Canada Seeks Input on Business R & D Policy -
INNOVATION In/Sight
The Canadian Federal Government has commissioned a panel of experts to advise it on what can be done “in order to maximize its contribution to innovation and to economic opportunities for business.” The experts have published a discussion paper seeking public comments, which can be reached by clicking on the title of this note.
The introduction to the discussion paper shows that Canadian businesses spend one percent of GDP on R&D whereas U.S. businesses spend two percent. It would be interesting to look behind these numbers to see whether the discrepancy is influenced by the fact that Canadian businesses are substantially owned by U.S. parent companies, which may do the R&D themselves.
The experts posed three specific questions:
- What federal initiatives are most effective in increasing business R&D and facilitating commercially relevant R&D partnerships?
- Is the current mix and design of tax incentives and direct support for business R&D and business focused R&D appropriate?
- What, if any, gaps are evident in the current suite of programming, and what might be done to fill these gaps?
Comments are due by February 18, 2011 and may be delivered through the panel’s web site at www.rdreview-examenrd.ca.
dgallsebrook@ludlowlaw.ca
suite 1400 - 439 university avenue , toronto, ontario m5g 1y8 , tel: 416-408-4565 x 224 , fax: 416-408-4569 www.ludlowlaw.ca
COPYRIGHT In/Sight
In Canada, copyright collectives accumulate the rights of large numbers of copyright owners, and collect license fees for otherwise infringing acts on behalf of the owners. The activities for which money is collected, and the rates, typically require approval by the Copyright Board. Such hearings can be hotly contested because a lot of money is at stake.
The copyright collectives are always questing to add new activities to their revenue stream. A recent target is music sampling. Bell Canada makes 30 second music clips available to prospective purchasers of complete copies of the music, so that purchasers can shop with knowledge of what they are buying. The collective SOCAN would like to attach a tariff to making these excepts accessible online.
The Copyright Board said that users copying such clips are doing research. Doing research is not copyright infringement, and therefore need not be subject to a tariff. The Board also held that a 30 second excerpt is not a substantial copy of the whole work, largely because the sample is not a substitute for the whole and does not displace any sales. Nothing makes this clearer than the answering argument of the copyright collective SOCAN, which was to instead aggregate the amount of music copied and consider it as hours of uncompensated use. Copyrights are infringed one work at a time, making this argument a tacit admission that sampling is not infringement in individual recordings.
Professor Michael Geist has commented on the Federal Court of Appeal decision at http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5036/125/. He points out that the finding that “consumer research” is “research” is significant. It is, but since the Supreme Court has already told us in the CCH case not to parse the “research” exception to infringement down into subtypes of research, the decision is more illustrative than precedential.
Perhaps what is most interesting is what the Federal Court of Appeal did not say. Under section 80 of the Copyright Act, it is not an infringement of copyright for an individual to make a copy of an entire musical work for non-commercial use. In addition, users pay for this copy by a tariff which is already levied upon them in the purchase price of blank CDs. There would seem to be available arguments that there is no point in fussing over a fraction when the whole is exempted anyway, and that a new tariff could be seen as double recovery.
It took the Federal Court of Appeal 29 paragraphs to reach this predictable conclusion. Presumably the Supreme Court’s interest in hearing the case is based upon the large amount of money involved and the large number of people from and to whom wealth would be transferred.The future of the digital world will increasingly involve subdividing works, indexing, cataloguing and searching them. Perhaps this appeal will provide useful goalposts for these practices.
suite 1400 - 439 university avenue , toronto, ontario m5g 1y8 , tel: 416-408-4565 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 416-408-4565 end_of_the_skype_highlighting x 224 , fax: 416-408-4569 www.ludlowlaw.ca
Sobering thoughts on harmful aspects of trade secrets -
PATENTS/TRADE SECRETS In/Sight
Stephen Friend, of Sage Bionetworks, writes about the need for more collaborative drug development models. He quotes Tania Bubela, of the University of Alberta, who succintly makes the point that “Patenting is inversely correlated with academic collaboration”.
90 percent of Phase II drug trials fail. “Failure” sometimes includes causing unanticipated harm to patients.
The author’s thesis is that a sharing of information would prevent a lot of these misadventures. Drug trials are both hazardous to patients and costly to drug development companies and to the economy generally. In addition, a great deal of repetitious research would be obviated by sharing rather than hoarding information in the hope of obtaining patent protection.
Click on the tile above to read the article “Crowdsourcing Drug Discovery”.
suite 1400 - 439 university avenue , toronto, ontario m5g 1y8 , tel: 416-408-4565 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 416-408-4565 end_of_the_skype_highlighting x 224 , fax: 416-408-4569 www.ludlowlaw.ca
COPYRIGHT In/Sight
An article by David Allsebrook of LudlowLaw has been published in “Legal Issues in Electronic Commerce” 3rd Edition, Captus Press, Concord, Ontario, edited by R.L. Campbell. The article is entitled “Submissions on Copyright Law Reform”.
The text is a wide ranging and comprehensive compilation of articles on electronic commerce issues. It ranges from the economic and political through the legal and regulatory issues. I recommend it to anyone who wants a bird’s eye view of the major issues in the Internet age and foundational information as to where they are headed in the future.
suite 1400 - 439 university avenue , toronto, ontario m5g 1y8 , tel: 416-408-4565 x 224 , fax: 416-408-4569 www.ludlowlaw.ca
Canada's Digital Economy Consultation -
COPYRIGHT/PATENT In/Sight
Industry Minister Tony Clement has launched a public consultation on the subject of what Canada’s policies towards the Digital Economy should be. The consultation process includes a white paper, a set of skill testing questions, and a series of round tables. One of the topics is copyright, although the government has introduced a Copyright Bill already this month (which paid no attention to the public opinion gleaned from its public consultation process last summer). There is no mention of patents.
If you wish to make a submission, the deadline is July 9, 2010. There is also an “Idea Forum” where you may post your ideas and vote and comment on the ideas posted by others.
suite 1400 - 439 university avenue , toronto, ontario m5g 1y8 , tel: 416-408-4565 x 224 , fax: 416-408-4569 www.ludlowlaw.ca
PATENTS In/Sight
In the 12th century and again in the 17th century, Western European researchers sought out ancient Greek and Roman texts. Their contents provided a knowledge base as Western Europe began to develop its own technological and philosophical culture. As anyone who has taken high school geometry can attest, strong Greek influence persists in the Western world to this day.
During those times, little information was available in Western Europe about the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of less accessible preceding cultures. That is now changing. The difference from the previous renaissances, is that the originating cultures, such as China, India, and aboriginal cultures, still exist, and have a proprietary pride in their accumulated knowledge and wisdom.
A current example is in the field of medicine. India has, at government expense, developed a database of medicines which have been known in India for hundreds of years. The thirty million page database has been provided, by India’s initiative, to the European Patent Office. It is being used by the European Patent Office to reject modern patent applications for the traditional Indian medicinal formulations.
The Chinese government has similarly created a database of 12,000 traditional Chinese medications and provided it to the European Patent Office for use as prior art.
The purpose of sharing this information with the world’s patent offices is to prevent what is sometimes called “bio-piracy”. Cultures which originated these medications want the credit for having done so, and object to what they consider to be the misappropriation of their heritage by others.
For more information about these initiatives, here are a couple of links to start you off.
http://www.epo.org/topics/issues/traditional.html
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100427/jsp/nation/story_12384397.jsp
suite 1400 - 439 university avenue I toronto, ontario m5g 1y8 I tel: x 224 I fax: I www.ludlowlaw.ca
How Secret are Your Shredded Documents ? -
CONFIDENTIALITY In/Sight
Software has been developed to reassemble shredded documents. The context for this is an effort to restore the records of the former East German Secret Police, the Stasi. Apparently the Stasi left behind 16,000 garbage bags full of shredded documents. Efforts to reassemble them by hand are going painfully slowly (Expected completion time - 800 years). Click on the link for details.
Personally, I would have started writing code halfway through bag number 1. Start with the corner pieces….
The moral of the story - be sure your shredded remnants are destroyed before they fall into someone else’s hands.
suite 1400 - 439 university avenue I toronto, ontario m5g 1y8 I tel: x 224 I fax: I www.ludlowlaw.ca
Irony Visits the Federal Court -
PATENTS In/Sight
Few litigants in Canada fight harder than drug companies fighting over patents. The central dispute usually involves a company with a drug patent using the one-sided system to fend off generic drug companies who are seeking regulatory approval to market the drug as soon as they can. Don’t feel too sorry for the generics, they may spend a fortune on lawyers, but they are also very prosperous.
Here we find a generic, Novopharm, in the course of trying to pry the fingers of Pfizer off a drug patent. Novopharm is asking the Court to protect Novopharm’s legal arguments from public view, so that Novopharm’s generic competitors cannot benefit from its arguments, and also use them to defeat the patent. The application was denied.
suite 1400 - 439 university avenue I toronto, ontario m5g 1y8 I tel: x 224 I fax: I www.ludlowlaw.ca
An Indie Musician's Take on Music Economics -
COPYRIGHT In/Sight
A refreshingly well written and and learned commentary on music how to make money as a musician, past , present and future. This stark article “Simon Indelicate” may be a bit bleak in its valuation of talent and showmanship as contributors to success, but it is entertaining while laying bare the framework of the old music economy and how uttlerly its structure has vanished.
David Allsebrook dgallsebrook@ludlowlaw.ca
suite 1400 - 439 university avenue I toronto, ontario m5g 1y8 I tel: I fax: 416-408-4569 I www.ludlowlaw.ca
China Reduces Sentences for Inventive Prisoners -
PATENTS In/Sight
Gansu Province in north-central China has developed a novel (the pun sort of happened on its own) coordination between its Intellectual Property Office and the Bureau of Prison Administration. The Prison Administration is offering sentence remissions to prisoners making “inventions or major technological renovations”.
For some reason, this was followed by an upsurge in patent filings by prisoners in Gansu. To meet the demand, the Gansu IP Office has dispatched senior patent practitioners and government officials to help prisoners with their patent applications.
Perhaps there will now be a wealth of expertise available at the Gansu patent office on tunneling techniques, contraband concealment, cutlery sharpening, lock picking, and other useful arts.
For those who debate whether patents actually provide any incentive to invention, or invention disclosure, here is grist for the mill. And maybe there is a spark of creative thinking among the bureaucrats of centrally planned economies after all.
suite 1400 - 439 university avenue I toronto, ontario m5g 1y8 I tel: x 224 I fax: I www.ludlowlaw.ca