Cosmo, Cosmolino: Patent law and nanotechnology

Patent law has a significant instrumental and symbolic role in regulating nanotechnology. A 2011 report of the United States Federal Trade Commission noted that ‘the patent system plays a critical role in promoting innovation across industries from biotechnology to nanotechnology, and by entities from large corporations to independent inventors’. This chapter considers the much contested legal, ethical and social issues involved with regulating the patenting of nanotechnology. Section I considers the efforts of patent offices to classify nanotechnology and the empirical evidence about patent filing rates. Section II examines whether there is a ‘tragedy of the anticommons’ emerging in respect of nanotechnology. It contemplates access mechanisms – such as the defence of experimental use, patent pools, open innovation models and technology transfer. Section III explores ethical and social concerns associated with nanotechnology – in particular, issues about the impact upon human health and the environment.

Plain packaging for the Pacific Rim: The Trans-Pacific Partnership and tobacco control

Big Tobacco has been engaged in a dark, shadowy plot and conspiracy to hijack the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) and undermine tobacco control measures – such as graphic health warnings and the plain packaging of tobacco products... In the context of this heavy lobbying by Big Tobacco and its proxies, this chapter provides an analysis of the debate over trade, tobacco, and the TPP. This discussion is necessarily focused on the negotiations of the free trade agreement – the shadowy conflicts before the finalisation of the text. This chapter contends that the trade negotiations threaten hard-won gains in public health – including international developments such as the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and domestic measures, such as graphic health warnings and the plain packaging of tobacco products. It maintains that there is a need for regional trade agreements to respect the primacy of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. There is a need both to provide for an open and transparent process regarding such trade negotiations, as well as a due and proper respect for public health in terms of substantive obligations. Part I focuses on the debate over the intellectual property chapter of the TPP, within the broader context of domestic litigation against Australia’s plain tobacco packaging regime and associated WTO disputes. Part II examines the investment chapter of the TPP, taking account of ongoing investment disputes concerning tobacco control and the declared approaches of Australia and New Zealand to investor-state dispute settlement. Part III looks at the discussion as to whether there should be specific text on tobacco control in the TPP, and, if so, what should be its nature and content. This chapter concludes that the plain packaging of tobacco products – and other best practices in tobacco control – should be adopted by members of the Pacific Rim.

Open for litigation: Australia, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership

On the 28th May 2014, a petition signed by 1.8 million people worldwide was delivered to the Australian Parliament to protest against the radical secrecy surrounding the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Tesla motors’ open source revolution: Intellectual property and the carbon crisis

On the 12th June 2014, Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of the electric car manufacturer, Tesla Motors, announced in a blog that ‘all our patents belong to you.’ He explained that the company would adopt an open source philosophy in respect of its intellectual property in order to encourage the development of the industry of electric cars, and address the carbon crisis. Elon Musk made the dramatic, landmark announcement: Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

The Down Under book and film remind us our copyright law’s still unfair for artists

Australian copyright law is broken, and the Australian Government isn’t moving quickly to fix it. Borrowing, quoting, and homage are fundamental to the creative process. This is how people are inspired to create. Under Australian law, though, most borrowing is copyright infringement, unless it is licensed or falls within particular, narrow categories. This year marks five years since the very real consequences of Australia’s restrictive copyright law for Australian artists were made clear in the controversial litigation over Men at Work’s 1981 hit Down Under. The band lost a court case in 2010 that found that the song’s iconic flute riff copied some of the 1934 children’s song Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gumtree. A new book and documentary tell us more about the story behind the anthem – and the court case. The book, Down Under by Trevor Conomy, and the documentary, You Better Take Cover by Harry Hayes, bring renewed interest and new perspectives on the tragic story.

Incentives for global public health: Patent law and access to essential medicines

This portrait of the global debate over patent law and access to essential medicines focuses on public health concerns about HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, the SARS virus, influenza, and diseases of poverty. The essays explore the diplomatic negotiations and disputes in key international fora, such as the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization. Drawing upon international trade law, innovation policy, intellectual property law, health law, human rights and philosophy, the authors seek to canvass policy solutions which encourage and reward worthwhile pharmaceutical innovation while ensuring affordable access to advanced medicines. A number of creative policy options are critically assessed, including the development of a Health Impact Fund, prizes for medical innovation, the use of patent pools, open-source drug development and forms of 'creative capitalism'.

Towards the development of a low cost airborne sensing system to monitor dust particles after blasting at open-pit mine sites

Blasting is an integral part of large-scale open cut mining that often occurs in close proximity to population centers and often results in the emission of particulate material and gases potentially hazardous to health. Current air quality monitoring methods rely on limited numbers of fixed sampling locations to validate a complex fluid environment and collect sufficient data to confirm model effectiveness. This paper describes the development of a methodology to address the need of a more precise approach that is capable of characterizing blasting plumes in near-real time. The integration of the system required the modification and integration of an opto-electrical dust sensor, SHARP GP2Y10, into a small fixed-wing and multi-rotor copter, resulting in the collection of data streamed during flight. The paper also describes the calibration of the optical sensor with an industry grade dust-monitoring device, Dusttrak 8520, demonstrating a high correlation between them, with correlation coefficients (R2) greater than 0.9. The laboratory and field tests demonstrate the feasibility of coupling the sensor with the UAVs. However, further work must be done in the areas of sensor selection and calibration as well as flight planning.

Optimisation of open pit mine block sequencing

This study presents a comprehensive mathematical model for open pit mine block sequencing problem which considers technical aspects of real-life mine operations. As the open pit block sequencing problem is an NP-hard, state-of-the-art heuristics algorithms, including constructive heuristic, local search, simulated annealing, and tabu search are developed and coded using MATLAB programming language. Computational experiments show that the proposed algorithms are satisfactory to solve industrial-scale instances. Numerical investigation and sensitivity analysis based on real-world data are also conducted to provide insightful and quantitative recommendations for mine schedulers and planners.

Information feudalism: Who owns the knowledge economy? A book review

Back in 1995, Peter Drahos wrote a futuristic article called ‘Information feudalism in the information society’. It took the form of an imagined history of the information society in the year 2015. Drahos provided a pessimistic vision of the future, in which the information age was ruled by the private owners of intellectual property. He ended with the bleak, Hobbesian image: "It is unimaginable that the information society of the 21st century could be like this. And yet if abstract objects fall out of the intellectual commons and are enclosed by private owners, private, arbitrary, unchecked global power will become a part of life in the information society. A world in which seed rights, algorithms, DNA, and chemical formulas are owned by a few, a world in which information flows can be coordinated by information-media barons, might indeed be information feudalism (p. 222)." This science fiction assumed that a small number of states would dominate the emerging international regulatory order set up under the World Trade Organization. In Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?, Peter Drahos and his collaborator John Braithwaite reprise and expand upon the themes first developed in that article. The authors contend: "Information feudalism is a regime of property rights that is not economicallyefficient, and does not get the balance right between rewarding innovation and diffusing it. Like feudalism, it rewards guilds instead of inventive individual citizens. It makes democratic citizens trespassers on knowledge that should be the common heritage of humankind, their educational birthright. Ironically, information feudalism, by dismantling the publicness of knowledge, will eventually rob the knowledge economy of much of its productivity (p. 219)." Drahos and Braithwaite emphasise that the title Information Feudalism is not intended to be taken at face value by literal-minded readers, and crudely equated with medieval feudalism. Rather, the title serves as a suggestive metaphor. It designates the transfer of knowledge from the intellectual commons to private corporation under the regime of intellectual property.

The artist is a thief: A book review

Stephen Gray is a writer and law lecturer who has been living in Darwin since 1989. He started out writing formal legal pieces about how copyright law had unsuccessfully sought to accommodate Aboriginal art. Such work led him to further investigate the philosophical questions underlying the legal issues affecting both traditional and urban Indigenous people. Gray has also explored matters of bioprospecting in relation to Indigenous biological resources. He has investigated the introduction of a label of authenticity into Australia. Gray has also published a number of articles about other legal issues affecting Indigenous people. He has explored such topics as native title, customary law, alternative dispute resolution, and criminal law. Gray has recently been awarded The Australian/ Vogel Literary Award for his novel The Artist is a Thief. He was inspired to write a book after being sent out to a community on a possible copyright claim as part of his job in the law faculty of Northern Territory University: "I wrote an academic article and then a more philosophical piece talking about the copyright act and the way it doesn't really protect traditional artists who have a very different view of the place of their art. The pieces were interesting, but I felt there was something more there that needed a fictional expression as well." It is ironic that such a self-conscious and sophisticated meditation upon appropriation and authenticity should win The Australian/ Vogel Literary Award. The inaugural award in 1980 was won by Paul Radley, who later revealed his books were mostly written by his uncle, and in 1993 it was won by Helen Demidenko, aka Darville, who had lied about her Ukrainian background and family history.

International copyright law: A book review

n his 1994 book, Copyright's Highway, Paul Goldstein made the telling prophecy: The celestial jukebox may also portend more revolutional changes in international copyright markets. As the celestial jukebox disseminates information and entertainment over the air and without regard for national boundaries, the importance of the nation-state as a traditional guarantor of copyright may be replaced by international institutions such as the newly established World Trade Organization. In retrospect, it was an accurate prediction. The celestial jukebox has shown little respect for national boundaries. In particular, ephemeral file-sharing programs such as Napster, Freenet and Filetopia have posed difficulties for copyright law. International treaties have taken on larger significance and international institutions such as the World Intellectual Property Organization and World Trade Organization have assumed a greater role in regulating international copyright markets.

Moral rights and their application in Australia: a book review

In Moral Rights and Their Application in Australia, Maree Sainsbury offers a summary of the new moral rights regime established in Australia in 2000. It is a decent guide and handbook to moral rights for legal practitioners, the authors of copyright work, and the users of copyright material. As the author notes: "The Australian moral rights legislation impacts on the rights and obligations of many people in diverse circumstances, from the creator of a highly unique work of art to the designer of a web site incorporating factual information or graphics which someone else has created. Any person creating or dealing with copyright material should be aware of the moral rights implications. This book provides a detailed analysis of the moral rights legislation, while stressing the fundamental provisions. It also provides some useful practical guidance for those who are affected, both in general terms and with respect to the more specific situations outlined above." Maree Sainsbury provides an enjoyable account of the history and nature of moral rights. She charts the romantic, Continental origins of moral rights, and explains their translation to countries, such as Australia and the United States.

Media futures: A review essay on'The Future of Reputation','TV Futures', and'The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It'

In his 1987 book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, Stewart Brand provides an insight into the visions of the future of the media in the 1970s and 1980s. 1 He notes that Nicolas Negroponte made a compelling case for the foundation of a media laboratory at MIT with diagrams detailing the convergence of three sectors of the media—the broadcast and motion picture industry; the print and publishing industry; and the computer industry. Stewart Brand commented: ‘If Negroponte was right and communications technologies really are converging, you would look for signs that technological homogenisation was dissolving old boundaries out of existence, and you would expect an explosion of new media where those boundaries used to be’. Two decades later, technology developers, media analysts and lawyers have become excited about the latest phase of media convergence. In 2006, the faddish Time Magazine heralded the arrival of various Web 2.0 social networking services: You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy‐strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television. And we didn’t just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open‐source software. America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user‐created Linux. We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy. The magazine announced that Time’s Person of the Year was ‘You’, the everyman and everywoman consumer ‘for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game’. This review essay considers three recent books, which have explored the legal dimensions of new media. In contrast to the unbridled exuberance of Time Magazine, this series of legal works displays an anxious trepidation about the legal ramifications associated with the rise of social networking services. In his tour de force, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, Daniel Solove considers the implications of social networking services, such as Facebook and YouTube, for the legal protection of reputation under privacy law and defamation law. Andrew Kenyon’s edited collection, TV Futures: Digital Television Policy in Australia, explores the intersection between media law and copyright law in the regulation of digital television and Internet videos. In The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain explores the impact of ‘generative’ technologies and ‘tethered applications’—considering everything from the Apple Mac and the iPhone to the One Laptop per Child programme.

Wikipedia, collective authorship, and the politics of knowledge

This chapter considers the legal ramifications of Wikipedia, and other online media, such as the Encyclopedia of Life. Nathaniel Tkacz (2007) has observed: 'Wikipedia is an ideal entry-point from which to approach the shifting character of knowledge in contemporary society.' He observes: 'Scholarship on Wikipedia from computer science, history, philosophy, pedagogy and media studies has moved beyond speculation regarding its considerable potential, to the task of interpreting - and potentially intervening in - the significance of Wikipedia's impact' (Tkacz 2007). After an introduction, Part II considers the evolution and development of Wikipedia, and the legal troubles that have attended it. It also considers the establishment of rival online encyclopedia - such as Citizendium set up by Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia; and Knol, the mysterious new project of Google. Part III explores the use of mass, collaborative authorship in the field of science. In particular, it looks at the development of the Encyclopedia of Life, which seeks to document the world's biodiversity. This chapter expresses concern that Wiki-based software had to develop in a largely hostile and inimical legal environment. It contends that copyright law and related fields of intellectual property need to be reformed in order better to accommodate users of copyright material (Rimmer 2007). This chapter makes a number of recommendations. First, there is a need to acknowledge and recognize forms of mass, collaborative production and consumption - not just individual authorship. Second, the view of a copyright 'work' and other subject matter as a complete and closed piece of cultural production also should be reconceptualised. Third, the defense of fair use should be expanded to accommodate a wide range of amateur, peer-to-peer production activities - not only in the United States, but in other jurisdictions as well. Fourth, the safe harbor protections accorded to Internet intermediaries, such as Wikipedia, should be strengthened. Fifth, there should be a defense in respect of the use of 'orphan works' - especially in cases of large-scale digitization. Sixth, the innovations of open source licensing should be expressly incorporated and entrenched within the formal framework of copyright laws. Finally, courts should craft judicial remedies to take into account concerns about political censorship and freedom of speech.