IPR

Going Nuts over the Value of Local Production

Submitted by Jon on Thu, 05/06/2010 - 12:39

For some background, I highly recommend Alanna Shaikh's post here: http://aidwatchers.com/2010/04/the-plumpy%E2%80%99nut-dustup/ and follow-up here: http://aidwatchers.com/2010/05/the-plumpy%E2%80%99nut-dust-up-nutriset%E... . In short, a French company is defending their patent on a super-nutritious "therapeutic" food called Plumpy'nut against a lawsuit by some US NGOs (who could have licensed it, but are instead trying to break the patent)

My guy reaction was anti-intellectual property, as I strongly believe that our current IP schemes tend to do more damage than good. That being said, I think Nutriset is seemingly doing the right thing here - forcing support for local production. Let us presume nothing but sparkly, unicorn-bedazzled thoughts about Nutriset for a moment:

Goal 1: Provide a therapeutic food product
Goal 2: Ensure quality standards (duh)
Goal 3: Make it widely available and politically tenable to "recipient" governments
Goal 4: Don't make things worse locally by undercutting the economy

You could open the patent, post the ingredients and production methods and encourage everyone to go after it. This would support goals 1,3 and 4, with a risk of opportunists really wrecking #2, anyone could claim that they were using the authentic plumpynut recipe even while their product is unhealthy at best or outright deadly at worst.

Social Networks (including Facebook) and Technology Transfer

Submitted by Jon on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 13:10

In Social Networks (not Facebook) and Development I covered the relevance of local social networks and social capital / trust for successful, long-term community and economic development.

Finding, engaging an empowering local social networks is the first step. I believe connecting these networks to the global communities of interest and practice on the Internet can provide a multiplier effect.

In the recent Technology Salon on Malawian health ICT systems, it was discussed how hiring recent Malawian college grads and connecting them to the global community of open source coders gave them an immense resource to draw on as they began their work; and they were soon contributing as peers and mentors to other programmers around the world.

That's power, and that's the 21st century version of technology transfer.

ICT4Dev Reading List

Submitted by Jon on Thu, 05/28/2009 - 10:54

Here's a hastily-constructed Amazon store of some of the books and essays I've read which provide great insight and contrarian positions to modern development approaches, backed up with hard data, well-written, and sometimes painful reminders of the darker stories of US's history with international development:

Cory Doctorow, or how I learned to start worrying and hate IP regulation

Submitted by Jon on Sun, 03/15/2009 - 12:01

Sometimes, I lie awake at night and worry about copyright. I then start worrying if this makes me irreconcilably weird.

I worry both for our American culture, as items have stopped falling into the public domain and becoming available to re-use and re-mix, or simply to re-present for free. If this doesn't seem like a problem, this video on a 6-second drumbeat will blow your mind - especially if you then read this story about an artist being sued for a 1 minute clip of silence making fun of John Cage's 4'33" of silence. The artist ended up settling out of court.

I worry more generally about international trade and development, as we inflict ever-tighter IP regulations on countries we give aid to or trade with - regulations which we scoffed and flouted during our own development.

We're no longer protecting innovation with these laws - we're protecting the first movers (often big, established businesses), and encouraging gaming the patent system to try and get the most generic and sweeping patent accepted.

Turnabout is fair(-use) play

Submitted by Jon on Fri, 06/20/2008 - 17:02

The Associated Press has been rattling sabers of bloggers quoting (even with credit and links) from AP articles, claiming that any quote longer than 5 words costs money:

  • 5-25 words: $ 12.50
  • 26-50 words: $ 17.50
  • 51-100 words: $ 25.00
  • 101-250 words: $ 50.00
  • 251 words and up: $ 100.00

Good will sharing

Submitted by Jon on Sun, 05/11/2008 - 09:30

I read BoingBoing - it provides a steady stream of new and interesting things around the net, and the occasional IT policy tidbit. Lots of people read boingboing as well, giving it a power not unlike the slashdot effect - the ability to direct massive amounts of traffic at a site, taking it down in many cases with the onslaught.

Copyright

Submitted by Jon on Wed, 10/11/2006 - 10:44

I used to use recipes as a good, non-new/Internet-y example of how you can still make profits (recipe books) with no attempt at copyright enforcement (who cares if you share the recipes, as long as you're not duplicating the whole book and re-selling it competitively, each individual recipe is like an advertisement for the publisher's entire series of cookbooks.

Oh well

IPR and ... plants?

Submitted by Jon on Sat, 08/05/2006 - 15:19

Brazil is registering list of plant names to fight pharma companies from trademarking the names when using compounds extracted from these plants.
India also has been fighting "biopiracy".

This is a reminder that intellectual property restrictions extend beyond IT and media issues, into important topics such as affordable medicines when it intersects with pharmaceuticals.

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