Who is to blame for the EpiPen hike? Drug monopolies – not evil CEOs; Guardian, 8/29/16

Colin Holtz, Guardian; Who is to blame for the EpiPen hike? Drug monopolies – not evil CEOs:

"Instead of playing whack-a-mole, we need to break the monopolies themselves.

Many companies have effectively outsourced their R&D to federally funded academic research. Under existing law, federal funding of R&D requires companies to offer the medicine on “reasonable terms”. If they do not, we can demand generic versions for federal programs like VA hospitals, and pay a royalty in return. Or, we can simply break the patent for everyone.

In fact, we may not be limited to publicly funded pharmaceuticals. The federal government technically has the power to suspend a patent altogether. In 2003, the Bush administration threatened the maker of anthrax medicine Cipro with exactly that power.

Moving forward, all new patents could include far-stricter cost protections that link prices to median income. Or, if you prefer a more flexible system, you could incentivize innovation with hefty cash prizes, but place the resulting drugs in the public domain."

California's Legislature Wants to Copyright All Government Works; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 5/13/16

Ernesto Falcon, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); California's Legislature Wants to Copyright All Government Works:

"AB 2880 will give state and local governments dramatic powers to chill speech, stifle open government, and harm the public domain.

The California Assembly Committee on Judiciary recently approved a bill (AB 2880) to grant local and state governments' copyright authority along with other intellectual property rights. At its core, the bill grants state and local government the authority to create, hold, and exert copyrights, including in materials created by the government. For background, the federal Copyright Act prohibits the federal government from claiming copyright in the materials it creates, but is silent on state governments. As a result, states have taken various approaches to copyright law with some granting themselves vast powers and others (such as California) forgoing virtually all copyright authority at least until now.

EFF strongly opposes the bill. Such a broad grant of copyright authority to state and local governments will chill speech, stifle open government, and harm the public domain. It is our hope that the state legislature will scuttle this approach and refrain from covering all taxpayer funded works under a government copyright."

The Blue Wars: A Report from the Front; Harvard Law Record, 3/21/16

Carl Malamud, Harvard Law Record; The Blue Wars: A Report from the Front:

"The subject of this legal inquisition is a work you all know well: The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. A series of letters from Ropes & Gray LLP firmly asserted and repeatedly reminded me of the legal protections surrounding this work including trademark and copyright protections. THE BLUEBOOK A UNIFORM SYSTEM OF CITATION, Registration No. 3,886,986; THE BLUEBOOK, Registration No. 3,756,727; The Bluebook A Uniform System of Citation, 20th edition, Copyright Registration No. TX0008140199 (June 5, 2015).

The Blue Wars started in 2009 when Frank Bennett, a law professor at Nagoya University in Japan, was working on some open source software for legal citation. Professor Bennett wanted to build in a resolution mechanism for common abbreviations, for example mapping the court name “Temporary Emergency Court of Appeals” to the designated abbreviation (“Temp. Emer. Ct. App.”). The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation 234 tbl.T.1 (Columbia Law Review Ass’n et al. eds., 20th ed. 2015).

Professor Bennett applied to the Harv. L. Rev. Ass’n for permission to use the rudimentary Bluebook web site and grab the abbreviations. He was firmly rebuffed. Being an open source acolyte, Professor Bennett felt he was entitled to use those common and obvious abbreviations, so he wrote to his spiritual leader [Lawrence Lessig] for help...

These are the challenges in front of us all. What is at stake is not the future of a $36 book, it is the question of how we communicate the law so that we all understand each other; so that our system of justice can be transparent and clear; so that we all know what we’re talking about when we refer to a source. I hope we can do this together."

Anne Frank's diary caught in fierce European copyright battle; Guardian, 1/18/16

Alison Flood, Guardian; Anne Frank's diary caught in fierce European copyright battle:

"In a letter to Ertzscheid sent in late December, the foundation asks him to “cease and desist” from making The Diary of a Young Girl available online, to “immediately” announce he was “misinformed” about the copyright in the diary, to compensate damages, and to pay €1,000 each day he does not comply with the instructions, or risk court proceedings.

Ertzscheid went ahead, however, describing it as a “gift”. “This first of January 2016, 70 years after the death of Anne Frank, because this is enough time and because it is legal, this diary, her diary, enters the public domain. It belongs to everyone. And it is up to each of us to weigh its importance,” he wrote."

Scholars Unveil New Edition of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’; New York Times, 12/1/15

Alison Smale, New York Times; Scholars Unveil New Edition of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ :

"Not since 1945, when the Allies banned the dubious work and awarded the rights to the state of Bavaria, has Hitler’s manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” been officially published in German. Bavaria had refused to release it. But under German law, its copyright expires Dec. 31, the 70th year after the author’s death.

That allows a team of historians from a noted center for the study of Nazism, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, to publish its two-volume, 2,000-page edition, a three-year labor complete with about 3,500 academic annotations.

The intention is to set the work in historical context, to show how Hitler wove truth with half-truth and outright lie, and thus to defang any propagandistic effect while revealing Nazism."

Matter of rights: Was Otto Frank really Anne Frank’s co-author?; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 11/18/15

Editorial Board, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Matter of rights: Was Otto Frank really Anne Frank’s co-author?Matter of rights: Was Otto Frank really Anne Frank’s co-author? :

"Otto Frank, her father, was the only family member who survived the Holocaust. It was his efforts that led to the publication of her diary. Until his death in 1980, he was acknowledged as the book’s “editor,” but gave full credit for the text to his daughter.

This is an important point given the new controversy surrounding the book’s copyright. Seventy years after her death, the European copyright is set to expire, but the Swiss foundation that holds the rights wants to prevent it from moving into public domain. The foundation is filing an extension of the copyright based on new information — the claim that Otto Frank is the book’s co-author.

This is contrary to descriptions made about the book since its publication. If the diary had been co-written by her father, then it cannot be properly called a girl’s reflections.

Extending the foundation’s control, until 2050, over “The Diary of Anne Frank” by now claiming Otto Frank is the co-writer is a cynical attempt to control a major revenue stream.

“The Diary of Anne Frank” belongs to the world. Treating it like a mere commodity detracts from its moral authority. Worse than that, making Anne Frank a mere collaborator in her own story is an insult to her memory and what she endured."

Anne Frank’s Diary Gains ‘Co-Author’ in Copyright Move; New York Times, 11/13/15

Doreen Carvajal, New York Time; Anne Frank’s Diary Gains ‘Co-Author’ in Copyright Move:

"Copyright protections vary from country to country. The classic novella “The Little Prince” fell into the public domain this year in much of the world but remains under copyright in France because of an exception that grants a 30-year extension to authors who died during military service in World War I and II.

Some critics of the foundation have already tested its resolve by posting bootleg copies of the diary online.

Olivier Ertzscheid, a lecturer in communications and researcher at the University of Nantes, received a warning letter this month from a French publisher of the diary after he started circulating a copy online in protest. He removed it, but he and a French politician, Isabelle Attard, said they were waiting to see what happens in January before pressing forward with a plan to encourage publication of the original manuscript more widely online.

“The best protection of the work is to bring it in the public domain, because its audience will grow even more,” said Ms. Attard, who noted that her own Jewish relatives were hidden or deported during the German occupation in France. “What is happening now is a bluff and pure intimidation.”

The foundation insists that by issuing an early warning of its intent to extend the copyright, it is acting ethically to prevent publishers from pursuing a course that might be unproductive and costly.

But if the foundation succeeds, publishers may wind up waiting even longer than the 70 years allowed after Otto Frank’s death."

Complex Car Software Becomes the Weak Spot Under the Hood; New York Times, 9/26/15

David Gelles, Hiroko Tabuchi, and Matthew Dolan, New York Times; Complex Car Software Becomes the Weak Spot Under the Hood:

“We should be allowed to know how the things we buy work,” Mr. Moglen of Columbia University said. “Let’s say everybody who bought a Volkswagen were guaranteed the right to read the source code of everything in the car,” he said.

“Ninety-nine percent of the buyers would never read anything. But out of the 11 million people whose car was cheating, one of them would have found it,” he said. “And Volkswagen would have been caught in 2009, not 2015.”

Automakers aren’t buying the idea...

Volkswagen, through its trade association, has been one of the most vocal and forceful opponents of an exemption to a copyright rule that would allow independent researchers to look at a car’s source code, said Kit Walsh, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group for user privacy and free expression.

“If copyright law were not an impediment,” he said, “then we could have independent researchers go in and look at the code and find this kind of intentional wrongdoing, just as we have independent watchdogs that check vehicle safety with crash-test dummies.”"

Should Germans Read ‘Mein Kampf’?; New York Times, 7/7/14

Peter Ross Range, New York Times; Should Germans Read ‘Mein Kampf’? :

"Since then, although “Mein Kampf” has maintained a shadow presence — on the back shelves of used bookstores and libraries and, more recently, online — its copyright holder, the state of Bavaria, has refused to allow its republication, creating an aura of taboo around the book.

All that is about to change. Bavaria’s copyright expires at the end of 2015; after that, anyone can publish the book: a quality publisher, a mass-market pulp house, even a neo-Nazi group.

The release of “Mein Kampf” into Germany’s cultural bloodstream is sure to be a sensational moment. In a nation that still avidly buys books — and loves to argue in public — the book will again ignite painful intergenerational debates on talk shows and in opinion pages about how parents and grandparents let themselves be so blindly misled.

Like the 1996 uproar caused by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” which accused ordinary Germans of being capable of mass-murdering Jews, this publishing event will shape contemporary politics and feed Germany’s deep-rooted postwar pacifism."