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Antigua is permitting this to happen LEGALLY, because quite some time ago, the US lost a ruling by the WTO that they were improperly blocking betting and gambling services in Antigua. http://www.ip-watch.org/2014/04/26/antigua-questions-efficacy-of-wto-dispute-system-over-ip-related-case/

The US does not wish to follow the WTO ruling, so Antigua is permitted to do this.

Hollywood knows this.

This article doesn't tell who signed letters which were sent to them by Comcast. But it does tell who sent letters to the FCC backing the merger, which of these people got contributions from Comcast, and how much they got.

More information here. Click on the "Center for Responsive Politics data on lobbying contributions here." link on this page, to get to the data page.

You also might give an example where patents are being ignored in those same markets.

Not sure which markets or what drugs the OP had in mind, but Brazil and India have both had rulings in the last several years that invalidated patents on HIV medication.

Licensing your patents under FRAND terms has more to do with what your innovation covers, in this case something that becomes adopted as a standard. These allow the fair use of the standard by competitors and drive the adoption of the standards and hence a monopoly. In this case it was about H.264 and 802.11 standards that that Microsoft was using that were patented by Motorola. What's not mentioned in this case is what other technology players are paying Motorola for use of the same patents. There's an excellent summary of the issues at the core of this case over at ip-watch and what this means for FRAND patents in general. While people may not like the players in this case (Google v. Microsoft) it is significant since it may mean that FRAND licencors may not get as much for these patents in the future. This would include Microsoft who has quite a few FRAND patents. It may also mean that those who currently license these patents from Google now may want to go back and re-negotiate citing the ruling because I couldn't find any reference to another licensee and what they were paying, maybe they're paying more or less? If they're paying less, then Microsoft would certainly have more cause to object to what Motorola was trying to charge.

Another aspect of this case that isn't mentioned is that we all know Google doesn't like Microsoft. The battles over the the Microsoft YouTube app releases recently highlights that these guys play cat and mouse games all the time. As part of the FRAND case, Google was using stall and delay tactics while negotiating with Microsoft over the FRAND agreement to drive up the possible damages they'd be awarded in this case. It just goes to show that "Do no evil" doesn't apply where patents are concerned with Google.

A week or two ago, a bunch of countries signed an treaty that allowed for publishing materials for the disabled.

So now various groups like HathiTrust (who won their lawsuit by The Authors Guild) can now share their work with groups from other countries. Unfortunately, the treaty had been modified to exclude audio visual works.

It might be that individual countries still have laws that apply (eg, the US does, but they still might not've been in full compliance), but we don't yet have an international treaty for doing it. My suggestion would be to host the website in Antigua.

Some reasons why:

Leaky geopolitics the ruptures and transgressions of WikiLeaks

The Contributions Of Julian Assange To The Debate On Intellectual Property

How much will it rain next week? Where will the Dow Jones index be in one year? How much of a problem would a Y2K bug be to computer systems, businesses, and the economy in general? Should we have spent as much as we did to prevent the Y2K bug, or was it a boondoggle? How bad will swine flue be? A pandemic? How many inoculations should a country purchase? Knowing such things would help us very much in planning our resource allocation, and relieve human suffering.

Outside of textbook math problems, the kind that any unschooled person can solve without any conscious knowledge or education of math or physics ( "I need to get out of the way of this train or it will plow through me" ), we can't really do all that much to predict the future.

Software patents are trivial because what they protect is not scarce.

Microsoft gets the paycheck for what it resisted so violently, even with lobbyists in third nations: sane patent reform.

Read this IPwatch article to get an idea what is going on in the Microsoft community. Phelps says:

What we've tried to do with "Burning the Ships" is take IP questions out of the realm of arcane debate among lawyers and show real people, in the midst of a highly dramatic internal struggle at Microsoft, learning how to deploy IP for tangible business benefit. As one reader put it, the book is a "thoroughly entertaining and informative canâ(TM)t-wait-to-get-to-the-next-page read."

Marshall Phelps wants to turn Microsoft into a kind of patent troll, or as they call it "open innovation".

IPW: A basic lesson in the book could be interpreted as, 'We were getting hurt by others who had patents, so we used our market power to require partners to agree not to enforce their patents until we had enough of our own patents to start enforcing them the way we didnâ(TM)t want others to do to us.' Can you address that?

PHELPS: Remember, this was back before software patents were a fact of life. MS was just getting a real head of steam but wasnâ(TM)t at all sure patenting was the way to go.

So either Microsoft kicks its bastards out or it simply deserves to suffer from these fines of a rotten patent system.

Ah, this is Marshall Phelps. A dark side of IBM import.

Sure, the recent job losses at Microsoft will not affect their "creation of IP". Look at SCO! Developers leave your company and lawyers litigate you to the ground. Great business model.

A somewhat better description of the rules can be found here.

They include things like limiting the number of claims to 25 (some patents include hundreds of claims, I believe; these are the heart of the patent, as they define what exactly might be infringed); and setting a limit on the number of requests for reexamination (I think that currently, you can just refile indefinitely, and that many applicants do just that, hoping that eventually an examiner will give up and accept their patent application).

For the former, it's not as big an issue in high technology, but it's a much bigger issue in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, where a 100-claim set is actually reasonable, due to the numbers of species or minor changes to a drug that they're claiming as dependent claims.

For the latter, one slight note I'd add is that the requests for continuing examination still have to move prosecution along... You can't just keep saying "my invention is A", have the examiner say "A is not novel", and file a continuation saying "my invention is A", unless you want it rubber stamped. Instead, it's more about narrowing the claims until you get to "Okay, my invention is A and B, when you use it to do C and D".

A somewhat better description of the rules can be found here.

They include things like limiting the number of claims to 25 (some patents include hundreds of claims, I believe; these are the heart of the patent, as they define what exactly might be infringed); and setting a limit on the number of requests for reexamination (I think that currently, you can just refile indefinitely, and that many applicants do just that, hoping that eventually an examiner will give up and accept their patent application).

I love that link, I mean talk about subtle paranoia. The case involves a shipment being accidental stopped for counterfeit drugs, to WHO is hiding something.

What's paranoid about getting upset when this happens:

"Such a seizure occurred last month, when authorities in the port of Rotterdam blocked a consignment of Losartan, a treatment for high blood pressure, that was being shipped from India to Brazil. Although Losartan is a legal generic drug, the seizure took place after an unnamed company claimed to hold the patent for it in the Netherlands."

So, generic drug legally produced in India, on its way for legal distribution in Brazil, gets stopped in the Netherlands because someone asserts that they have a patent on it in a country through which it's merely passing.

That instance occurred in January; since then, HIV medicines have been seized as well.

As the saying goes, it's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.

I also find it pretty amusing that /. will get its panties in a twist over DRM conspiracies, but not medicines. I mean, really, how important could medicines be?

FYI, ACTA is much more than a "Copyright" treaty. I wish that's all it were about, but the "C" in ACTA stands for "Counterfeiting". There's been a recent rash of seizures of legitimately produced generic drugs in the Netherlands, all on concerns about "counterfeiting." The pushing through of ACTA is likely only to make this sort of nonsense worse, and the effect on people's lives is real.

Ah, but how do we know it is not true? Since it is closed source we can never be completely certain and just have to take someone's word for it....which is really the whole point of the argument for OS.

Because 1) Microsoft documents the heredity of their code well. They're not stupid. And B) the source code is widely available, both through legitimate channels like Microsoft's shared source programs and channels that are a bit shadier like bit torrent. Don't you think someone would have pointed anything embarrassing to Microsoft like this by now?

If Microsoft is so good at documentation why haven't they documented those 238 MS patents Linux and OpenOffice violate for the world to see? Why did it take MS years to provide to the European Commission all those documents the EC asked for?

Falcon

But also remember that it was the faceless, unelected, bureaucratic EU Commission that tried to use its power to force software patents (in their original form) through the European Parliament

I wouldn't say faceless, it was Charlie McCreevy who was behind the patent 'reforms'. I won't dispute the rest of your assertions though. :)

"Developing countries represent less than 5 percent of the worldwide pharmaceutical market and practically none of its profits." IP Watch: "Inside Views: A Call To Universities To Help Increase Global Medicines Access"

Roche have dragged their heels with licenses for over a year, they finally issued a few licenses after several governments threatened to force a license agreement on them. Regardless of the eventual merits of the drug, Roche's lengthy "license negotiations" are an exercise in pure greed.

Nice, the linked article shows a 404. Here is another article about the subject