Written by Andrew Rens on June 5th, 2009
Last week, Friday and Saturday (29-30 May) I had a chance to participate in a conference on Philosophy and Intellectual Property.
A fascinating mix of lawyers, philosophers and other academics gathered to speak about the philosophical dimensions of what we currently call ‘intellectual property’.
The word ‘property’ received a great deal of scrutiny. We debated utilitarian, Lockian, Hegelian, Grotian and even Kantian justifications and critiques of the the legal monopolies of copyright and patent. Most of the papers delivered are on the conference website.
I won’t make any promises but I hope to write about some of the debates over the next week.
Posted in Philosophy | Comments Off on Thinking hard about ‘Intellectual Property’
Tags: Grotius, Hegel, intellectualproperty, Kant, Locke, Philosophy
Written by Andrew Rens on May 5th, 2009
bioethics.net reports that Merck publishes a phony journal that allows Big Pharma to make claims about their products which appear to be peer reviewed science, but aren’t.
“Merck cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them. Merck paid Elsevier to publish such a tome, which neither appears in MEDLINE or has a website.”
The story was first broken by The Scientist (registration required).
One wonders what PRISM have to say about this? PRISM if you recall was a lobby group created by publishers who make a great deal of profit from public research funding by charging prohibitive subscription fees. PRISM claimed to be formed “to advocate for policies that ensure the quality, integrity, and economic viability of peer-reviewed journals” but it was revealed that PRISM hired lobbyist Eric Dezenhall, who had formerly worked for ExxonMobil and Enron, to smear open access with a claim of government censorship. PRISM had its credibility undercut early on when pointed out that photographs used on the PRISM website had apparently been copied without permission.
PRISM doesn’t have anything to say about this, there doesn’t appear to have been much activity on the PRISM site since July 2007.
Posted in A2K | Comments Off on Science for Sale
Tags: peerreview, publicscience
