Whose Book is it Anyway? A View from Elsewhere on Publishing, Copyright and Creativity
Janis Jefferies, Sarah Kember (Editors)
Whose Book is it Anyway? follows the trajectory of a four-year research project conducted through a series of workshops held at venues ranging from Nesta, the London Book Fair and the British Library to The Guardian and the V&A. The research was predicated on what is colloquially termed the ‘copyfight’, brought into focus by UK reforms in intellectual property (IP) and open access2 and producing something of an impasse or standoff between those in the publishing industry who are concerned to retain, or even strengthen copyright in a digital context and, on the other hand, the technology industry and its advocates in government who regard intellectual property rights as more of an impediment than an incentive to innovation and economic growth.
Making up Numbers : A History of Invention in Mathematics
Ekkehard Kopp
Human beings have an innate need to make things up. People make up stories, nations make up histories, scientists make up theories to explain how the world works and philosophers ponder how we know things and how we should live and behave. These made-up tales often conflict with each other, but perhaps there is one thing on which we can all agree: that it is necessary to make up numbers to help us cope with life and with each other, from times when ‘one, two, many’ seemed to be enough, right down to the modern concepts of number used by scientists and mathematicians today. We might not always agree, nor even think about, what numbers are, but no-one is likely to deny that we need them
Models in Microeconomic Theory
Martin J. Osborne, Ariel Rubinstein
The book contains material for a year-long undergraduate course in what is often called “Intermediate microeconomics”. It covers basic concepts and models of current microeconomics theory. Our main aim is to give the reader an understanding of the concepts of model and equilibrium in microeconomic theory. The connection between models in microeconomics and the world is subtle, and microeconomic theorists differ in their views about the purpose of their work. Ariel has expressed his views about the meaning of models in economic theory frequently, especially in his book Economic fables (Rubinstein 2012). Although we do not discuss applications and implications of the theory for policy, we strongly believe that economic models should be connected to the world; they should concern concepts we use in the real world when thinking about economic interactions. A main principle that guides us is that concepts, models and results should be stated precisely. Nevertheless, the mathematics we use is elementary, and in particular we use almost no calculus. We also have tried to avoid involved computations, both in the text and the exercises. However, many of the proofs involve sustained logical arguments.
Intellectual Property and Public Health in the Developing World
Monirul Azam
This study explored how to design national patent laws and undertake the required institutional and infrastructural reforms that are optimal in terms of enabling developing countries and Least Developed Countries to promote innovation in their domestic pharmaceutical sectors and ensure access to medicines. Individual countries were free to determine their own patent laws prior to the establishment of the World Trade Organization. However, the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (the TRIPS Agreement), which is binding on all WTO members, aims at establishing strong minimum standards for intellectual property rights. Such minimum standards include the implementation of patent protection for pharmaceuticals. Bangladesh is a member of the WTO and, as an LDC, has been granted transitional periods until 1 July 2021 to protect IPRs under the TRIPS Agreement. Further, being an LDC, Bangladesh can also exploit the waiver for pharmaceutical patents until 1 January 2033. This study analyses experiences of implementing TRIPS-compliant patent laws in Brazil, China, India and South Africa, and explores potential policy options for the LDCs with a case study on the pharmaceutical sector in Bangladesh.
Privilege and Property Essays on the History of Copyright
Ronan, Deazley, Martin Kretschme, Lionel Bently
Copyright history had been the subject of intense and sustained study during several periods in the past, in the sense that there was a common set of questions, a community of scholars who read and responded to each other’s concerns, and an audience to which this history mattered. Between around 1740 and 1790 copyright history was elevated to an academic sub-discipline under this (sociological) definition in at least Britain, France and the German-speaking countries. William Blackstone (1723-1780), Denis Diderot (1712-1784) and Johann Stephan Pütter (1725-1807) all searched in different ways for the historical sources of a law prescribing norms of copying. Copyright history is also present in virtually every nineteenth-century jurisprudential treatment of literary property, author’s rights, publisher’s rights or copyright law
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 21st Century: A Living Document in a Changing World
Gordon Brown (Editor)
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a monumental embodiment for our time of the ancient idea that we all belong to a single global community, and that each human being has moral ties and responsibilities to all others. From the start, endorsed and adopted in 1948 by most Member States of the UN, the Declaration has been a beacon and a standard, its influence both wide and deep. The UDHR has been and is an unprecedented educational and cultural force, making people conversant with the idea of human rights, providing a widely accepted text enumerating those rights, delivering an articulate focus for what might otherwise be timid and inarticulate concerns, and sending out a message that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Today, the UDHR, translated into 350 languages, is the best-known and most often cited human rights document on Earth. By setting out, for the first time, fundamental rights to be universally protected, it is a milestone in the history of human interactions and the cause of human rights.
Financing Social Protection
Michael Cichon, Wolfgang Scholz, Arthur van de Meerendonk, Krzysztof Hagemejer, Fabio Bertranou, Pierre Plamondon
Measuring the Effectiveness of Social Protection: Concepts and Applications
Ruslan Yemtsov, Maddalena Honorati, Brooks Evans, Zurab Sajaia, Michael Lokshin
Social Protection for Sustainable Development: Dialogues between Africa and Brazil
Karen Lang (Editor)
Women’s Rights to Social Security and Social Protection
Beth Goldblatt (Editor), Lucie Lamarche (Editor)
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