I love the poetics of the name. Less obscure to the general public and so much cooler than garden variety "anti-DRM" campaigns. "Defective by design " refers to Digital Rights Management (DRM) protections that limit and restrict even fair use of electronic gadgetry like DVD and MP3 players.

This campaign is organized by the Free Culture Foundation and has over 15,000 registered members. Even Newsweek recently reported on the effectiveness of this campaign at attacking DRM and effectively educating people on the unfair monopoly privileges of these intellectual property rights.

A few interesting items in the news this week that I wanted to connect together.

The first is the release of Aberdeen Group's Product Intellectual Property Benchmark Report . They report that almost 25 percent of businesses surveyed say the threat to their product IP has grown over the past two years. These manufacturers claim now to be actively pursuing improved IP protection in the face of lost sales, lost market share, and lower margins. The key to success, the Report finds, is the adoption of "IP friendly" approaches to collaboration. I'm not sure what these would be.

A conference presented by  
The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT)
 
Fairmont Château Laurier Hotel
Ottawa - October 27-29, 2006

I meant to post this last month, but didn’t get a chance. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) held a conference in Ottawa this October on the impacts of intellectual property (IP) on the university. I caught one day of the three-day conference and found most interesting the presentations that lay out the complex, over-laying legal jurisdictions and social norms that govern intellectual property.

Geoff Tansey is a freelance writer and broadcaster who has been working on food, agriculture and development issues since the mid-1970s.

http://www.tansey.org.uk/

The WTO was getting too high profile, too conspicuous for transnational corporations to do business there. So corporations had two options: stop working through nation states and invest instead in private regulatory regimes, or else begin bilateral trade deals. I don't have much to add to the excellent work that the folks at the Global Justice Ecology Project are doing. So here's an excerpt from a recent report by Aziz Choundry:

From Seattle to Doha, Cancun to Hong Kong, and all points in between, World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations have failed to deliver as much as many of the corporations and governments which dominate the world’s economy want. So the US and a number of other governments, urged on by their big business lobbies, have increasingly turned to bilateral free trade and investment agreements. These negotiations are much less visible and can easily slip beneath the radar of NGOs and popular movements that oppose the WTO. The business coalitions that are the biggest driving force behind bilateral free trade and investment negotiations are quite open about their self-interest, and eager to keep upping the stakes and locking governments into ever tougher standards to ensure expanded profit margins and monopoly control. Through bilateral agreements, they seek to stitch up from below what they have been unable to achieve – so far - at the WTO.