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Posts tagged Intellectual property
Protect the drug giants’ patents – and harm the health of the poor?
Mar 12th
India has become “the pharmacy of the world”, home to dozens of generic copycat drug companies that have been producing expensive medicines at dirt-cheap prices that the poorest countries can afford. Famously, Mumbai-based Cipla forced down the prices of Aids drugs some years ago with the launch of a twice a day pill, which then became the staple treatment in many sub-Saharan countries.
But Medecins sans Frontieres, also known as Doctors without Borders, which played a role in that epic turnaround, is now warning that a Free Trade Agreement between the EU and India could ensure that sort of Robin Hood episode never happens again. Yesterday, its supporters demonstrated in New Delhi. They fear the EU, negotiating behind closed doors, will push or cajole India into recognising tough new intellectual property rights. The winners, it fears, will be Big Pharma, while the losers will be the impoverished sick.
This was Loon Gangte, president of the Delhi Network of Positive People (DNP+):
We are marching to call on the Indian government not to trade away our lives. Lifelong treatment for people living with HIV depends on continued access to newer AIDS medicines. Because of international trade rules that India has already signed in the past, some of our newer AIDS medicines are already patented and completely unaffordable. We are protesting against India’s accepting terms that would further compromise access to life-saving medicine.
This is a complicated issue, which is why it gets little attention in the mainstream press. Trade rules and agreements are tough going for any but the dedicated and the nerdy. But essentially, for some years now Big Pharma has been trying to use its influence over politicians in the US and in Europe (who don’t want to lose the investment, jobs and taxes that drug companies bring at home) to demand tighter rules on the Indian copycats. Patents normally last for 20 years, so drug companies can recoup the millions they spend on R&D. They want India to observe their patents, just as Europe and the US do.
India gets cheaper drugs if the generic whizzkids can knock off copycat versions of the blockbusters. While India is middle-income and getting richer, unfortunately a tough trade agreement with the EU would probably penalise the Indian poor. But it also threatens the poorest of the poor, in Africa and other parts of Asia. Look in an African health centre and all the drugs are Indian-made. With a growing need for new and better HIV drugs in sub-Saharan countries, it may be no time to curb the Indian generic manufacturers.
Meanwhile the lobbying for more money for HIV/Aids moved seamlessly this week from London to Washington, where Dr Peter Mugyenyi, director and founder of Uganda’s Joint Clinical Research Center, gave evidence on the Hill. The Center is the biggest implementer of Pepfar (the president’s emergency plan for Aids relief) funds in East Africa and Mugyenyi was one of a handful of people in the room when Pepfar was conceived in 2003. He says that cuts in US funds for Aids are already beginning to bite. This is what he told me:
I’m panicking about it. That’s how bad it is because I’m foreseeing the return of the catastrophic times of the 90s, when everything in Africa came to a standstill and the hospitals couldn’t function and the staff fled the health service – and many of them died. They couldn’t get access to treatment and had nothing to offer their patients. The patients were abandoning the health facilities and flocking to witch doctors and traditional healers who were clearly helpless.
Could we go back there? Mugyenyi says he is already seeing people with newly-diagnosed HIV turned away from clinics as the orders are given only to carry on treating those already on the drugs. The money has been frozen, he says. And yet only 4 million are on treatment and 10 million need to be – and the WHO’s new guidelines say people with HIV should be treated earlier, which would perhaps double the numbers who should be getting drugs.
Read also Chris Collins of the Foundation for Aids Research in the Huffington Post on the hearings in the House and Senate over the Aids budget.
But good news from the Commission on Narcotic Drugs meeting in Vienna this week. After years of blocking resolutions to encourage access to clean needles to protect drug users from HIV, the Obama administration made a break with the past. This was the verdict of Professor Gerry Stimson, Executive Director of the International Harm Reduction Association:
Real progress was made here this week in Vienna – some countries that in the past tried to obstruct resolutions dealing with harm reduction and human rights have backed off. The big – and welcome – development is the US position. The fresh approach of the Obama administration to the UN and to international drug and HIV/AIDS policy is making itself felt. US officials here for the first time were able to voice their support for HIV-related risk prevention measures, and for HIV prevention firmly based in human rights. Let’s hope this continues to play through in the years ahead – if so we are going in the direction of a more rational global response to drug-related harm.
So all eyes are now on Russia, where 65% of HIV infections come from injecting drug users, and which turns a blind eye.
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Pink Floyd win high court battle to stop EMI selling singles
Mar 11th
Band objected to label providing downloads of individual songs from concept albums that were created as a single work
Pink Floyd have today won a high court battle to stop record company EMI selling single downloads from their concept albums.
The judge has yet to rule on how much EMI now owes the band but the label was ordered to pay Pink Floyd’s costs, which are estimated at £60,000.
Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt accepted arguments by the group that EMI was bound by a contract forbidding it to sell its records other than as complete albums without written consent.
Pink Floyd alleged – and EMI agreed – that it had allowed online downloads from the albums and had allowed parts of tracks to be used as ringtones.
Pink Floyd are known for their conceptual albums in which individual songs often merge with others to form larger “song suites”. The band argued that their music should only ever be heard as part of the full-length albums in which they originally appeared. They pointed to a contract signed in 1999 that stated their music could not be “unbundled” from its original context.
EMI’s lawyers argued that this contract, which was signed before the emergence of digital music stores such as iTunes, referred to “records” and did not apply to online sales.
But the judge sided with the band, noting that the contract was designed to “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums”.
Lawyers said it was the first time such a dispute between artists and their record companies had been heard in private.
Pink Floyd were pioneers of the long player format, with their 1973 prog-rock classic The Dark Side of the Moon notching up 35m worldwide sales.
The ban signed with EMI in 1967 and became one of its most lucrative signings, their back catalogue being outsold only by that of The Beatles.
Roger Waters, who co-founded the band with Syd Barrett, Richard Wright and Nick Mason, has a fortune estimated at £85m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. The band last played together at London’s Live 8 concert in 2005.
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The Lib Dem assault on online liberty | James Graham
Mar 10th
A Lib Dem-backed amendment to the digital economy bill would help make the internet less free, not decrease piracy
Have the Liberal Democrats been taken over by the Flat Earth Society? This weekend, Liberal Democrat conference-goers will have to put up with being lobbied by the Church of Scientology over their war on psychiatry; previously the Scientologists have only paid to exhibit at Conservative conference. Meanwhile, just over a week ago the party issued a statement – quickly retracted – denouncing the science and technology select committee’s call for homeopathy to be assessed like any other potential medical treatment, insisting that instead it should be, um, treated like any other medical treatment.
Doffing forelocks to Scientologists and homeopaths might be embarrassing but amounts to little more than that. More far-reaching is the fact that last week Lib Dem lords worked with the Conservatives to push through an amendment to the government’s digital economy bill. This amendment removes Lord Mandelson’s proposals to grant himself open-ended powers that he can change at will and replaces it with a clause empowering the courts to block websites hosting a “substantial” amount of user-generated content (UGC) that is in breach of copyright. This move has resulted in a strong reaction from digital rights campaigners, Liberal Democrat bloggers and prospective parliamentary candidates.
It is important to keep the hyperbole in check in this debate, particularly as the authors of this amendment, Lords Clement-Jones and Razzall, have seized on some of the more effervescent criticisms to justify their actions. So let’s be clear: this amendment probably won’t lead to YouTube being shut down overnight. What it will do is shift the balance of power even more away from the creators of UGC and towards anyone with the money and a vested interest in shutting it down.
We’ve seen repeated examples in recent years of how the UK’s libel laws can be used to bully web hosting services into shutting down blogs, regardless of the actual grounds. The vague scope of the Lib Dem amendment is likely to have a similar chilling effect on websites which, at the end of the day, are there to make money, not spend thousands of pounds in legal fees investigating every single complaint levelled at one of their users. This amendment will have the ultimate effect of making the internet just that little bit less free and more in the hands of big business while failing to achieve its stated objective of cracking down on internet piracy.
Why has this happened? My view is rather less conspiracy-focused than some. I suspect it has to do with the craven need of some Liberal Democrats to gain approval from the political establishment. That same need nearly prevented the party from taking a clear line against the Iraq war back in 2003 (for example) and results in us continuing to nominate people to the House of Lords itself, thus lending it greater respectability, despite spending the past 100 years calling for it to be replaced with something vaguely democratic.
No doubt Clement-Jones and Razzall felt that making bad less awful was the only responsible thing to do. In fact, forcing us to choose between judges and lawyers having to interpret a bad law and ministers making it up as they go along is no choice at all. After five years of one of the most depressing parliaments in living history, the last thing the Lib Dems can afford to do is to present themselves as the nicer, slightly less unacceptable face of the establishment. Leave that to David Cameron.
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My Lords, you can’t please the entertainment industry and sustain privacy
Mar 4th
Liberal Democrat peers have added an amendment to the Digital Economy bill which outlaws ‘web lockers’. Have they never tried to send a large, personal, private file?
This Wednesday, I woke up to find an urgent email in my inbox from the Open Rights Group, letting me know that Lords Razzall and Clement-Jones, both Liberal Democrat peers, had introduced a web censorship amendment to Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill.
I had a moment’s confusion, because I assumed that the LibDems (a party I belong to) would have proposed a bill against web censorship. But no, our peers had put forward an amendment that would allow courts to order all of Britain’s ISPs to shut off access to specific sites if these sites were found to be involved with copyright infringement.
Like many LibDems, I wrote to the Lords using WriteToThem and told them that promoting censorship – that is, shutting off entire swaths of the web because parts of a site infringed upon copyright – was not consistent with the values of the “party of liberty.” So I was even more horrified to discover on Thursday that Razzall and Clement-Jones had withdrawn their amendment and entered a new one, jointly with the Tory Lords, that was specifically aimed at eliminating “cyber-lockers” (also called “web lockers”) – services like Google Docs, YouSendIt, RapidShare and so on – that allow users to upload files that are too big to be attached to email, and send a private download URL to the recipient instead.
In a statement on Liberal Democrat Voice, Clement Jones defended his amendment, saying:
“Around 35% of all online copyright infringement takes place on non peer-to-peer sites and services. Particular threats concern “cyberlockers” which are hosted abroad.
“There are websites which consistently infringe copyright, many of them based outside the UK in countries such as Russia and beyond the jurisdiction of the UK courts. Many of these websites refuse to stop supplying access to illegal content.
“It is a result of this situation that the Liberal Democrats have tabled an amendment in the Lords which has the support of the Conservatives that enables the High Court to grant an injunction requiring Internet Service Providers to block access to sites.”
Judging from the flood of outraged responses that followed, LibDem members aren’t on board with this. And I’m among them. Web lockers are a critical piece of our internet life, and an attempt to ban them is worse than misguided; it’s actively detrimental to the UK.
First, we must acknowledge that web lockers are useful for more than piracy. As our routine media files have increased in size – multi-megapixel images, home videos, audio recordings of meetings and so on – it’s become increasingly difficult to use email to share data privately with family, friends and colleagues, because most email servers croak over really big files. For example, the sound editor for my podcasts uses a web locker to send me the mastered audiofiles for my review (and he’s not the only audio person who relies on this; many’s the time I’ve had an audiobook publisher send me an MP3 of an audiobook for review through a web locker).
There are plenty of personal uses too: my parents live in Canada and are always hungry for video of their granddaughter, but I don’t want to make our home movies available on the public internet, so web lockers save the day for us. And when my immigration attorneys needed a mountain of scanned bank statements sent to their office for my application for permanent residence in the UK, a web locker made it easy to convey an encrypted archive to them.
There’s no way to square this need for private file sharing with the entertainment industry’s demand that all files be placed in the public sphere, where they can be inspected for infringement.
The reason web lockers are used for piracy is that they support privacy. A call to end web lockers is really a call to eliminate the public’s ability to exchange personal information out of sight of the wide world. The only way you can be sure that someone isn’t using a web locker to share a bootlegged movie is by shutting off my ability to privately send my mum a video of my toddler in the bath.
And separate from that, there’s the infrastructural cost of establishing a Great Firewall of Britain in order to block access to web lockers. Developing a system whereby parts of the net can be shut off for all of Britain creates the possibility that someone will use the system to shut off the wrong part of the net. I’m not just talking about the danger of a hijacker breaking into the system to shut down or redirect traffic to legitimate sites (say, Microsoft Security Centre or the BBC), but the attractive nuisance presented by such a system. Once you create the facility to shut off parts of the internet that are implicated in civil disputes, how long will it be before people who’ve alleged a libel or are worried about a trade secret being not so secret are lobbying to have this turned to their aid?
Which isn’t to say that this will actually stop infringement. File sharers have already demonstrated their ability to use the perfectly legal, widespread proxy services abroad to circumvent network blocks – ask any 14-year-old whose school network is censored by blocking software and I guarantee you’ll get an education in how to evade this kind of thing. Which is great news if you’re a pirate, but why should sound engineers, doting grandparents, and solicitors have to learn how to evade the Great Firewall in order to conduct their legitimate business?
It’s not as if this hasn’t been tried abroad. When South Korea and the US signed a Free Trade Agreement in 2007, Korea – a global powerhouse on the IT front – agreed to take major steps to lock down its Internet, including a prohibition on web lockers. Three years later, Korea has slipped badly in the global league tables and finds itself bringing more and more criminal sanctions against its young people.
“The party of liberty” needs to rein in these Lords, and not just because a failure to disavow them will cost the LibDems votes in May; but because this amendment is bad for the UK, bad for copyright, and bad for freedom.
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Apple sues HTC over iPhone patents
Mar 2nd
Taiwanese mobile-phone manufacturer backing Google’s Android OS is accused of infringing 20 Apple patents
Apple is suing the Taiwanese handset maker HTC, alleging that it has infringed 20 patents relating to “the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware”.
Among the patents that Apple alleges have been infringed are a number relating to touchscreen interfaces – for which the iPhone has become the best-known, though it was not the first, mobile device.
“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, in a statement. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”
It is thought that a key element that triggered the lawsuit is that in February HTC released handsets which use “pinch-to-zoom” functionality resembling that of the iPhone.
Apple has filed the suit in the US courts in Delaware, Maryland, but also with the US International Trade Commission (ITC), which has the power to halt imports of products. That would stymie HTC and Google, whose free Android mobile operating system is built into a growing number of HTC phones, and has made significant inroads into the burgeoning smartphone market in recent months.
But the move was received with surprise in the technology community. “I don’t fault Apple for acquiring patents. They have to, for defensive purposes, given the current laws,” noted John Siracusa, a journalist at Ars Technica who has followed Apple closely for years. “But using them offensively sucks.”
The use of the ITC could be key for Apple. A recent analysis found that where lawsuits are filed both with US district courts and the ITC, plaintiffs succeed in the latter more often than the former, by 58% to 35%. That means Apple is roughly 50% more likely to win the case with the ITC – and so could block HTC imports of newer handsets.
HTC indicated that it was completely surprised by the case, and had not even received the formal complaint from Apple when the American company announced it publicly.
Apple has submitted more than 700 pages of exhibits relating to its patents to the court in Delaware, Maryland, where it is filing the case. It cites a number of handsets, including the Nexus One handset powered by Google’s Android mobile operating system, and also other handsets which use Microsoft’s Windows Mobile system. HTC has in the past been the largest manufacturer of Windows Mobile handsets – although it has recently shifted its allegiance to Google’s Android, which is free and has captured significant market share since being launched in 2008.
Apple has specified 10 patents in the Delaware filing, and a different 10 in the ITC filing.
The case is thought to be the first in which Apple has taken the first step in suing a rival mobile phone company. Although it has an ongoing patent dispute with Nokia, the Finnish mobile handset maker, the first move there was by Nokia. Apple has since countersued. The case is ongoing.
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The demise of the music industry is visible everywhere but in the facts
Mar 12th
Posted by Victor Keegan in Business
No comments
If music executives sold bottled water, they’d be calling for a ban on tapwater downloads. But their industry is proving resilient
Illegal downloads continue to be a cause of Armageddon within the music industry and a source of endless fascination outside. Business leaders still regularly moan that illegal downloads are destroying their livelihood, especially if representatives of government are within hearing range. At the first Music 4.5 conference in London last week, speakers took it as read that “kids are not buying music anymore” and that they must look elsewhere for revenues. Evidence of the demise of purchased music is everywhere to be seen, except for one place: the statistics.
In fact it is easier to make the case that the music industry, far from imploding, is one of the great success stories of the recession. The most dramatic example of this is in what kids are supposed not to be buying any more: single tracks. Last year sales of singles soared to an all-time record of 152.7m units, an astonishing 33% rise in a year when the whole economy (GDP) contracted by 3.3%. If the music pundits seriously think that these are not being bought by kids, then it shows how out of touch they are with their customers. These same youngsters who were – and probably still are – massively downloading free music from the internet were prepared to pay up to £3 a pop for an insipid ringtone (interestingly, not included on the industry’s statistics unless they are full-track ones). Why? Because there is an easy payment system on phones which didn’t exist on the web. Now there is an easy payment system (iTunes et al) on the web they are starting to pay again. If the big music companies had spent their energies dreaming up a payments mechanism for web downloads instead of suing their customers they could have swept all before them. Instead they were like the crew of a sinking boat that blames the sea instead of trying to mend the leak. If they were in the bottled water industry, they would probably be urging the government to stop free downloads of tap water at home as unfair competition. Yet the bottled water industry should have been their model. It got away with charging us lots of money for a product that was no better than free tapwater through clever marketing.
Even now practically everyone I meet from the music industry protests that it couldn’t be expected to combat the technological disruption that was eroding its traditional model. What piffle. Lots of books have been written about disruptive technologies. They can’t say they weren’t warned. As it turned out, pretty well every system for monetising music – iTunes, Spotify, We7, Shazam, Nokia’s Comes with Music et al – has come from outside the industry. What a missed opportunity.
Sales of singles are, of course, only one part of the industry. There has, unsurprisingly, been a fall in sales of albums – down from 133.6m units to 128.9m last year, not helped by the closure of key UK retail chains Zavvi and Woolworths – but that was more than offset by growth elsewhere in sponsorship, live shows and merchandising where there is something of a boom happening in Britain. Overall, the music industry grew by an amazing 4.7% in recession-ridden 2008, according to PRS for Music, and will probably be resilient when the full 2009 figures come in. A key fact is that last year income from live music overtook that from recorded music for the first time. Don’t think tracks, think music.
Clearly, the industry is changing. Consumers can now buy the singles they want without being locked into buying albums containing other tracks they don’t want. That may bring in less income but it is the gateway to other revenues. The people who allegedly won’t pay for downloads will pay huge sums to hear their favourite artists live or be part of the merchandising experience. Maybe illegal downloads – which, needless to say, I don’t approve of – should be looked on as a massive crowd-sourced marketing operation to generate money for gigs, memorabilia and future sales.
The future lies in capitalising on the whole musical experience, as the admirable Music 4.5 initiative well knows: it seeks to bring together artists and entrepreneurs to plot the future. If the quality of the five-minute pitches made at the conference by budding businesses is anything to go by, the future is bright. I loved the way Songkick.com is moving beyond Last.fm by linking songs you and your friends like with information about the band’s past and present gigs, enabling you to talk about them after the show. MusicGlue offers free downloads in exchange for email addresses which, over time, will produce geographic patterns showing where there is a dense enough cluster of fans to justify a gig. CloseCallMusic encourages people to interact with live music as it happens, while TuneRights is trying to crowd-source the financing of records. Audiofuel, which matches music to your jogging beat, aims to be the new Ministry of Sound. I loved what Decibel is planning – to have a vast data base of meta tags so you can find out details of each member of the band: that Jimi Hendrix played as a session man on a Little Richard track, for instance. That is just the sort of value-added that will lure people away from free downloads. Nick Hornby would love it.
These were only some of the pitches made which suggest that the future of the industry may continue to reside in bottom-up initiatives rather than the top-down approach of the major labels. The music industry, to be fair, is still a very heavy investor as a new study shows, but it had better be alert if it doesn’t want to be upstaged even more. The sad fact is that around 90% of start-ups fail – but it is vital for future employment, as well as the health of the music industry that we spend money to find the winners. A revolution is under way.