How Copyright Law Is Holding Back Australian Creators
[Kylie Pappalardo and Karnika Bansal] Australian creators struggle to understand copyright law and how to manage it for their own projects. Indeed, a new study has found copyright law can act as a deterrent to creation, rather than an incentive for it. Interviews with 29 Australian creators, including documentary filmmakers, writers, musicians and visual artists, sought to understand how they reuse existing content to create. It considered issues such as whether permission (“licences”) had been sought to reuse copyrighted content; the amount of time and cost involved in obtaining such permissions; and a creator’s recourse if permission was either denied or too expensive to obtain. Click here for more.
Re:Create Report – Unlocking the Gates: America’s New Creative Economy
[Re:Create] Over the span of just two decades, the internet has unlocked the gates to the new creative economy, empowering nearly 15 million Americans to create their own content and earn billions of dollars in revenues from posting online. Internet platforms like Amazon Publishing, Instagram, Etsy and YouTube have been driving forces behind the growth and expansion of the dynamic, multibillion-dollar new creative economy… An estimated 14.8 million Americans used the following nine platforms in 2016 to earn income from their independent, personal creations. These independent creators earned an estimated $5.9 billion in 2016 from their creations. Click here for more.
Intellectual Property Policies for Solar Geoengineering
[Jesse Reynolds, Jorge Contreras and Joshua Sarnoff] Abstract: Governance of solar geoengineering is important and challenging, with particular concern arising from commercial actors’ involvement. Policies relating to intellectual property, including patents and trade secrets, and to data access will shape private actors’ behavior and regulate access to data and technologies. There has been little careful consideration of the possible roles of and interrelationships among commercial actors, intellectual property, and intellectual property policy. Despite the current low level of commercial activity and intellectual property rights in this domain, we expect both to grow as research and development continue. Given the public good nature of solar geoengineering, the relationship between the public and private sectors would likely assume a procurement structure. Innovative policy approaches to intellectual property and data access that are specific to solar geoengineering are warranted. These current circumstances also present opportunities for the development of policy and norms that might soon be lost. Click here for more.
Malaysia Can Teach Trump How to Lower Drug Prices
[Fifa Rahman and Fran Quigley] … Malaysia faces a frightening crisis in the spread of hepatitis C, with an estimated 500,000 people — 2.5% of the population — infected with the chronic liver disease. …The good news is that direct acting antivirals (DAA) are remarkably effective at treating hepatitis C, with cure rates approaching 100%. The bad news is that the corporation Gilead Sciences holds monopoly patents on key DAAs, especially sofosbuvir, despite not having discovered the drug. Gilead has exploited its position to charge as much as $95,000 per patient for treatment. The manufacturing cost is estimated to be less than US$200. US government health programs have spent billions on sofosbuvir, yet its high cost blocks most US patients with hepatitis C from accessing it. The government of Malaysia has refused to accept this deadly status quo. Click here for the full piece in the Health and Human Rights Journal.
Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement
[Daniel Nazer] Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and technically misguided decision would threaten millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability. Click here for more.
