyright, but users are allowed to [...]
The Commonwealth of Learning has published a chapter on open licenses (part of an upcoming book on the use of copyright for authors, educators and librarians). I believe such a book could be a great resource, and given the CoL’s mission of supporting education I was quite excited to have a look and share it [...]
Fantastic Disney mesh-up to explain the concept of copyright and fair use (which is referred to as fair dealing in South Africa). It’s a tricky beast and, as the film points out “not a right!” and there is much uncertainty how much of a work can be reproduced for teaching and learning in higher education [...]
Also found this on the lessig blog. A US publisher makes the majority of its newspapers available online under CC Attribution NonCommercial license. This is important, because it greatly lowers the effort involved in clearing rights. Many people have nothing against others using their content for non-commercial use, but they would like to be asked. [...]
Is this something to worry about or will the pressure of social norms (and the smarts of software developers worldwide) render these last efforts as useless as the chip that someone wanted to build into everyone’s TVs at one point …… And as Cory points out, you can use google search to find it.What this is really about is an incumbent industry’s desperate attempts to rescue an outdated business model.
from http://www.abanet.org/journal/redesign/01fcle.html :”That’s one reason why the proposed Patent Reform Act contains a new definition of prior art. The bill would narrow the definition of prior art to include only inventions that are “reasonably and effectively accessible” to those skilled in the field. The new definition would exclude inventions that are relatively unpublicized and products such as software that are marketed to the public but whose workings are kept hidden from experts in the field because the products cannot readily be disassembled to see how they work.Software companies are worried that their rights would be undercut by the proposed redefinition of prior art. Others are concerned that the definition is so vague that it would spawn a huge amount of litigation.“There would end up being many litigations and many hearings about whether a piece of proposed prior art is reasonably and effectively accessible,” says Kelly Hunsaker, a patent litigator in Redwood City, Calif.”
Today’s highlights: Lawrence Lessig talks about Fair Use / Google Book Search at an amazing video sharing site called youtube, which reminds me of flickr, but for video. Then a friend sent this link to what must be one of the all-time great music videos (and I rediscovered the funky little animation with the disco ball on the same site).
I have spent some time recently looking at Economic research on patents and it turns out that patents are — especially in the case of developing countries — largely useless…. However, if one listened to the international debates at WIPO or the WTO (the two organisations that practically “own” intellectual rights - pun intended) it seems that either the experts have not read any of the research or they just don’t care.
