ONE OF OUR readers has advised watching the following long talk.



There is a lot more about Intellectual Monopolies in the news today. To give just a sample:

• Out of Africa Something New - and Bad

Despite the fact that South Africa is at the forefront of open source usage, it seems to be taking a very bad turn as far as open knowledge is concerned:

The Intellectual Property from Publicly Financed Research Bill was signed into law yesterday.

This stems from a mistaken belief that:

the best way to get research re-used for the benefit of the economy is to lock it down, and award a monopoly to one person, rather than opening it to everyone.

• EU trade polices for pharma-driven changes to Indias IP laws

Shefali Sharma wrote a EED report in which she highlights the role of Trade Agreements for the subversion of democratic decision making over IPR laws.

• EIF2 contribution of Open Source Consortium

Gerry Gavigan contributed in the name of the Open Source Consortium to the consultation for an improved European Interoperability Framework:

We were particularly pleased to see the issue of software patents addressed in a manner that prevents them being used to hinder competition rather than the original purpose of patent law, to promote innovation.

• IBM Patents Removing Leading/Trailing Blanks

theodp writes "With its example of how ' John Doe ' could be saved in a database as 'John Doe' (i.e., without leading or trailing blanks), purported patent reformer IBM dazzled the USPTO enough to earn Big Blue a patent last Tuesday for Automatically removing leading and trailing space characters from data being entered into a database system . The three IBM 'inventors' are also seeking a related patent for Retrieving data from a database system without leading and trailing space characters. Hey, if the patent system ain't broke, don't fix it!"

Any more news on Intellectual Monopolies would be welcome. ⬆