Law and Innovation

Fresh and interesting article from Health Issues India about the next fighting front in the war over intellectual property: Hepatitis C in India: "In recent weeks, the international non-governmental organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) announced that it supports the ‘patent opposition’ which has been filed recently at India’s Patent Office by the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK). The application aims to prevent US pharma company Gilead/Pharmasset from gaining a patent in India on sofosbuvir, a drug for hepatitis C, which will be launched here soon. Sofosbuvir is the first of several oral hepatitis C drugs expected to come to market in the coming year. It cures hepatitis C in a much shorter time period than today’s available treatment. Gilead is expected to charge around $80,000 for one treatment course of sofosbuvir in the US. As mentioned in this article in the Times of India, even if offered at a fraction of this price in dev...

Fresh and interesting article from Business Insider  about the war between the two tech Giants: Google Inc. and Apple Inc.  "This is an excerpt from "DOGFIGHT: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution" by Fred Vogelstein, published in October 2013 by Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. By 2010 Apple and Google were attacking each other on every possible front: in the courts, in the media, and in the marketplace. Android's surge in popularity was astonishing, and Andy Rubin, Eric Schmidt, and the rest of Google made no secret of their glee. It seemed that every chance they got during 2010 they would expound on how many monthly activations Android had racked up and how mobile devices were going to change the future of Google and the world. In an April 2010 interview with the New York Times, Rubin even predicted that Android was going to rule the entire mobile universe. The year before he had been worried ...

Belgium is not only famous for food (such as french fries, chocolates, waffles), beers and the statue of a little boy peeing in a fountain. We also have a Belgian boy reporter: Tintin! (and Snowy, of course).  In general, a copyright law prevents the unauthorized copying of a work of authorship. It is about protecting authors by rewarding them for their creative efforts. A copyright law grants certain exclusive rights (such as the right of reproduction and distribution) to the owner of a copyright in a work, for instance, a book. As it is the case with every right, the question is: how long should it last? The duration of copyright protection is the life of the author plus 70 years. As you will read in this article, Hergé died on March, 3 1983. Therefore, the copyright protection will lapse on March 3, 2053 (1983 + 70).  This fresh and interesting article is about a possible future copyright protection saga concerning Tintin character (from the IPKat ): ...