On July 14, 2009, KEI, will host a brownbag on the Google Book settlement. The even will be held at the KEI Washington, DC offices, 1621 Connecticut Ave NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC 20009. (Tel +1 202 332 2670 for directions or more information).

The speaker will be Alexander Macgillivray, the Deputy General Counsel at Google.

Pope Benedict XVI today issued a statement saying that “On the part of rich countries, there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care.” The criticism came in a section of his most recent encyclical letter dealing with social issues, and specifically focusing on international human development and systemic failures of bodies large and small to solve development problems.

The World Health Organization just published a report on this week’s second meeting of the WHO Expert Working Group (EWG) on R&D Financing.

Today nine NGOs sent a letter the WHO Expert Working Group on R&D Financing. The letter focuses on issues about transparency, conflicts of interest, and EWG outcomes. The whole EWG seems to be going very badly right now, in part because of the US government and much of Northern Europe is working hand and glove with the pharmaceutical industry, and partly because the Gates Foundation is protecting big pharma and seems to have an ideological attachment to strong IPR.

Kira Alvarez is the Deputy Assistant USTR for Intellectual Property Enforcement, and the chief US negotiator for ACTA. According to her Linkedin bio, as late as October 2008, right before the election, she was the Time Warner Vice President for Global Public Policy, and before that, she was a lobbyist for Ely Lilly, the pharmaceutical company.

At least four imprints of Random House (Ballantine, Dell, Del Rey and Spectra) have turned off text to speech in Kindle books that they give away at a zero price. Random House is owned by Bertelsmann AG, the German publishing giant. What is the rationale for soundproofing* these books?
Here are some examples of DRM’d soundproof books that are free to Kindle users who do not have visual impairments.