Charles Goldfinger

On September 21, 2006, the Russian Parliament approved in the first reading a new draft law on intellectual property. Following the approval, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said the draft meets international requirements set for Russia and is aimed at Russia's accession to the WTO.

Milken Institute, a California-based think-tank founded by famous financier Michael Milken, published earlier this week a report on global trends in university biotechnology transfer. This is an impressive piece of work, carried out by a research team of nine and drawing on every conceivable source of data.

The big event in the Open Source community this week is Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, published on Microsoft's web site on September 12. What Microsoft promises is that no developer or programmer will be harassed or sued for infringement of 35 patents Microsoft holds in the area of web services specifications, if he/she uses those specifications to develop open-source applications.

It may be that the similarity between the name of a US memory chip supplier, Rambus, and that of a rebel and indomitable hero, Rambo, is purely coincidental. Yet, looking at the story of Rambus, it is difficult to avoid comparisons.

Google has so many irons in the fire that it is not always easy to keep track of its projects. This is definitely not the case of the Google Library project, which proposes to scan the content of great libraries of the world and make them accessible to on-line search.

Unlike old generals, drug-patent wars not only do not die but do not even fade away. As reported by Reuters and other major media, on Monday, August 7, hundreds of Thais living with HIV/AIDS demonstrated in front of the Bangkok offices of drug maker GlaxoSmithKline to protest a patent application for its key anti-retroviral drug, Combid.

Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig are two well-known law professors affiliated with very prestigious US universities, Yale and Stanford, respectively. They are specialised in intellectual property like policemen are specialised in crime: it is their bailiwick but they do not particularly like it.

The IP battlefield is large and diversified. It goes way beyond highly-publicized battles about patenting genes or semi-conductor designs. A case in point is a lawsuit filed July 14 by Materialise nv, a spin-off of Belgium’s Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, against a Swiss-Swedish company, Nobel Biocare.

For the last three years, the French parliament has been struggling with legislation on copyright and associated rights in information society. It has surfaced in the headlines, portrayed as a fight to force Apple to make its iTunes music downloads playable on competing music boxes. But there's more involved.

A key distinction between physical and intellectual property is that the value of the latter is created as much by sharing it as by owning it. How to share it, between creator and enabler, is a particularly acute issue within the academic environment - as indicated by a recent, noteworthy debate on the subject in Sweden.