Entertainment Industry: Yes, Please Keep Negotiating Secret Copyright Treaty To Save Our Asses

from the yeah,-that's-convincing dept

Sherwin Siy (one of the few people who actually was allowed to glance briefly at parts of the proposed ACTA treaty, though under strict NDA) has written about yet another letter sent by the entertainment industry to the government in support of ACTA. This letter includes pretty much everyone who benefits from abusing copyright laws and is afraid of the internet:

Advertising Photographers of America
American Association of Independent Music (A2IM)
American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA)
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP)
American Society of Media Photographers, Inc. (ASMP)
Association of American Publishers (AAP)
Broadcast Music, Inc (BMI)
Commercial Photographers International
Directors Guild of America (DGA)
Evidence Photographers International Council
Independent Film and Television Alliance (IFTA)
International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE)
Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA)
National Music Publishers Association (NMPA)
NBC Universal
News Corporation
Picture Archive Council of America (PACA)
Professional Photographers of America (PPA)
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
Reed Elsevier Inc.
Society of Sport & Event Photographers
Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA)
Stock Artists Alliance
Student Photographic Society
The Advertising Photographers of America
The Walt Disney Company
Time Warner, Inc.
Universal Music Group
Viacom Inc.
Warner Music Group

Funny... isn't it, that all these companies and industry groups are supporting a deal that no one's seen yet? Oh wait... that's because many of them have seen it and actually have had a hand in creating it. But what's really damning is that no where in the letter do they explain why this is actually needed or how it will do anything valuable. Instead, it's a pure faith-based letter saying "if you pass this secret treaty, good things will happen." I don't know about you, but generally, I prefer there to be actual proof and evidence that restricting consumer rights around the world actually leads to some sort of real benefit.

Tellingly, they don't respond to any of the points we raised earlier. This is not a treaty to help people or the economy. It's a deal to try to sneak through a system for propping up an obsolete business model by companies who don't want to adapt.

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Merck And Elsevier Exposed For Creating Fake Peer Review Journal

from the wow dept

I know I've mentioned for a while that I've been spending a lot of time looking into the healthcare industry -- particularly pharmaceutical companies, but haven't written that much about them yet because I haven't had the time to put everything together. However, the one thing that seems pretty consistent is how incredibly untrustworthy some of these companies are. The claims that it costs $800 million to make a pill are totally unsubstantiated. The idea that patents are necessary to create drugs is also entirely unsubstantiated. The more you look at it, the more you realize that patents have actually allowed the pharma industry to slow down many potential life-saving innovations in favor of a drug-based solution that isn't always the best. That isn't to say that there aren't some valuable pharmaceuticals, but the industry has a long history of deception and convincing the public and politicians that they need a lot more protection and money than they really do -- and that their drugs are more effective than they really are.

Even so, I was still somewhat stunned to read (via Clay Shirky) that Merck supposedly created a fake peer-reviewed journal to publish data that made its drugs look good. It also got Elsevier to publish the journal to make it look legit (Elsevier being one of the bigger publishers of -- of course -- proprietary medical journals). Two companies with a history of locking up information and data teaming up to mislead doctors and the public? What a shock...

Of course, this is exactly the sort of thing that you can do when everything is locked up and proprietary, rather than open. There's almost no way to confirm or check the data or information to make sure it's legit, so people tend to assume it is. In that regard, perhaps it's no surprise that the two companies eventually went down this road, but it does highlight one of the problems with the way the system works today. As Shirky later points out this is hardly unique for a firm like Elsevier, which has faced some serious ethical questions regarding its publications in the past as well.

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Big Publishers Increasingly Experimenting With Free Academic Journals

from the about-time dept

For many years there's been a push to create free research journals in various academic and scientific fields. The reasoning was that the high expense of the traditional journals made new breakthroughs and research much more difficult and expensive, potentially slowing down important advances. There was also some concern about publicly funded research not being available to the public. For a while, the traditional publishers acted horrified at the idea of free journals, but it appears that they're finally realizing the idea might not be so bad. Publishing giant Reed Elsevier is launching a new free medical journal online for oncologists that it hopes to support with advertising. It hopes to sign up a bunch of doctors to use it and may launch other free journals in other medical areas. It's definitely an experiment -- and appears to be driven in part by the growing number of free sources online -- but it's still good to see the big publishing houses not just bashing the idea, but testing it out themselves.

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