Intellectual Property
revere | April 4, 2008The Global War on Terror is claiming yet another victim: the reputation of Attorney General Michael Mukasey as a principled guardian of the Rule of Law. Even before joining the Bush administration Mukasey was forgetting the meaning of the word "torture," and since being confirmed is equally benighted regarding privacy. Now he is peddling shoddy goods linking terrorism and software piracy. Does this former judge have no shame? Via Preston Gralla at Computer World Blogs:
In a talk last week before at the Tech Museum of Innovation, Mukasey used his best fearmongering tactics to link software…
revere | March 31, 2008Record and movie companies want to turn file sharing into a moral issue -- I think there are some moral issues here, although they fall on both sides -- but in reality everyone knows it's just about money and the fact that they have their hands on the levers of the legal system which they use for their benefit. It's not about justice. They recover money from teenies and grandmas and then don't redistribute it to the artists. In fact they have a long history of cheating artists. And now they have been caught again with their hands in the cookie jar.
I found this on Slashdot but the original…
revere | March 25, 2008We've covered the Indonesian refusal to cooperate with international influenza surveillance system to a fare thee well (see posts posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and links therein), so this is just an update with some additional observations how Indonesia's deplorable behavior isn't that different than the US's deplorable behavior in the Middle East. First, Indonesia. When last we checked in Indonesia had sent off half a dozen flu specimens from the period after the end of January 2007 when it started its boycott. The hope was that the…
revere | March 10, 2008Suppose you had a high priced lawyer who sent a notice to someone on your behalf certifying, upon pain and penalty of perjury, that the information in her notice was accurate but that it turned out it was nothing of the kind? And that the falsity of the statement would have been immediately evident to a large number of non lawyer lay people, much less a lawyer acting on behalf of the US government? It seems there are only two choices here: deliberate perjury (a serious crime); or the engagement on your behalf of seriously incompetent people (business as usual in this Administration). I'll let…
revere | March 2, 2008The Indonesian virus sharing impasse is said to be over, and with the dénouement comes some fascinating new information. Many will remember the row started when an Australian vaccine maker took an Indonesian viral isolate and made an experimental vaccine from it (see many posts among those here). At the time it was said the Indonesian Health Minister objected that her country would never be able to afford the vaccine and she therefore stopped making the virus available to WHO. WHO was the source of the seed strain used by the Australian company to make a prototype vaccine.
It turns out,…
revere | February 23, 2008Indonesia is providing bird flu specimens to WHO again. And Indonesian Health Minister Dr Siti Fadilah Supari has just published a book declaring the 50 year plus history of global influenza surveillance is part of a conspiracy by the developed world to control the rest of the world:
"Developed countries become richer because they have the capability to develop the vaccine and control the world," she writes.
Dr Supari also expresses alarm at WHO laboratories sharing bird flu virus data with the United States National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where nuclear weapons are developed.
"…
revere | February 15, 2008"Open Access" is apparently an Idea whose Time has Come:
All papers by Harvard scholars accepted for publication as of today will be freely available to the public. The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously passed a motion last night (February 12) that requires all arts and sciences faculty articles to be made publicly available.
Harvard is the first US university to mandate open access to its faculty publications, Peter Suber, open access advocate, wrote on his blog yesterday. The mandate "should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have…
revere | January 21, 2008A report late last night by Helen Branswell alerted me to a tabulation from a new tracking system WHO is putting into place to answer demands from a number of member states in the developing world that there be more transparency in how isolates of avian influenza (bird flu) submitted to WHO are used and by whom. About a third of confirmed cases have been registered in Indonesia, although that country has provided less than a quarter of the isolates, a reflection of the refusal by the country's health minister, Dr. Siti Fadilah Supari, to provide any more specimens until matters of vaccine…
revere | December 29, 2007This both made me laugh and made me mad. Corey Doctorow over at Boingboing relates how he was contacted by a new online service to write a letter of recommendation for a former student applying to graduate school. Using a web-based interface the same letter could be submitted to multiple universities. Good idea. Like a lot of professors I have to write a lot of these and making it easier is good for me and good for students. The catch was that this one came with an end user license agreement (EULA) requiring the submitter (who is doing everyone a favor, including the web-based application…
revere | December 24, 2007We've discussed the scandal over the use of Avastin and Lucentis for wet macular degeneration several times (here, here, here). If you've missed it, here's the gist. Avastin is a drug approved to treat colon cancer. It works by choking off blood vessels to the tumor. It turns out, however, that a tiny dose of the same drug, when injected into the eye can also stop the uncontrolled growth of blood vessels behind the retina that produces a leading cause of blindness in the elderly, macular degeneration. The good news is a compounding pharmacy can take the large dose in the Avastin package and…
revere | December 20, 2007Nature's senior correspondent, Declan Butler, was one of the first to raise the profile of a pandemic threat in the scientific community and has had done some superb reporting since, including several stories on sharing gene sequences. The problematic actors in his earlier stories were respected scientists and the business-as-usual way they were approaching release of genetic sequences even as the world worried that the virus they were studying, influenza A, was inexorably searching for the right recipe to enhance its own raison d'etre, to make still more copies of itself, potentially with…
revere | December 10, 2007The debate about how much wild migratory birds contribute to the spread of highly pathogenic influenza/A H5N1 goes on. According to a sensible Commentary in Nature (Dec. 6) it needn't. We should have taken steps some time ago to answer an answerable question. But we didn't and still haven't initiated those steps:
Two years ago, some believed that H5N1 viruses were poised to spread around the globe on the wings of migrating wild birds. A massive effort was mounted to track their movement but, as of September 2007, very few positive birds have been found in tests of over 300,000 healthy wild…
revere | November 26, 2007Indonesia's health minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, has answered the question whether the recently concluded Geneva summit on sharing of influenza viruses had produced sufficient agreement to induce that country to begin sharing again. Her answer seems to be "no":
Indonesia's health minister reiterated Sunday that she would not send bird flu specimens to the World Health Organization, saying poor nations needed assurances that any pandemic vaccines developed from the virus would be affordable.
Siti Fadilah Supari made the comments on her return from Geneva, where the WHO held an…
revere | November 24, 2007As you will see from the account below the fold, the flu summit was a contentious and complicated affair. Only time will tell if it was even a qualified success, but there are reasons to be hopeful. Tip of the hat to Ed Hammond, one of the NGO participants, who provided the public health community with his perspective at a time when no one else was talking. This involved late hours for him at the end of long days. We are grateful.
Here's his wrap-up:
Influenza Meeting Ends in Qualified Success
At the end of contentious meetings like the one on policies for sharing flu virus it is tempting to…
revere | November 24, 2007Yesterday was the fourth and final day of the important Geneva summit on sharing flu virus isolates. Like premature news of Mark Twain's death, the Reuters report the meeting had failed was exaggerated. On the contrary, the summit appeared to have moved things forward. We have the latest, below. You can find previous happenings and background here, here, here and here.
Status mid-day, Day 4 (3:26 pm Geneva time, November 23), as reported by Ed Hammond:
Some Things That Happened in the Night Session of Day 3 and Morning Session of Day 4
These sessions were the final negotiations before…
revere | November 23, 2007The critical summit on sharing influenza viruses entered its third day (previous coverage here and links therein). The big media outlets covered the opening but not since. Fortunately, you can read about developments here (Day 2, here). Ed Hammond is there and is keeping us abreast of developments.
A participant's view at the start of Day 3 (5:30 am, Thursday, Geneva time):
Halfway Through and No New Ideas from the US and EU
To be sure, Indonesia has not been the most effective leader for its cause. Its multiple failures at this meeting (if not previous ones) to put forward clear language…
revere | November 22, 2007We have an on-the-ground view of the critical influenza virus sharing summit, provided by Ed Hammond in Geneva. I am promoting his comment thread notes from earlier today and a fuller account from late in the evening on Wednesday (Geneva time) sent me by email. It is clear that the atmosphere is tense and not convivial.
First, if you haven't been following the issue here or elsewhere, here's a bit of background from an excellent piece at Intellectual Property Watch (h/t Agitant):
The politically explosive issue of ensuring everyone benefits from vaccines in the event of an influenza pandemic…
revere | November 21, 2007The first day of the scheduled four day showdown in Geneva over sharing bird flu virus isolates is now over. What seems to have been accomplished is statements of opening positions. How moveable everyone is remains to be seen, as does whether there is an Alexander the Great around to cut the Gordian Knot (you can see the strands of the knot in some of our previous posts, for example (chronologically) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
Here is Reuter's version of Day 1:
Indonesia, the nation worst hit by bird flu with 91 human deaths,…
revere | November 20, 2007If a rogue H5N1 virus easiy tansmissible between people is to develop, the most plausible spot for it to happen is Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous with a vast reservoir of infected poultry (and who knows what else) and more human cases (113) and more deaths (91) than any other country. But Indonesia still refuses to share its human H5N1 isolates, contending they get nothing tangible from an arrangement which is likely to lead to vaccines they won't be able to afford. Under the current system, which allows intellectual property rights to cover vaccines developed from WHO supplied…
revere | November 17, 2007I used to watch The Daily Show every night (thanks to TiVo). Now I don't because of the writers' strike. So I have to settle for this. Enjoy: