Um no. It is up to the state to protect and enforce the rights of its citizens. Otherwise we'd had a society where only the rights of the strong is worth anything.
There's a bit of both. It's unrealistic to expect the state to do all of the work of enforcing the rights of all people at all times, so there is a hefty dose of personal responsibility that we expect from people. E.g., in intellectual property, the rightsholder generally has to complain about alleged violations, the state is not going to go looking for them on its own. Or with personal property, we expect people to take precautions like locking their doors and not leaving valuables unattended. And of course some people are better positioned than others to take these precautions, or to seek redress from the state when something bad happens.
On the other hand, getting ISPs involved in the copyright issue is trying to coopt a third party into the enforcement of someone else's rights.Yeah, of course it better aligns the ISPs with the interests of rights holders. If you made a law saying I had to pay every time someone else pirated music, my interests would also align pretty quickly with those of rights holders.
No, it's only government censorship when the government does it.
There are plenty of other kinds of censorship, but whether they are appropriate and our reaction to them varies with who or what is involved. Ever heard of self-censorship? Or the Index Librorum Prohibitorum?
It gives some guidelines, and four factors that are to be considered. Neither are exhaustive; just because a given situation isn't explicitly spelled out in 17 USC Sec. 107 doesn't mean it isn't fair use. Fair use precedent is slippery precisely because it depends on the merits of individual cases, which are very hard to codify.
Where's the problem? If oil really is that cheap, then it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to go with "green energy".
But that's just it--oil isn't that cheap. The full cost of its externalities is not captured in the price we pay at the pump. Both the social externalities of pollution, etc., as well as the numerous direct and indirect subsidies.
Not to say that green technology isn't also subsidized, but pointing to the market price of oil doesn't really indicate its full economic costs
Visit Washington, D.C. sometime and use the Metro. It's customary to stand on the right, and it's very irritating to locals when you don't. I usually ask people to move out of the way if they're on the left.
Summer's a pain, though, because of the floods of tourists... no point in asking one to move, because there are about 20 more above them.
I actually don't have a problem with Micro USB... it's a standard, and you can get cheap cables from Hong Kong off of eBay for less than $3 including shipping. My Kindle uses one, and I wanted an extra cable, so that was easy enough. But most Blackberries are pretty thick, makes you wonder why they went to Micro, which is primarily to save on device width.
Honestly even if every device maker simply wrote the name of the product clearly on the power brick, and all power bricks/transformers and their devices specified the voltage, current, and polarity, we'd be in a better place.
It would be nice if they all standardized on a magsafe interface.
I hope not, at least not the earlier incarnations of it. Apple forums are full of people complaining about problems with their MagSafe failing to charge, not working at all, etc. I had problems with mine - power brick wouldn't charge the machine after about two years. It was going to be $60 for a new one, but I cajoled the guy at the "genius bar" into letting me have one for free.
Fair Use is defined under the four criteria of Fair Use.
The four factors, which came out of case law and were later codified in the statute, are not exhaustive (even though some judges seem to treat them as such). 17 USC Sec. 107 states that the factors "shall include" the four things listed, not "shall only include" or "shall be limited to." This is part of the reason why fair use is so murky, and it's not an entirely bad thing.
At Ph.D. prep level you should be reading research papers/journal articles to work out who's doing interesting work. You should also have networked in your undergrad and formed connections to people who can provide you with interesting opportunities in exchange for your hard work.
I'll second this. When I was figuring out where to apply for my Ph.D., I knew what I was interested in, and for a while I did browse the faculty lists of top schools just to see if there was anyone there interested in similar things. My interest is kind of an oddity in the field, and I didn't have much success finding anyone.
They way I ended up finding my school (i.e., faculty member) was when doing research for a paper. Course instructor recommended that I read so-and-so, because she is a professor in my field working on the topic. Later, course instructor introduced me to her at a conference. I read a few of her articles, bought some of her books, decided that would work for me.
Another thing I would stress is to make sure your faculty member is tenured and not planning on leaving for another school... or if they're not tenured, that you have more than one person you'd like to work with. It will suck if you go expecting to work with one person, only to find out a year later that they're no longer going to be teaching at the school.
And the schools will make money off of it, too
on
Behind Cyberwar FUD
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've been seeing ads for a new degree program in "cybersecurity" at UMUC (second-career oriented portion of the University of Maryland). But I really wonder how effective such a degree could be if the person in the program isn't required to do some basic programming. From what I can tell, they aren't... they take "network essentials" and classes that include "penetration testing," but if the graduates of this kind of program are up against skilled hackers who are comfortable with bit-banging, I guess we're kind of screwed.
Your link clearly says the case is about the ownership of the work. Is your link wrong?
No, your reading comprehension is wrong.
The section you quote is relating what the parties had discussed IN ADVANCE of the case regarding copyright -- which was, in fact, nothing. This is the ENTIRE reason there was confusion over ownership of the copyright - because they did not discuss it, so it was not clear if it was a work for hire, or not.
If you looked at any of the rest of the opinion, instead of just cherry picking one section you misunderstood as supporting your flawed understanding of the case, you would have noticed that the issue of copyright ownership comes up over and over again.
That's exactly my point. I'm talking about ownership of copyright. The case was about who owned the physical object.
No, the case was about TWO things: ownership of the object AND ownership of the copyright. If you don't believe me, go read the text of the opinion yourself.
I'm not going to bother responding to the rest of your post since you are failing to understand even this simple point.
The point is that they are considered the author. Even though in reality, they aren't.
Not true. If they don't allow you a license to use their copyrighted material then you're fucked. That's the whole point of copyright law. To control things in exactly this manner.
No, it's not. Go look at USC 17 Sec. 106 and read the list of exclusive rights. There is no exclusive right to control whether someone "uses" a single instance of your work. You have the exclusive right to distribute, make derivative works, etc.
If your got an independent contractor to do any number of things for you: write a computer program, write a novel, paint a portrait, etc., it is irrelevant whether they give you a license to the work or transfer the copyright. You will still own the object and be able to "use" it normally - this means reading the book, using the software (and there is almost certainly an implied license if you have a contract with them), and hanging the portrait on your wall. What you can't do (without a license or transfer of copyright to you) is redistribute, prepare derivative works, give a public reading of the book, display the portrait publicly, etc.
Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid is irrelevant. That's a case about taking ownership of a physical object.
No, there were two issues: ownership of the object, and ownership of the copyright. Those are very different issues. All of this confusion arises from a fundamental misunderstanding about the rights conferred by copyright, which are separate from the actual work or object in question.
Copyright actually serves to help give the work a fighting chance, as the rights owner gains nothing by having the work out of circulation, and has good reason to champion it - once it's in the public domain, unless it has stood the test of time, it has no champion and truly is lost.
If this were always true, there would be no such thing as orphan works.
You are talking about dropping a book into the public domain once the sales are no longer enough to keep it in print, and in order to do that, you have to strip all rights the author has to their own book away. So, if the author wants to try again, they can't - the book is in the public domain, and they no longer have any say in the matter.
You do realize there are alternatives to just "all or nothing", right? For example, bringing back copyright renewal accompanied by a registration fee (which in fact used to be the way it was done in the U.S.). Statistical evidence shows that the vast majority of works were not renewed, indicating that the copyright owners did not think the fairly small renewal fee was worth it.
That sort of system both enhances the public domain and allows authors who believe their work has continued economic value to continue to exploit the copyright. In fact, one proposal by Posner (7th Circuit Appeals Court Judge, famous for law and economics) and Landes (a well-known IP academic) actually makes a case for indefinite copyright. See: Landes, William M, and Richard A Posner. “Indefinitely Renewable Copyright.” University of Chicago Law Review 70 (2003): 471.
You claim that shortening copyright would have no impact on the availability of (many) books because there is no demand for them in the first place.
You then support your claim that there is no demand for them by claiming, presumably, that the cost of a limited print run would be so low that were there any demand, it could profitably be met.
I don't really buy this. Isn't the entire problem with thousands and thousands of orphaned works that the copyright holder can't even be easily identified? So that even if there is demand, and the costs of a limited print run are small enough that I decide it would be profitable to do it, I can't find the copyright holder (who may be dead, have gone out of business, or simply forgotten or lost the records pertaining to the copyright).
There are a huge number of books that are out of print but still under copyright. Wasn't one of the benefits of the Google Books scanning project to make these widely available at essentially no cost to interested readers? I could turn your argument around and say, look, if the copyright holders weren't exploiting their copyright and selling the book in the first place, clearly they didn't think it was worthwhile to do so, so what's the harm in Google scanning it and making it available?
Furthermore, there are other reasons to have access to the text of old books than just for passing interest or pleasure of reading them. Lots of scholars would love to have full-text search capability of old, out-of-print works, if only for statistical analysis. It doesn't make sense to do this with limited print runs, and it would be prohibitively expensive. Just scanning everything, OCR, and archival makes much more sense.
On the issue of film preservation, a letter from the National Film Preservation Foundation discusses the problem of orphan works again:
"In an environment of scare resources... Copyright status becomes part of the preservation decision-making process... I believe that important parts of America's film heritage will become lost to educators and the general public unless some simpler, more structured and cost-effective system can be developed for ascertaining the rights status of orphan works." (source)
If copyright were shorter, there would be fewer orphan works, and at least according to that group, more preservation and dissemination of cultural material.
ACTA is a sole executive agreement, not a treaty. As such it does not need to be ratified or even examined by Congress, under the assumption that it does not exceed the bounds of current U.S. law. However, just yesterday ACTA negotiators admitted that provisions of ACTA will likely require at least some parties to modify their national laws.
Actually, it is theft. The fact that you made the copy is irrelevant, because that copy belongs to the rightsholder (in a nutshell, this is all copyright really is). By not rendering it up to them, you have stolen it.
Wake me up when someone actually files a suit over a copyright in court, specifically alleges the crime of theft, and prevails. There is a name for copyright infringement: copyright infringement. Calling it theft or stealing just confuses people about the nature of copyright - yourself included, see the next point.
It's not the copy that belongs to the rightholder, it is the right to make copies. Copies can belong to anyone. The right to make copies, along with other related rights conferred by copyright law (such as the right to make derivative works, etc.) normally belongs to the author, who can then transfer it to someone else. Don't confuse the single instance of the copy with the copyright.
Copyright infringement is not theft legally speaking, but people try to make the analogy by arguing that copyright infringement causes loss or deprivation in a similar manner. That argument at least has some merit, since you are in fact depriving them of the exclusive right to make copies, and presumably the value they could have derived from that right.
This needs to be clarified. It's not true that "only the creator can copyright something" precisely because of the work for hire doctrine.
Also, work for hire is less about the person who hired you being able to use what you've created than to exercise all the rights accorded to copyright holders. E.g., if you pay someone to write a computer program for you and they retain the copyright, you are still able to use it. You just won't be able to redistribute it, etc. There's a very famous case about this, the Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, where the issue was whether a sculpture that was commissioned was a work for hire or not. But the issue was always over who owned the copyright, not who owned the actual physical sculpture.
What's the solution? You seem to be saying that people who develop medicine shouldn't be able to charge and/or profit from it?
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm not an expert in that particular area, but from what I've read there are a number of well known partial solutions, such as:
More effective differential pricing of medicines. There are a lot of stated concerns about reimportation of low-cost medicines into high-income countries, but empirical evidence about the extent to which this is really a problem is needed.
PhRMA and USTR should quit doing everything in its power to oppose the use of compulsory licenses and price controls by low- and middle-income nations like Thailand, Brazil, etc.
Fix the problems with parallel importation of medicines that would allow least-developed countries to import drugs which they do not have the local capacity to produce.
Set up alternative revenue mechanisms. Prize or bounty systems, for example, that would incentivize research and investment, but that would not necessitate exclusive patent rights.
An alternative to compulsory licensing would be the outright purchase of IP rights for a particular medicine at a flat rate.
There are plenty of ways to approach the problem, and there is plenty of academic literature on the subject. Off the top of my head, I would refer you to William "Terry" Fisher, Kevin Outterson, and Ellen t'Hoen for starters.
This is the first I've heard of it. More info please.
If you read the official draft ACTA text that was released by USTR, patents are mentioned several times in both Chapters 1 & 2.
Additionally, "intellectual property" is broadly defined in the agreement in such a way as to explicitly include patents (as well as industrial designs, integrated circuit designs, geographical indications, and trade secrets). This effectively means that any reference to "intellectual property rights" generally in the ACTA draft text should be read as including patents.
It's not really a joke. The difference in price between patented medicines and patent-expired medicines, or those that are still under patent but obtained with compulsory licenses is significant.
Patent rights contribute significantly to the cost of medicines and medical technology. They're not the only cost, nor the most significant in every case, but given that expenditures are always limited, more money spent as a result of the patent means fewer people treated.
It's not a direct line, but yes, patents can kill. This is why there was such mobilization around ARVs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and why patents and public health continue to be a huge area of debate. It's also relevant to ACTA, because, as most people here seem to continually forget, ACTA implicates patents as well.
As for the second part. What the fuck are you talking about? IP rights holders are incapable of controlling happiness. Can you restate your point please?
Not sure what the OP meant by this exactly, but:
You need to be alive in order to be happy.
IP rights holders (patent holders in particular) in many cases possess the legal right to deny access to a product or process that can keep someone alive, either by the patent right itself, or by the market power conveyed by the patent that allows them to price the item out of the reach of people.
So in some sense, yes, IP rights holders can control happiness:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Um no. It is up to the state to protect and enforce the rights of its citizens. Otherwise we'd had a society where only the rights of the strong is worth anything.
There's a bit of both. It's unrealistic to expect the state to do all of the work of enforcing the rights of all people at all times, so there is a hefty dose of personal responsibility that we expect from people. E.g., in intellectual property, the rightsholder generally has to complain about alleged violations, the state is not going to go looking for them on its own. Or with personal property, we expect people to take precautions like locking their doors and not leaving valuables unattended. And of course some people are better positioned than others to take these precautions, or to seek redress from the state when something bad happens.
On the other hand, getting ISPs involved in the copyright issue is trying to coopt a third party into the enforcement of someone else's rights.Yeah, of course it better aligns the ISPs with the interests of rights holders. If you made a law saying I had to pay every time someone else pirated music, my interests would also align pretty quickly with those of rights holders.
It's only censorship when the government does it.
No, it's only government censorship when the government does it.
There are plenty of other kinds of censorship, but whether they are appropriate and our reaction to them varies with who or what is involved. Ever heard of self-censorship? Or the Index Librorum Prohibitorum?
This link: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107 specifies what is considered fair use.
It gives some guidelines, and four factors that are to be considered. Neither are exhaustive; just because a given situation isn't explicitly spelled out in 17 USC Sec. 107 doesn't mean it isn't fair use. Fair use precedent is slippery precisely because it depends on the merits of individual cases, which are very hard to codify.
Where's the problem? If oil really is that cheap, then it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to go with "green energy".
But that's just it--oil isn't that cheap. The full cost of its externalities is not captured in the price we pay at the pump. Both the social externalities of pollution, etc., as well as the numerous direct and indirect subsidies.
Not to say that green technology isn't also subsidized, but pointing to the market price of oil doesn't really indicate its full economic costs
Visit Washington, D.C. sometime and use the Metro. It's customary to stand on the right, and it's very irritating to locals when you don't. I usually ask people to move out of the way if they're on the left.
Summer's a pain, though, because of the floods of tourists... no point in asking one to move, because there are about 20 more above them.
I actually don't have a problem with Micro USB... it's a standard, and you can get cheap cables from Hong Kong off of eBay for less than $3 including shipping. My Kindle uses one, and I wanted an extra cable, so that was easy enough. But most Blackberries are pretty thick, makes you wonder why they went to Micro, which is primarily to save on device width.
Honestly even if every device maker simply wrote the name of the product clearly on the power brick, and all power bricks/transformers and their devices specified the voltage, current, and polarity, we'd be in a better place.
It would be nice if they all standardized on a magsafe interface.
I hope not, at least not the earlier incarnations of it. Apple forums are full of people complaining about problems with their MagSafe failing to charge, not working at all, etc. I had problems with mine - power brick wouldn't charge the machine after about two years. It was going to be $60 for a new one, but I cajoled the guy at the "genius bar" into letting me have one for free.
Fair Use is defined under the four criteria of Fair Use.
The four factors, which came out of case law and were later codified in the statute, are not exhaustive (even though some judges seem to treat them as such). 17 USC Sec. 107 states that the factors "shall include" the four things listed, not "shall only include" or "shall be limited to." This is part of the reason why fair use is so murky, and it's not an entirely bad thing.
At Ph.D. prep level you should be reading research papers/journal articles to work out who's doing interesting work. You should also have networked in your undergrad and formed connections to people who can provide you with interesting opportunities in exchange for your hard work.
I'll second this. When I was figuring out where to apply for my Ph.D., I knew what I was interested in, and for a while I did browse the faculty lists of top schools just to see if there was anyone there interested in similar things. My interest is kind of an oddity in the field, and I didn't have much success finding anyone.
They way I ended up finding my school (i.e., faculty member) was when doing research for a paper. Course instructor recommended that I read so-and-so, because she is a professor in my field working on the topic. Later, course instructor introduced me to her at a conference. I read a few of her articles, bought some of her books, decided that would work for me.
Another thing I would stress is to make sure your faculty member is tenured and not planning on leaving for another school... or if they're not tenured, that you have more than one person you'd like to work with. It will suck if you go expecting to work with one person, only to find out a year later that they're no longer going to be teaching at the school.
I've been seeing ads for a new degree program in "cybersecurity" at UMUC (second-career oriented portion of the University of Maryland). But I really wonder how effective such a degree could be if the person in the program isn't required to do some basic programming. From what I can tell, they aren't... they take "network essentials" and classes that include "penetration testing," but if the graduates of this kind of program are up against skilled hackers who are comfortable with bit-banging, I guess we're kind of screwed.
Practice cracking WEP keys.
I just use other people's default FIOS installations for that.
Your link clearly says the case is about the ownership of the work. Is your link wrong?
No, your reading comprehension is wrong.
The section you quote is relating what the parties had discussed IN ADVANCE of the case regarding copyright -- which was, in fact, nothing. This is the ENTIRE reason there was confusion over ownership of the copyright - because they did not discuss it, so it was not clear if it was a work for hire, or not.
If you looked at any of the rest of the opinion, instead of just cherry picking one section you misunderstood as supporting your flawed understanding of the case, you would have noticed that the issue of copyright ownership comes up over and over again.
I'm done spoon feeding you. Goodbye.
That's exactly my point. I'm talking about ownership of copyright. The case was about who owned the physical object.
No, the case was about TWO things: ownership of the object AND ownership of the copyright. If you don't believe me, go read the text of the opinion yourself.
I'm not going to bother responding to the rest of your post since you are failing to understand even this simple point.
In works for hire the creator is the employer.
The point is that they are considered the author. Even though in reality, they aren't.
Not true. If they don't allow you a license to use their copyrighted material then you're fucked. That's the whole point of copyright law. To control things in exactly this manner.
No, it's not. Go look at USC 17 Sec. 106 and read the list of exclusive rights. There is no exclusive right to control whether someone "uses" a single instance of your work. You have the exclusive right to distribute, make derivative works, etc.
If your got an independent contractor to do any number of things for you: write a computer program, write a novel, paint a portrait, etc., it is irrelevant whether they give you a license to the work or transfer the copyright. You will still own the object and be able to "use" it normally - this means reading the book, using the software (and there is almost certainly an implied license if you have a contract with them), and hanging the portrait on your wall. What you can't do (without a license or transfer of copyright to you) is redistribute, prepare derivative works, give a public reading of the book, display the portrait publicly, etc.
Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid is irrelevant. That's a case about taking ownership of a physical object.
No, there were two issues: ownership of the object, and ownership of the copyright. Those are very different issues. All of this confusion arises from a fundamental misunderstanding about the rights conferred by copyright, which are separate from the actual work or object in question.
Copyright actually serves to help give the work a fighting chance, as the rights owner gains nothing by having the work out of circulation, and has good reason to champion it - once it's in the public domain, unless it has stood the test of time, it has no champion and truly is lost.
If this were always true, there would be no such thing as orphan works.
You are talking about dropping a book into the public domain once the sales are no longer enough to keep it in print, and in order to do that, you have to strip all rights the author has to their own book away. So, if the author wants to try again, they can't - the book is in the public domain, and they no longer have any say in the matter.
You do realize there are alternatives to just "all or nothing", right? For example, bringing back copyright renewal accompanied by a registration fee (which in fact used to be the way it was done in the U.S.). Statistical evidence shows that the vast majority of works were not renewed, indicating that the copyright owners did not think the fairly small renewal fee was worth it.
That sort of system both enhances the public domain and allows authors who believe their work has continued economic value to continue to exploit the copyright. In fact, one proposal by Posner (7th Circuit Appeals Court Judge, famous for law and economics) and Landes (a well-known IP academic) actually makes a case for indefinite copyright. See: Landes, William M, and Richard A Posner. “Indefinitely Renewable Copyright.” University of Chicago Law Review 70 (2003): 471.
You claim that shortening copyright would have no impact on the availability of (many) books because there is no demand for them in the first place.
You then support your claim that there is no demand for them by claiming, presumably, that the cost of a limited print run would be so low that were there any demand, it could profitably be met.
I don't really buy this. Isn't the entire problem with thousands and thousands of orphaned works that the copyright holder can't even be easily identified? So that even if there is demand, and the costs of a limited print run are small enough that I decide it would be profitable to do it, I can't find the copyright holder (who may be dead, have gone out of business, or simply forgotten or lost the records pertaining to the copyright).
There are a huge number of books that are out of print but still under copyright. Wasn't one of the benefits of the Google Books scanning project to make these widely available at essentially no cost to interested readers? I could turn your argument around and say, look, if the copyright holders weren't exploiting their copyright and selling the book in the first place, clearly they didn't think it was worthwhile to do so, so what's the harm in Google scanning it and making it available?
Furthermore, there are other reasons to have access to the text of old books than just for passing interest or pleasure of reading them. Lots of scholars would love to have full-text search capability of old, out-of-print works, if only for statistical analysis. It doesn't make sense to do this with limited print runs, and it would be prohibitively expensive. Just scanning everything, OCR, and archival makes much more sense.
On the issue of film preservation, a letter from the National Film Preservation Foundation discusses the problem of orphan works again:
"In an environment of scare resources... Copyright status becomes part of the preservation decision-making process... I believe that important parts of America's film heritage will become lost to educators and the general public unless some simpler, more structured and cost-effective system can be developed for ascertaining the rights status of orphan works." (source)
If copyright were shorter, there would be fewer orphan works, and at least according to that group, more preservation and dissemination of cultural material.
ACTA is a sole executive agreement, not a treaty. As such it does not need to be ratified or even examined by Congress, under the assumption that it does not exceed the bounds of current U.S. law. However, just yesterday ACTA negotiators admitted that provisions of ACTA will likely require at least some parties to modify their national laws.
Actually, it is theft. The fact that you made the copy is irrelevant, because that copy belongs to the rightsholder (in a nutshell, this is all copyright really is). By not rendering it up to them, you have stolen it.
Wake me up when someone actually files a suit over a copyright in court, specifically alleges the crime of theft, and prevails. There is a name for copyright infringement: copyright infringement. Calling it theft or stealing just confuses people about the nature of copyright - yourself included, see the next point.
It's not the copy that belongs to the rightholder, it is the right to make copies. Copies can belong to anyone. The right to make copies, along with other related rights conferred by copyright law (such as the right to make derivative works, etc.) normally belongs to the author, who can then transfer it to someone else. Don't confuse the single instance of the copy with the copyright.
Copyright infringement is not theft legally speaking, but people try to make the analogy by arguing that copyright infringement causes loss or deprivation in a similar manner. That argument at least has some merit, since you are in fact depriving them of the exclusive right to make copies, and presumably the value they could have derived from that right.
This needs to be clarified. It's not true that "only the creator can copyright something" precisely because of the work for hire doctrine.
Also, work for hire is less about the person who hired you being able to use what you've created than to exercise all the rights accorded to copyright holders. E.g., if you pay someone to write a computer program for you and they retain the copyright, you are still able to use it. You just won't be able to redistribute it, etc. There's a very famous case about this, the Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, where the issue was whether a sculpture that was commissioned was a work for hire or not. But the issue was always over who owned the copyright, not who owned the actual physical sculpture.
What's the solution? You seem to be saying that people who develop medicine shouldn't be able to charge and/or profit from it?
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm not an expert in that particular area, but from what I've read there are a number of well known partial solutions, such as:
There are plenty of ways to approach the problem, and there is plenty of academic literature on the subject. Off the top of my head, I would refer you to William "Terry" Fisher, Kevin Outterson, and Ellen t'Hoen for starters.
This is the first I've heard of it. More info please.
If you read the official draft ACTA text that was released by USTR, patents are mentioned several times in both Chapters 1 & 2.
Additionally, "intellectual property" is broadly defined in the agreement in such a way as to explicitly include patents (as well as industrial designs, integrated circuit designs, geographical indications, and trade secrets). This effectively means that any reference to "intellectual property rights" generally in the ACTA draft text should be read as including patents.
Lady Gaga records aren't patented, and patents are what I'm talking about. Read my other comment for more detail.
It's not really a joke. The difference in price between patented medicines and patent-expired medicines, or those that are still under patent but obtained with compulsory licenses is significant.
Patent rights contribute significantly to the cost of medicines and medical technology. They're not the only cost, nor the most significant in every case, but given that expenditures are always limited, more money spent as a result of the patent means fewer people treated.
It's not a direct line, but yes, patents can kill. This is why there was such mobilization around ARVs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and why patents and public health continue to be a huge area of debate. It's also relevant to ACTA, because, as most people here seem to continually forget, ACTA implicates patents as well.
As for the second part. What the fuck are you talking about? IP rights holders are incapable of controlling happiness. Can you restate your point please?
Not sure what the OP meant by this exactly, but: