Knowledge Ecology Notes

The World Health Organization just published a report on this week’s second meeting of the WHO Expert Working Group (EWG) on R&D Financing. Continue reading WHO releases sketchy report on second meeting of Expert Working Group on R&D Financing

TACD has issued a resolution on copyright terms, and measures to mitigate the harm from excessive terms. The TACD Press release follows: Continue reading TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) resolution on copyright terms

Today nine NGOs sent a letter the WHO Expert Working Group on R&D Financing. The letter focuses on issues about transparency, conflicts of interest, and EWG outcomes. The whole EWG seems to be going very badly right now, in part because of the US government and much of Northern Europe is working hand and glove with the pharmaceutical industry, and partly because the Gates Foundation is protecting big pharma and seems to have an ideological attachment to strong IPR.

The letter follows: Continue reading Civil Society letter to Members of the WHO Expert Working Group on R&D Financing

Apparently at least one entrant has qualified to win the $1 million Netflix grand prize. One can follow the progress of the teams on the Netflix Leaderboard: http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard.

Netflix is company that lends movie DVDs by postal mail or streams directly to a computing device, for an monthly subscription fee. According to the company, the “Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) Prizes. Winning the Netflix Prize improves our ability to connect people to the movies they love.” The contest began in October 2006, and features annual “progress” prizes of $50,000 (for the best result achieved), and a grand prize, now apparently about to be won, of $1 million, for improving the Netfix predictions of movies by 10 percent.

An interesting account of the competition, from some members of the first team to qualify for the grand prize, was published in the May 2009 IEEE Spectrum. Continue reading The Netflix prize, about to be won

According to Rapleaf CEO and venture capitalist Auren Hoffman, open source software has dramatically increased the productivity of software engineers. In a June 23, 2009 article in Tech Crunch titled “Engineers Are The Best Deal – So Stock Up On Them,” Hoffman writes:

Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999! Continue reading Auren Hoffman on productivity gains from open source software

The US Department of State “2009 Investment Climate Statement for Switzerland” provides an interesting and often unexpected portrait of the intellectual property landscape for a country that is often a hard-liner in global IPR negotiations. For example, DOS claims that “Switzerland is the primary source of illegal medicines entering the EU,” that “the unauthorized downloading of multimedia content and the provision of that content to family members or friends for personal use is not prohibited,” that parallel trade of IP goods is often allowed, that Switzerland has liberal copyright exceptions, and that Switzerland is considering broad mandatory licensing provisions governing patented research tools. Note also that Switzerland is not the US 301 or EU list of IPR priority countries. Continue reading Switzerland’s intellectual property rules are often different from what you might expect

The PAHO negotiations on the R&D resolution has produced a new draft, which radically guts the provision on transparency of pharmaceutical industry economics. Continue reading US guts transparency clause in PAHO R&D resolution

Kira Alvarez is the Deputy Assistant USTR for Intellectual Property Enforcement, and the chief US negotiator for ACTA. According to her Linkedin bio, as late as October 2008, right before the election, she was the Time Warner Vice President for Global Public Policy, and before that, she was a lobbyist for Ely Lilly, the pharmaceutical company. Alvarez also worked for both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, before her stints for Lilly and Time Warner. Note that she took her current job in December 2008, after the election but before the inauguration. Now she is the lead Obama representative for ACTA, reporting to Stan McCoy and Ambassador Kirk at USTR. Continue reading Meet the chief US ACTA negotiator: Kira Alvarez, the Deputy Assistant USTR for IP Enforcement

Today the executive board of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) is considering a proposal to have more transparency of the economics of the pharmaceutical industry. (I have separately blogged about this on the Huffpo). Specifically, an amendment offered to a PAHO EB resolution on research, proposed the following: Continue reading PAHO dispute standards for transparency of economic data for pharmaceutical industry

I just finished a two day meeting in Manchester, England, in a meeting of Joe Stigltiz’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD) Task Force on Intellectual Property and Development. The meeting was held at the University of Manchester’s Brooks World Poverty Institute. The agenda and conference papers for the meeting are on the web here, including a paper on prizes I wrote with Tim Hubbard. The slides from my talk are available here. Continue reading Designing Prizes