In "Chinese Movie Piracy is Overestimated," Tyler Cowan blogs a paper on the issue, and comments follow.

"Pilgrim" makes a good point in commenting that the reason that China is such a concern is partly because of their significant exports to other markets, even if domestic consumption of the products were low due to the generally low standard of living.

And, as always, one might reasonable point out that not every product necessarily would have been a sale. And that poverty in such countries makes that even less likely. But these points only go so far. Business models have to be forward looking. Someone who buys a pirated product is certainly a part of a potential market, if not a current market. Standards of living rise--potentially quite quickly.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 1:38 PM | Academia , Enforcement & Remedies , International

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The American has an article by Roger Bate assessing current compulsory licensing trends at WHO:

The drug companies have tried voice: they have pointed out the need to make some profit from middle-income markets; they have complained to governments, activists, the media, and anyone that will listen; and they have tried litigation and threats of exit. Perhaps it is time to actually try exit.

The first to take action might be Novartis. According to several sources, the company has shelved plans to build a $500 million factory in Brazil that would manufacture an anti-meningitis vaccine.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 8:12 AM | International , Patents , Pharma

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Recently, there are reports of more compulsory licensing for 20 more drugs in Thailand; and a conference is announced to celebrate this strategy.

Hence this series of links and clips.

On April 11, http://www.africasia.com/services/news reported on a plan that seems to implicitly suggest that African states might set aside an array of patents (sorry, no present link):

"We need to produce (medicines) in Africa. We have the potential, why do we want to take them from outside when we can take it in Africa?" Mamadou Diallo, chief pharmacist in the AU commission's medical services directorate, told AFP.

"The main objective is to identify which kinds of medicines we are going to produce, essential drugs we need for Africa, and who is going to produce these drugs."

Many African countries currently rely on India and China for imports of affordable generic drugs, but both countries are subject to patent laws which threaten Africa's access to the medicines.

According to Diallo, Africa has all the resources and capacity at its disposal to manufacture essential medicines for the opportunistic infections like tuberculosis, malaria and HIV/AIDS which plague the continent.

It is sad that the plan to produce the drugs in Africa apparently does not extend to actually inventing and developing more such drugs in Africa--or then the patents would be important.

Contrast Alec Van Gelder's article on African medicines:

The UN Economic Commission for Africa endorses fears that “drastic trade liberalization, particularly substantial reductions in tariff, could entail, for instance, loss of tariff revenue hence fiscal difficulties.” The anti-globalisation group Oxfam issued a 128-page document in 2005 called “Why Developing Countries Need Tariffs”, as part of the Trade Justice Movement coalition.

All of this means that many religious, aid and international organisations think incomes for bureaucrats matter more than prices for citizens. They also believe that tariffs protect local industries and allow them to grow up into competitive industries.

Thus Tanzania imposed on 26 July a 10 per cent tariff on imported medicines, to protect what it called its “infant medicine industries.”

What about real infants? The immediate effect of this new tariff will be deadly. “Low income of the majority of the Tanzanian population hinders their accessibility to health services as medicines and other services are unaffordable,” according to the World Health Organisation. The average Tanzanian earns US$744 annually--a 10 % increase in the cost of medicines can make the difference between life and death for the 21.7% of the population that suffers from malnutrition.

While few of the world’s poorest--and least healthy--countries have any viable pharmaceutical sectors, a shocking number apply similar taxes and tariffs on medicines. A 2005 American Enterprise Institute study revealed that over 33 countries impose levies higher than the new Tanzanian rate.

Continue reading Patents, Meds, and the Developing World: Clips & Links . . .

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 10:02 AM | International , Patents

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Over on the Huffington Post, Jermaine Dupri sounds off about the state of the music business. Specifically, he has a big problem with artists being forced to offer singles and blames iTunes and "cherry picking" by consumers for the shift away from albums.

posted by Amy Smorodin @ 2:19 PM | Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation , Media: Video, Music...

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Bet this was fun. Elsa Bertet of Variety.com links to a panel entitled "What's So Fair About Fair Use," with contributions from documentary and feature filmmakers.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117975360.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 3:20 PM |

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Mark Lemley and J. H. Walker from Stanford Law School announce their new IP litigation project.

The Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse (IPLC) will be a comprehensive online information source on IP lawsuits. Modeled on the renowned Stanford Securities Class Action Clearinghouse, the IPLC will host general statistical information, as well as text-searchable dockets, complaints, select motions, judicial opinions, and related data.

posted by Noel Le @ 10:31 AM | Academia

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In Silicon-Valley circles, Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch family of websites is known for encouraging entrepreneurial activity. In copyright-policy circles, TechCrunch is known for discouraging entrepreneurial activity. After all, Mr. Arrington published The Essential Guide to Piracy, which begins as follows:

“Piracy is an action sport. The ability to infringe copyright and steal valuable work induces a rush like no other. Whether you steal music, movies, books, applications, or whatever, it feels like breaking the law and it saves our wallets and purses from becoming empty.”

Gee, where do kids today get the idea that it is OK to engage in the sort of illegal free-riding that Justices Breyer, Stevens and O’Connor recently called “garden-variety theft”?

So TechCrunch thought that copyright piracy was cool. Then, it made a discovery: Hundreds of for-profit websites were “splogging”; they were selling advertisements by copying and re-posting TechCrunch’s original content without permission or attribution. In short, they were pirating from TechCrunch. TechCrunch thought this was not cool at all.

And that was very odd. According to Mr. Arrington, TechDirt should embrace “splogging”: After all, even if for-profit copying of TechCrunch’s original content destroyed TechDirt’s ad-based business model, TechCrunch could still cross-subsidize the production of its content by renting out Mr. Arrington for speaking engagements.

TechCrunch’s response to “splogging” indicates that it suspects that such cross-subsidization schemes are ill-considered utopian nonsense. It is difficult to disagree. Mr. Arrington can understand why our laws must encourage, support and protect the Silicon-Valley entrepreneurs who make the risky investments needed to bring us new gizmos. But he fails to understand why laws must also protect the entrepreneurs who make the risky investments needed to create the new content that makes new gizmos worth owning.

posted by Thomas Sydnor @ 10:29 AM | Enforcement & Remedies , Free Culture Movement , Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation

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Good. Musician makes good. There's an interesting article with some ideas in Spin magazine--though no clear direction emerges. Potentially useful for new artists, not so much for encouraging the re-release of Led Zeppelin (soon to be on iTunes) or old blues. If the thought of entanglement of music in a web of marketing schemes is not entirely appealing, but, well, that's not a policy concern. What becomes of artists from unsophisticated backgrounds in this might well be... professional sports all over again?

On the prospects for live music, from Richard Morrison. (And I confess another non-policy consideration, I detest live music--one sacrifices consistent sound quality to leave the privacy of one's home to sit or stand in crowds flaunting their absurd subcultures--but I will make grudging exceptions for metal concerts, classical guitar, and live jazz). But this, too, has its limits as a business model.

Also less encouraging is Radiohead's experiment in whatever-it's-worth pricing, with many electing a price of zero; the link is to Bill Rosenblatt's report. Barry Shrum offers his perspective.

In the end, it will all get worked out. But there is no end in sight for the usefulness of copyright and technology as a tool for defining obligations in new relationships of goods, services, and persons, or as a substitutes for traditional enforcement. Continued competition of free goods with paid goods would reduce anxiety about whether producers are sensitive to consumer demand for flexible and friendly protection technology.

Two distressing trends in the overall debate, though, might well be with us forever. One is the tendency of some to see the glass of new technology as almost entirely empty, the other to see it as almost entirely full. But where old boundaries don't hold up, new lines will be found and somehow enforced; markets go on. And where the status quo gives way, one ends up with not an end to the limitations on human endeavor peculiar to one set of economic circumstances, but a whole new set of limitation peculiar to the next. On the whole, people don't do well without lines drawn in the sand, and will draw new ones when the last set is erased.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 8:55 AM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines... , Media: Video, Music...

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The Sydney Morning Herald has a nice write-up of an interview with Professor Henry Chesbrough-

Open innovation guru, Harvard Business School Professor Henry Chesbrough, has written papers on the need to develop more flexible and open business models across the board. Companies need to get a lot better at bringing external ideas and knowledge in from the outside, while at the same time allowing internal ideas not being used to flow outside the organization.

I know most large organizations dismiss this as academic debate - one CEO told me last week that open source models are great in theory and disastrous in reality. I can understand his scepticism. Relinquishing control of product development to scores of unknown individuals? Talk about flying in the face of every business instinct.

...we would not mean to suggest that all open source software is an example of Open Innovation– or for that matter, that all open innovation in the IT industry relates to open source software.
...
…open source is only Open Innovation if it has a business model.

This (patent) incentive will clearly be especially important for firms that cannot easily access or acquire the complementary assets required to profitably commercialize their inventions... patents play an important role in promoting vertical specialization in R&D by limiting the hazards faced by specialized technology developers.

posted by Noel Le @ 1:05 PM | Academia

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PC World reports on a former Sun executive and the firm's FOSS strategies-

Sun Microsystems' push to open source all of its software helped prompt one vice president, Larry Singer, to leave the company, Singer said at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon.

The company has been offering up to open source crown jewels such as its Java platform and the Solaris OS. Singer, who was vice president of Global Information Systems Strategy at Sun, stressed that he agreed with a lot of the open source efforts, such as open-sourcing Solaris and Java. But he said he thought the company was over-emphasizing open source when it should have been focusing on generating revenues; he disagreed with new CEO Jonathan Schwartz about the effort and this was one reason Singer left the company in March after having been at Sun since 2003.
...
"The hard part is we were spending all of our time and attention inside [Sun] on things that were important from an intellectual standpoint, important from an innovative standpoint [but it was] hard to understand how they were going to drive revenue for the company," said Singer.

He added he understood that Sun could lure new customers into buying its systems by extending Solaris via open source. But the return on investment from this effort could take 10 to 12 years, he said. "There's not going to be a company in 10, 12 years unless we get our revenues up in two years," he said. The company needed to focus on differentiation in core products, including workstations, servers and storage devices, to satisfy the big companies that constitute its customer base, Singer said.

posted by Noel Le @ 9:32 AM | Free Culture Movement

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posted by Solveig Singleton @ 9:02 AM | Enforcement & Remedies , Internet: P2P, Search Engines... , Media: Video, Music...

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posted by Solveig Singleton @ 8:57 AM | Enforcement & Remedies

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posted by Solveig Singleton @ 12:52 PM |

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posted by Solveig Singleton @ 12:41 PM | Patents , Supreme Court

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posted by Solveig Singleton @ 7:47 AM | International , Software , Standards

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posted by Solveig Singleton @ 7:29 AM | Access: Commons, Fair Use, Orphan Works, Public Domain , DRM & Watermarks, etc.

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posted by Solveig Singleton @ 11:21 AM | Enforcement & Remedies , Media: Video, Music...

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