Author: James Love

The July 20, 2009 issue of BioCentury has an extensive report on the “Biosimilar fire Drill.” It discusses in detail the lobbying by the Biotechnology Industry Association (BIO, bio.org) to defeat efforts by President Obama, OMB, the FTC, Representative Waxman, Senator Brown, AARP, Public Citizen, PIRG, Consumers Union, KEI, Essential Action, and others, to reform the regulation to biologic medicines, so there is more generic competition. Continue Reading →

Congress should reject the 12-14.5 year monopoly for biologic products provided for in HR 1548

KEI* opposes H.R.1548, the bill to “establish a pathway for the licensure of biosimilar biological products,” on the grounds that the period of the monopoly is excessive, and not subject to safeguards that would protect consumers.

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TACD has issued a resolution on copyright terms, and measures to mitigate the harm from excessive terms. The TACD Press release follows:

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Apparently at least one entrant has qualified to win the $1 million Netflix grand prize. One can follow the progress of the teams on the Netflix Leaderboard: http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard.

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According to Rapleaf CEO and venture capitalist Auren Hoffman, open source software has dramatically increased the productivity of software engineers. In a June 23, 2009 article in Tech Crunch titled “Engineers Are The Best Deal – So Stock Up On Them,” Hoffman writes:

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The US Department of State “2009 Investment Climate Statement for Switzerland” provides an interesting and often unexpected portrait of the intellectual property landscape for a country that is often a hard-liner in global IPR negotiations. Continue Reading →

I just finished a two day meeting in Manchester, England, in a meeting of Joe Stigltiz’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD) Task Force on Intellectual Property and Development. The meeting was held at the University of Manchester’s Brooks World Poverty Institute. The agenda and conference papers for the meeting are on the web here, including a paper on prizes I wrote with Tim Hubbard. Continue Reading →