A breast cancer survivor says she is challenging a patent claim on cancer genes because she does not want biotech companies to own human material.
A landmark case challenging the ownership of breast and ovarian cancer genes is being heard in the Federal Court in Sydney today.
Law firm Maurice Blackburn claims four biotech companies do not have the right to patent a set of human cancer genes — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The universities of Western Ontario and Toronto have signed a deal with Access Copyright that allows for surveillance of faculty correspondence, unjustified restriction to copyrighted works and two million dollars in fees that will be passed along to students.
The agreement reached last month with the licensing agency includes provisions defining e-mailing hyperlinks as equivalent to photocopying a document, an annual $27.50 fee for every full-time equivalent student and surveillance of academic staff email.
CAUT executive director James Turk described the news as incredulous — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Support for ACTA in Europe is waning as both Bulgaria and the Netherlands refuse to ratify the international anti-piracy agreement.
Bulgaria will not ratify the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement over fears it will curb freedom to download movies and music for free and encourage internet surveillance, economy minister Traicho Traikov said on Tuesday.
More than 4,000 people marched in the capital Sofia last Saturday calling on parliament not to ratify the act. Similar rallies drew thousands of protesters across eastern Europe, as well as in Germany, France and Ireland — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In March, the Mozambican legislature is expected to pass a bill that would revise the country’s draconian abortion law and legalise voluntary abortions in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. In doing so, Mozambique would become the ninth African country to liberalize its abortion policy in the last decade. Since 2003, 28 countries have ratified an African Union protocol supporting the right to abortion in cases of rape, incest, or high-risk pregnancies. In these incremental changes, there may be signs of a continental shift — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A prominent Conservative has broken ranks with his allies on the religious right
by declaring his support for the Government’s controversial plans to legalise gay marriage.
In an interview with The Independent, Tim Montgomerie dismissed criticism that extending equal rights to gays and lesbians would weaken marriage. He said Tories and church leaders should support gay marriage because it would save the institution, not destroy it. Marriage is probably the most important Conservative institution and excluding people from it is therefore excluding people from Conservativism to a significant extent,
he said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Big Monopoly has learned in the past century that when they look like a little spoiled brat having a tantrum, politicians will throw taxpayer money their way to shut them up. Therefore, this is a behaviour they emulate as soon they are given a good enough excuse. It’s simply a reinforced, learned behaviour.
A boycott against Big Monopoly will not work. Any noticeable drop in profits will cause them to throw a tantrum at policy makers and complain how their profits are dropping due to piracy, and request harder enforcement of their copyright monopolies at the expense of our civil liberties and the freedom of the net.
Buying more of their products (yeah, right) will not work. Any noticeable raise in profits will cause them to commission reports to policy makers illustrating their grandiose importance to the economy as a whole, suggesting that they are the direct reason for at least several hundred per cent of the gross national product. Therefore, they will argue, they need additional protection as a national interest.
Doing nothing will not work either, as we are constantly on the retreat in civil liberties — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Now that the SOPA and PIPA fights have died down, and Hollywood prepares their next salvo against internet freedom with ACTA and PCIP, it’s worth pausing to consider how the war on piracy could actually be won.
It can’t, is the short answer, and one these companies do not want to hear as they put their fingers in their ears and start yelling. As technology continues to evolve, the battle between pirates and copyright holders is going to escalate, and pirates are always, always going to be one step ahead.
But what’s clear is that legislation is not the answer. Piracy is already illegal in the US, and most places around the world, yet it persists underground, but more often in plain sight. Short of passing a law that allows the actual blacklisting of websites like China and Iran, there is no legislative solution. That’s what SOPA and PIPA were attempting to do, but it so obviously trampled on the First Amendment, it was laughed out of existence as the entire internet protested it. The only other thing you could get the internet to agree on was if they tried to institute a ban on cat pictures — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Managers are alerted by flashing lights if an employee is away from their desk for a loo break or other personal activities
beyond the allotted time.
But unions and workplace inspectors have branded the practice at insurance company DNB as highly intrusive
and a potential breach of their human rights.
Norway’s privacy regulator called Datatilsynet has now written to DNB telling them the monitoring system is a major violation of privacy
.
It said: Each individual worker has different needs and these kinds of strict controls deprive the employees of all freedoms over the course of their working day.
The employees union Finansforbundet described the rules as unacceptable.
Rovio Mobile learned from the music industry’s mistakes when deciding how to deal with piracy of its Angry Birds games and merchandise, chief executive Mikael Hed told the Midem conference in Cannes this morning.
We have some issues with piracy, not only in apps, but also especially in the consumer products. There is tons and tons of merchandise out there, especially in Asia, which is not officially licensed products,
said Hed.
We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy.
Hed explained that Rovio sees it as futile
to pursue pirates through the courts, except in cases where it feels the products they are selling are harmful to the Angry Birds brand, or ripping off its fans.
When that’s not the case, Rovio sees it as a way to attract more fans, even if it is not making money from the products. Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Two large ISPs in the Netherlands have said they will not be blocking subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, as demanded by the Hollywood supported anti-piracy outfit BREIN. T-Mobile and KPN argue that blocking websites is a threat to the open Internet, and suggest that the entertainment industry focuses on new business models instead. BREIN is now expected to take the ISPs to court — via redwolf.newsvine.com
My initial reaction upon a cursory reading of the announcement was also that it wasn’t too bad, given the alternatives. However I’ve since looked at the policy in more detail and my conclusion is that this isn’t a mediocre but acceptable policy; rather, this is an excellent policy which will be helpful to free-speech advocates.
I often criticise companies on this blog so I want to take a moment to recognise Twitter for a model policy and explain why these should be the kind of practices that I hope other Internet companies follow.
In my opinion, with this policy, Twitter is fighting to protect free speech on Twitter as best it possibly can. (It also fits with its business model so I am not going to argue they are uniquely angelic, but Twitter does have a good track record. Twitter was the only company which first fought the US government to protect user information in the Wikileaks case, and then informed the users when it lost the fight. In fact, Twitter’s transparency is the only reason we even know of this; other companies, it appears, silently caved and complied.)
Twitter’s latest policy is purposefully designed to allow Twitter to exist as a platform as broadly as possible while making it as hard as possible for governments to censor content, either tweet by tweet or more, all the while giving free-speech advocates a lot of tools to fight censorship — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Twitter has announced it will begin restricting tweets in certain countries, marking a policy shift for the social media platform that helped propel the popular uprisings recently sweeping across the Middle East.
As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,
Twitter wrote in a blog post.
It said even with the possibility of such restrictions, Twitter would not be able to coexist with some countries.
Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there,
it said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In most reports following the MegaUpload shutdown, the site is exclusively portrayed as a piracy haven.
However, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people used the site to share research data, work documents, personal video collections.
As of today, these people are still unsure whether they will ever get their personal belongings back.
In a response, Pirate Parties worldwide have started to make a list of all the people affected by the raids, and they are planning to file an official complaint against the US authorities — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Speaking at Electronic Frontiers Australia’s War on the Internet
event on Saturday in Melbourne (full video available online here), Ludlam, who is the Communications Spokesperson for the Greens, said much of the thinking around the data retention proposal had been integrated into new cybercrime legislation introduced in mid-2011.
Ludlam said the proposal had been narrowed down to a degree to which most people would find reasonable
, in that law enforcement agencies could, for example, request ISPs to keep all available data on people suspected of committing major crimes such as terrorism — a technique he described as hold that person’s everything, until we tell you not to any more
.
However, the Greens Senator warned, that cybercrime legislation could mutate
into something completely different. Maybe let’s trap all the data of these categories of people,
he said, appearing to refer to the political activist community, many members of whom had gathered at the Melbourne event. Or these postcodes of people
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is the notorious, unprecedented secret copyright treaty that was negotiated by industry representatives and government trade reps, without any access by elected representatives, independent business, the press, public interest groups, legal scholars, independent economists and so on. Time and again, the world’s richest governmental administrations (only rich countries were in the negotiation) told their own parliaments and congresses that they could not see what was in the treaty, nor know the details of the discussion.
The Canberra Wikileaks cables revealed the US Embassy sanctioned a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target Australian communications company iiNet through the local court-system, with the aim of establishing a binding common-law precedent which would make ISPs responsible for the unauthorised file-sharing of their customers.
Both the location, Australia, and the target, iiNet, were carefully selected. A precedent set in Australia would be influential in countries with comparable legal systems such as Canada, India, New Zealand and Great Britain. Australian telecommunications giant Telstra was judged too large for the purposes of the attack. Owing to its smaller size and more limited resources, iiNet was gauged the perfect candidate.
The involvement of major American studios in the offensive was suppressed. The case was filed by … the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its international affiliate, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), but does not want that fact to be broadcasted,
the US Embassy, Canberra wrote. We will monitor this case … to see whether or not the ‘AFACT vs the local ISP’ featured attraction spawns a ‘giant American bullies vs little Aussie battlers’ sequel
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
PIPA and SOPA may be dead in the water for now, but it’s worth remembering that the most controversial part of the legislation is something the Australian Government has been thinking about for years.
One of the provisions in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that raised the most amount of anger, and was also one of the first to be quickly removed, was that the US Government would be able to force US-based internet service providers (ISPs) to block overseas websites found to contain copyright-infringing material.
Outrage ensued, the provision was removed, Wikipedia blacked out and the legislation was ultimately shelved.
In Australia, the Attorney-General’s Department has reassured us that the government currently has no plans of bringing in any new SOPA-style laws, instead preferring an industry-based model for dealing with piracy.
But website blocking has been on the cards for the Australian Government for many years, in the form of the mandatory internet filter — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital has apologised for forcing unwed mothers to give up their children for adoption until the mid-1970s.
The apology came in a Senate inquiry into the forced adoption
practice, which will report its findings next month.
Between the 1940s and 1970s there were about 45,000 adoptions in the state and it is estimated about 5,000 unmarried mothers at the RWH were told to give up their children — via redwolf.newsvine.com
At 40, the WikiLeaks founder comes across more like an embattled rebel commander than a hacker or journalist. He’s become better at handling the media – more willing to answer questions than he used to be, less likely to storm off during interviews — but the protracted legal battle has left him isolated, broke and vulnerable. Assange recently spoke to someone he calls a Western intelligence source
, and he asked the official about his fate. Will he ever be a free man again, allowed to return to his native Australia, to come and go as he pleases? He told me I was fucked,
Assange says.
Are you fucked?
I ask.
Assange pauses and looks out the window. The house is surrounded by rolling fields and quiet woods, but they offer him little in the way of escape. The British Supreme Court will hear his extradition appeal on 1 February — but even if he wins, he will likely still remain a wanted man. Interpol has issued a so-called red notice
for his arrest on behalf of Swedish authorities for questioning in connection with a number of sexual offences
— Qaddafi, accused of war crimes, earned only an orange notice
— and the US government has branded him a high-tech terrorist
, unleashing a massive and unprecedented investigation designed to depict Assange’s journalism as a form of international espionage. Ever since November 2010, when WikiLeaks embarrassed and infuriated the world’s governments with the release of what became known as Cablegate, some 250,000 classified diplomatic cables from more than 150 countries, the group’s supporters have found themselves detained at airports, subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury, and ordered to turn over their Twitter accounts and emails to authorities — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Two undercover police officers secretly fathered children with political campaigners they had been sent to spy on and later disappeared completely from the lives of their offspring, the Guardian can reveal.
In both cases, the children have grown up not knowing that their biological fathers — whom they have not seen in decades — were police officers who had adopted fake identities to infiltrate activist groups. Both men have concealed their true identities from the children’s mothers for many years — via redwolf.newsvine.com
RSS – Posts