Intellectual Property
sb admin | April 25, 2007Fair use? If it benefits the progress of science or the dissemination of scientific knowledge, it really ought to be fair use, no matter what. But when it's cropping out a piece of a figure for an illustration in an article about a scientific result, with that result fully cited, it fully is fair use, even under the shrinking domain that remains within USA copyright law. Alas, when you are an individual graduate student, and the entity asserting that you're violating their copyright, knowledge that you are well within fair use is little comfort when you're faced the travesty that is our…
revere | April 24, 2007Excitement, then irritation. That was my reaction to a news article in Nature about a technique using a protein to switch off nerve firing when activated by light:
There were audible gasps and spontaneous applause at a neuroscience meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, in February, when Ed Boyden described a protein that switches off nerve firing when activated by light. And when Karl Deisseroth told the fuller story of the protein, called NpHR and published in this week's Nature, at Cold Spring Harbor in New York late last month, there was talk of a revolution in neuroscience. It is perhaps no…
sb admin | March 21, 2007I love the way Cory Doctorow expresses it in this BoingBoing post:
Now, whenever I write about trademarks, I get a bunch of emails asserting the voodoo theory of trademark: every conceivable use of a trademark has to be policed aggressively or you'll lose your trademarks forever. It's just not true. A trademark isn't the right to tell people what words they can use when they talk, and it isn't the right to tell dictionaries which words they're allowed to define. Voodoo trademarkism is a fairy tale that trademark lawyers tell their kids at night to reassure them that they'll have a healthy…
revere | January 1, 2007Everybody should think of starting a new career once in a while, and New Year's Day seems as good a time as any for US taxpayers to embark on their new jobs as Venture Capitalists. Medgadget, a site that brings us news of advances in medical technology, now tells us about a private Salt Lake City company, TechniScan Medical Systems, who just received $2.8 million in taxpayer money, from NIH no less, to develop a noninvasive ultrasound device for detecting breast cancer.
Medgadget is offended by the use of public dollars for this purpose, and frankly, so am I. NIH supports basic research and…
revere | November 9, 2006The US midterm election is over and the Democratic party will take control of the US House of Representatives. For the most part this is a good thing. A very good thing. For the most part. But there is a fly or two in the ointment. There always seems to be.
With the change of parties we will be getting new subcommittee chairpersons (the Chairs have great power over what laws get passed)and some are, shall we say, problematic. Like the "Honorable" Howard Berman who represents the district next to Holywood and is sometimes referred to as "the Representative from Disney" because he does the…