open...
open source, open genomics, open creation
18 September 2013
Why Even Good Hospitals And Doctors Are An Obstacle To Better, Cheaper Healthcare
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As we noted in the context of antibiotics , it's well recognized that financial incentives cause the pharmaceutical industry to enga...
EU Commission Sued For Refusing To Reveal Trade Agreement Documents They Shared With Lobbyists
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A recurrent theme here on Techdirt is the lack of transparency when international agreements and treaties are being drawn up. That'...
Saudi Religious Police: Anyone Using Twitter 'Has Lost This World And His Afterlife'
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A couple of days ago Techdirt wrote about how Murong Xuecun, a well-known user of the Chinese microblog Sina Weibo with over a million ...
Kiwis Want To Spy On All Communications, VPNs, And Be Able To Use Secret Evidence Against You
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Although New Zealand's decision not to allow patents for programs " as such " was welcome, other moves there have been more...
Critic Of Chinese Censorship Censored: Microblog With 1.1 Million Followers Deleted
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It will hardly come as a surprise to anyone to learn that a popular writer and well-known critic of China's pervasive censorship sys...
Copyright Holders Will Define Details Of UK's Orphan Works Bill, But Not The Public
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The UK's new orphan works legislation allows works to be classed as orphans only after a "diligent search" has been conduct...
Once Again Top Downloaders Are Top Spenders, According To UK Gov't Study
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If there's one clear trend that has emerged in recent years, it's that those who download and share unauthorized copies of files...
Colombia's Other Copyright Bill: Moving Things In The Right Direction?
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If you wanted an indication of just how much copyright has moved on from being a dry and boring topic of interest only to a few specialis...
How Investor-State Dispute Resolution Threatens Access To Medicines, And Much Else
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A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about the growing importance of investor-state dispute resolution in so-called free trade agreements (F...
New Zealand To Ban Software Patents 'As Such'; Tries To Pin Down What On Earth That Means
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Few patent sagas have been as fraught as New Zealand's attempt to revise its laws to exclude software. Techdirt first wrote about t...
Indian Government Quietly Brings In Its 'Central Monitoring System': Total Surveillance Of All Telecommunications
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There's a worrying trend around the world for governments to extend online surveillance capabilities to encompass all citizens -- of...
European Court Puts Release Of Drug Safety Data On Hold
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Last month Techdirt wrote about the case of the giant pharma company AbbVie seeking to prevent the European Medicines Agency from relea...
Open Data, Creative Destruction and Money
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Nearly three years ago, I wrote an article exploring why at that time there were no billion-dollar companies (since then, Red Hat has fin...
Why the Idea of the Software Patent Does Not Fly
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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the growing threat of software patents in Europe (again). I was delighted to come across thi...
EU Consultations: A Modest Proposal
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Last week I reported on the reply I received from Jean Bergevin of the European Commission on the subject of the IPRED consultation, and...
The Most Dangerous Windows Infection of All
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Readers of this blog don't need to be told about Windows' awful security record, or how, when news outlets talk glibly of "v...
Open Source (Seeds) Under Threat
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Seeds might seem far from the world of high tech and free software, but they have much in common. Seeds contain DNA, which is a (quaterna...
Benefit Claimants Must Use Ancient Microsoft Software
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Remember the bad old days when the UK government forced people to use Microsoft software in order to interact with it online? Remember h...
Dutch Law Would Authorize Police To Hack Into Foreign Computers And Phones: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
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When we wrote last year about a Dutch idea to give police there the power to break into computers -- even those located abroad -- we and...
Royalty Collection Agency SABAM Sues Belgian ISPs In Pursuit Of Its Fantasy 'Piracy License'
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Back in November 2011, we wrote about the Belgian music royalty collection agency SABAM's demand for 3.4% of Internet subscriber fee...
Now US And EU Want To Apply Upward Ratchet To TRIPS Itself
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Here on Techdirt we often talk about the copyright ratchet -- the fact that for three hundred years changes to copyright have always b...
Mozilla Sends Cease And Desist Letter To Commercial Spyware Company For Using Firefox Trademark And Code To Trick Users
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Techdirt has written several times about the increasing tendency for governments around the world to turn to malware as a way of spying ...
New EU Regulation Threatens Rare Seed Varieties, Agricultural Independence And Food Supply Resilience In Europe
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Unless we are farmers, we tend to take seeds for granted. But civilisation is built on seeds: it was the rise of large-scale agricultu...
Africa's Ancient Plant Diversity And Seed Independence Under Threat, Supposedly In The Name Of Progress
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As Africa continues to develop rapidly, Western countries and companies are increasingly interested in bringing it into existing internat...
Brazil's Marco Civil Not Dead Yet; Yahoo Voices Support
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Techdirt has been following the story of Brazil's innovative Marco Civil project, a civil-rights based framework for the Internet, fo...
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