Intellectual property and global warming: Climate justice

Engaging in a close analysis of legal and political discourse, this chapter considers conflicts over intellectual property and climate change in three key arenas: climate law; trade law; and intellectual property law. In this chapter, it is argued that there is a need to overcome the political stalemates and deadlocks over intellectual property and climate change. It is essential that intellectual property law engage in a substantive fashion with the matrix of issues surrounding fossil fuels, clean technologies, and climate change at an international level. First, this chapter examines the debate over intellectual property and climate change under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 1992, and the establishment of the UNFCCC Climate Technology Centre and Network. It recommends that the technology mechanism should address and deal with matters of intellectual property management and policy. Second, the piece examines the discussion of global issues in the World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO GREEN. It supports the proposal for a Global Green Patent Highway to allow for the fast-tracking of intellectual property applications in respect of green technologies. Third, the chapter investigates the dispute in the TRIPS Council at the World Trade Organization over intellectual property, climate change, and development. This section focuses upon the TRIPS Agreement 1994. This chapter calls for a Joint Declaration on Intellectual Property and Climate Change from the UNFCCC, WIPO, and the WTO. The paper concludes that intellectual property should be reformed as part of a larger effort to promote climate justice. Rather than adopt a fragmented, piecemeal approach in various international institutions, there is a need for a co-ordinated and cohesive response to intellectual property in an age of runaway, global climate change. Patent law should be fossil fuel free. Intellectual property should encourage research, development, and diffusion of renewable energy and clean technologies. It is submitted that intellectual property law reform should promote climate justice in line with Mary Robinson’s Declaration on Climate Justice 2013.

An elegy for Greg Ham: Copyright law, the Kookaburra case, and remix culture

The ‘Kookaburra’ case was a tragic and controversial copyright dispute, highlighting the need for copyright law reform by the Australian Parliament. In the Kookaburra case, a copyright action was brought by Larrikin Records against Men at Work’s song ‘Down Under’, alleging copyright infringement of the ‘Kookaburra’ song composed by Marion Sinclair. The dispute raised a host of doctrinal matters. There was disquiet over the length of the copyright term. There were fierce contests as to the copyright ownership of the ‘Kookaburra’ song. The litigation raised questions about copyright infringement and substantiality – particularly in relation to musical works. The ‘Kookaburra’ case highlighted frailties in Australia’s regime of copyright exceptions. The litigation should spur the Australian Law Reform Commission to make recommendations for law reform in its inquiry Copyright and the Digital Economy. This article provides a critical evaluation of the options of a defence for transformative use; a defence for fair use; and statutory licensing. The ‘Kookaburra’ case also examines the question of appropriate remedies in respect of copyright infringement. The conclusion considers the implications of the Kookaburra case for other forms of musical works – including digital sampling, mash-ups, and creative remixes. It finishes with an elegy for Greg Ham – paying tribute to the multi-instrumentalist for Men at Work.

Patents for humanity

This article evaluates two policy initiatives by the United States Government to address access to essential medicines -- Priority Review vouchers and “Patents for Humanity." Such proposals are aimed at speeding up the regulatory review of inventions with humanitarian uses and applications by the United States Food and Drug Administration, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It is argued that such measures fall short of international standards and norms established by the World Intellectual Property Organization Development Agenda 2007; the World Trade Organization’s Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health 2001 and the WTO General Council Decision of August 30, 2003; and the World Health Organization’s declarations on intellectual property and public health. This article concludes that there is a need for broader patent law reform in the United States to address matters of patent law and public health. Moreover, there is a need to experiment with other, more promising alternative models of research and development -- such as medical innovation prizes, a Health Impact Fund, the Medicines Patent Pool, and Open Source Drug Discovery.

Playing with Technology: Young Children Making Sense of Technology as Part of Their Everyday Social Worlds

Games and activities, often involving aspects of pretence and fantasy play, are an essential aspect of everyday preschool life for many young children. Young children’s spontaneous play activities can be understood as social life in action. Increasingly, young children’s games and activities involve their engagement in pretence using play props to represent computers, laptops and other pieces of technology equipment. In this way, pretend play becomes a context for engaging with matters from the real world. There are a number of studies investigating school-aged children engaging in gaming and other online activities, but less is known about what young children are doing with online technologies. Drawing on Australian Research Council funded research of children engaging with technologies at home and school, this chapter investigates how young children use technologies in everyday life by showing how they draw on props, both real or imaginary, to support their play activities. An ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis is used to explore how children’s gestures, gaze and talk work to introduce ideas and activities. This chapter contributes to understandings of how children’s play intersects with technologies and pretend play.

Intellectual property and biofuels: The energy crisis, food security, and climate change

In light of larger public policy debates over intellectual property and climate change, this article considers patent practice, law, and policy in respect of biofuels. This debate has significant implications for public policy discussions in respect of energy independence, food security, and climate change. The first section of the paper provides a network analysis of patents in respect of biofuels across the three generations. It provides empirical research in respect of patent subject matter, ownership, and strategy in respect of biofuels. The second section provides a case study of significant patent litigation over biofuels. There is an examination of the biofuels patent litigation between the Danish company Novozymes, and Danisco and DuPont. The third section examines flexibilities in respect of patent law and clean technologies in the context of the case study of biofuels. In particular, it explores the debate over substantive doctrinal matters in respect of biofuels – such as patentable subject matter, technology transfer, patent pools, compulsory licensing, and disclosure requirements. The conclusion explores the relevance of the debate over patent law and biofuels to the larger public policy discussions over energy independence, food security, and climate change.

Lock the gate: Fracking, investor-state dispute settlement, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership

There has been much debate about the relationship between international trade, the environment, biodiversity protection, and climate change.The Obama Administration has pushed such issues into sharp relief, with its advocacy for sweeping international trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. There has been much public concern about the impact of the mega-trade deals upon the protection of the environment. In particular, there has been a debate about whether the Trans-Pacific Partnership will promote dirty fracking. Will the Trans-Pacific Partnership transform the Pacific Rim into a Gasland?There has been a particular focus upon investor-state dispute settlement being used by unconventional mining companies. Investor-state dispute settlement is a mechanism which enables foreign investors to seek compensation from national governments at international arbitration tribunals. In her prescient 2009 book, The Expropriation of Environmental Governance, Kyla Tienhaara foresaw the rise of investor-state dispute resolution of environmental matters. She observed:'Over the last decade there has been an explosive increase of cases investment arbitration. This is significant in terms of not only the number of disputes that have arisen and the number of states that have been involved, but also the novel types of dispute that have emerged. Rather than solely involving straightforward incidences of nationalization or breach of contract, modern disputes often revolve around public policy measures and implicate sensitive issues such as access to drinking water, development on sacred indigenous sites and the protection of biodiversity.'In her study, Kyla Tienhaara observed that investment agreements, foreign investment contracts and investment arbitration had significant implications for the protection for the protection of the environment. She concluded that arbitrators have made it clear that they can, and will, award compensation to investors that claim to have been harmed by environmental regulation. She also found that some of the cases suggest that the mere threat of arbitration is sufficient to chill environmental policy development. Tienhaara was equally concerned by the possibility that a government may use the threat of arbitration as an excuse or cover for its failure to improve environmental regulation. In her view, it is evident that arbitrators have expropriated certain fundamental aspects of environmental governance from states. Tienhaara held: As a result, environmental regulation has become riskier, more expensive, and less democratic, especially in developing countries. This article provides a comparative analysis of the battles over fracking, investment, trade, and the environment in a number of key jurisdictions including the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Part 1 focuses upon the United States. Part 2 examines the dispute between the Lone Pine Resources Inc. and the Government of Canada over a fracking moratorium in Quebec. Part 3 charts the rise of the Lock the Gate Alliance in Australia, and its demands for a moratorium in respect of coal seam gas and unconventional mining. Part 4 focuses upon parallel developments in New Zealand. This article concludes that Pacific Rim countries should withdraw from investor-state dispute settlement procedures, because of the threat posed to environmental regulation in respect of air, land, and water.

The culture wars of climate change

Of late, there has been a growth in cultural expression about climate change – with the rise of climate fiction (‘cli-fi’); art and photography responding to changes in nature; musical anthems about climate change; plays and dramas about climate change; and environmental documentaries, and climate cinema. Drawing comparisons to past controversies over cultural funding, this paper considers the cultural wars over climate change. This article considers a number of cultural fields. Margaret Atwood made an important creative and critical contribution to the debate over climate change. The work examines Ian McEwan's novel, Solar, a tragi-comedy about authorship, invention, intellectual property, and climate science. After writing a history of Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have experimented with fiction – as well as history. This article focuses upon artistic works about climate change. It analyses James Balog’s work with the Extreme Ice Survey, which involved photography of glaciers under retreat in a warming world. The work was turned into a documentary called Chasing Ice. It also considers the artistic project of 350.org 'to transform the human rights and environmental issues connected to climate change into powerful art that gets people to stop, think and act.' The paper examines musical storytelling in respect of climate change. The paper explores dramatic works about climate change including Steve Waters' The Contingency Plan, Stephen Emmott's Ten Billion, and Andrew Bovell's When the Rain Stops Falling and Hannie Rayson’s Extinction. The paper also examines the role of documentary film-making. It also considers the cinematographic film, Beasts of the Southern Wild. Such a survey will enable a consideration of the larger question of whether creative art about climate change matters; and whether it is deserving of public funding.

The genographic project: Traditional knowledge and population genetics

This article considers the debate over patent law, informed consent, and benefit-sharing in the context of biomedical research in respect of Indigenous communities. In particular, it focuses upon three key controversies over large-scale biology projects, involving Indigenous populations. These case studies are representative of the tensions between research organisations, Indigenous communities, and funding agencies. Section two considers the aims and origins of the Human Genome Diversity Project, and criticisms levelled against the venture by Indigenous peak bodies and anti-biotechnology groups, such as the Rural Advancement Foundation International. It examines the ways in which the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) grappled with questions of patent law, informed consent, and benefit sharing in relation to population genetics. Section three focuses upon the ongoing litigation in Tilousi v. Arizona State University, and the Havasupai Tribe v. Arizona State University. In this matter, the Havasupai tribe from the Grand Canyon in the United States brought legal action against the Arizona State University and its researchers for using genetic data for unauthorised purposes - namely, genetic research into schizophrenia, migration, and inbreeding. The litigation raises questions about informed consent, negligence, and larger matters of human rights. Section four explores the legal and ethical issues raised by the Genographic Project. It considers the aims and objectives of the venture, and the criticisms levelled against it by Indigenous communities, and anti-biotechnology groups. It examines the response of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to the Genographic Project. It charts the debate over the protection of traditional knowledge in various international fora. The conclusion recommends a number of measures to better regulate large-scale biology projects involving the participation of Indigenous communities.

ACE Research Vignette 045: Are “Entrepreneurial Opportunities” a meaningful topic for entrepreneurship research?

This series of research vignettes is aimed at sharing current and interesting research findings from our team of international entrepreneurship researchers. In this vignette, Professor Per Davidsson discusses research on “entrepreneurial opportunities”. A “Government Health Warning” is in place for this particular vignette: it mainly concerns matters internal to entrepreneurship research; however, reflective practitioners may find it to be of interest.

Environmental Crime and Specialist Courts: The case for a ‘One-Stop (Judicial) Shop’ in Queensland

The increasing international political, public and scientific engagement in matters of environmental sustainability and development has produced a rapidly expanding body of environmental law and policy. The advent of international protocols, directives, and multilateral agreements has occurred concomitantly with the harmonisation of widespread environmental regimes of governance and enforcement within numerous domestic settings. This has created an unprecedented need for environmental legal apparatuses to manage, regulate and adjudicate legislation seeking to protect, sustain and develop global natural habitats. The evolving literature in green criminology continues to explore these developments within discourses of power, harm and justice. Such critiques have emphasised the role of dedicated environmental courts to address environmental crimes and injustices. In this article, we examine the important role of specialist courts in responding to environmental crime, with specific reference to the State of Queensland. We offer a critique of existing processes and practices for the adjudication of environmental crime and propose new jurisdictional and procedural approaches for enhancing justice. We conclude that specialist environmental courts endowed with broad civil and criminal jurisdiction are an integral part of an effective response to environmental crime.

Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming and Sharing Media in the Digital Era

As patterns of media use become more integrated with mobile technologies and multiple screens, a new mode of viewer engagement has emerged in the form of connected viewing, which allows for an array of new relationships between audiences and media texts in the digital space. This exciting new collection brings together twelve original essays that critically engage with the socially-networked, multi-platform, and cloud-based world of today, examining the connected viewing phenomenon across television, film, video games, and social media. The result is a wide-ranging analysis of shifting business models, policy matters, technological infrastructure, new forms of user engagement, and other key trends affecting screen media in the digital era. Connected Viewing contextualizes the dramatic transformations taking place across both media industries and national contexts, and offers students and scholars alike a diverse set of methods and perspectives for studying this critical moment in media culture.

Location and labor: Critical crossroads in global film and television

I approached the editorial prompt as an opportunity to work through some of the concerns driving my current research on creative labor in emergent or ‘peripheral’ media hubs, centers of production activity outside established media capitals that are nevertheless increasingly integrated into a global production apparatus. It builds from my research on the role that film, television and digital media production have played in the economic and cultural strategies of Glasgow, Scotland, and extends the focus on media work to other locations, including Prague and Budapest. I am particularly drawn to the spatial dynamics at play in these locations and how local producers, writers, directors and crew negotiate a sense of place and creative identity against the flows and counter-flows of capital and culture. This means not only asking questions about the growing ensemble of people, places, firms and policies that make international productions possible, but also studying the more quotidian relationships between media workers and the locations (both near and far) where they now find work. I do not see these tasks as unrelated. On the one hand, such queries underscore how international production depends on a growing constellation of interchangeable parts and is facilitated by various actors whose agendas may or may not converge. On the other hand, these questions also betray an even more complicated dynamic, a process that is shifting the spatial orientation of both location and labor around uneven and contested scales. As local industries reimagine themselves as global players, media practitioners are caught up in a new geography of creative labor: not only are personnel finding it increasingly necessary to hop from place to place to follow the work, but also place itself is changing, as locations morph into nebulous amalgamations of tax rebates, subsidized facilities, production services and (when it still matters) natural beauty.

The commodification and exploitation of fresh water: Property, human rights and green criminology

In recent years, both developing and industrialised societies have experienced riots and civil unrest over the corporate exploitation of fresh water. Water conflicts increase as water scarcity rises and the unsustainable use of fresh water will continue to have profound implications for sustainable development and the realisation of human rights. Rather than states adopting more costly water conservation strategies or implementing efficient water technologies, corporations are exploiting natural resources in what has been described as the “privatization of water”. By using legal doctrines, states and corporations construct fresh water sources as something that can be owned or leased. For some regions, the privatization of water has enabled corporations and corrupt states to exploit a fundamental human right. Arguing that such matters are of relevance to criminology, which should be concerned with fundamental environmental and human rights, this article adopts a green criminological perspective and draws upon Treadmill of Production theory.

Producing the NAPLAN Machine: A Schizoanalytic Cartography

Everything revolves around desiring-machines and the production of desire… Schizoanalysis merely asks what are the machinic, social and technical indices on a socius that open to desiring-machines (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, pp. 380-381). Achievement tests like NAPLAN are fairly recent, yet common, education policy initiatives in much of the Western world. They intersect with, use and change pre-existing logics of education, teaching and learning. There has been much written about the form and function of these tests, the ‘stakes’ involved and the effects of their practice. This paper adopts a different “angle of vision” to ask what ‘opens’ education to these regimes of testing(Roy, 2008)? This paper builds on previous analyses of NAPLAN as a modulating machine, or a machine characterised by the increased intensity of connections and couplings. One affect can be “an existential disquiet” as “disciplinary subjects attempt to force coherence onto a disintegrating narrative of self”(Thompson & Cook, 2012, p. 576). Desire operates at all levels of the education assemblage, however our argument is that achievement testing manifests desire as ‘lack’; seen in the desire for improved results, the desire for increased control, the desire for freedom, the desire for acceptance to name a few. For Deleuze and Guattari desire is irreducible to lack, instead desire is productive. As a productive assemblage, education machines operationalise and produce through desire; “Desire is a machine, and the object of the desire is another machine connected to it”(Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 26). This intersection is complexified by the strata at which they occur, the molar and molecular connections and flows they make possible. Our argument is that when attention is paid to the macro and micro connections, the machines built and disassembled as a result of high-stakes testing, a map is constructed that outlines possibilities, desires and blockages within the education assemblage. This schizoanalytic cartography suggests a new analysis of these ‘axioms’ of testing and accountability. It follows the flows and disruptions made possible as different or altered connections are made and as new machines are brought online. Thinking of education machinically requires recognising that “every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of flow, in relation to the machine connected to it”(Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 37). Through its potential to map desire, desire-production and the production of desire within those assemblages that have come to dominate our understanding of what is possible, Deleuze and Guattari’s method of schizoanalysis provides a provocative lens for grappling with the question of what one can do, and what lines of flight are possible.

No Exit from the gaze: Sartre’s theory facilitated through aspects of Meisner’s practice

This article explores the theory/practice nexus in performance and considers a method for the transfer of theory in rehearsal and performance. In a 2011 production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s "No Exit", rehearsal, performance and post-performance exercises were devised to facilitate an understanding of Sartre’s existential concepts for audiences based on Sanford Meisner’s techniques. In this production, Sartre’s theory of “the gaze” was “practiced” by actors and audience members opening up new perspectives on the conflation of theory and practice in theatre productions.