U.S. federal judge Leonie Brikema ruled this week that an AI can’t be listed as an inventor on a U.S. patent under current law. The case was brought forward by Stephen Thaler, who is part of the Artificial Inventor Project, an international initiative that argues that an AI should be allowed to be listed as an inventor in a patent (the owner of the AI would legally own the patent).
Thaler sued the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office after it denied his patent applications because he had listed the AI named DABUS as the inventor of a new type of flashing light and a beverage container. In various responses spanning several months, the Patent Office explained to Thaler that a machine does not qualify as an inventor because it is not a person. In fact, the machine is a tool used by people to create inventions, the agency maintained.
Brikema determined that the Patent Office correctly enforced the nation’s patent laws and pointed out that it basically all boils down to the everyday use of language. In the latest revision of the nation’s patent law in 2011, Congress explicitly defined an inventor as an “individual.” The Patent Act also references an inventor using words such as “himself” and herself.”
“By using personal pronouns such as ‘himself or herself’ and the verb ‘believes’ in adjacent terms modifying ‘individual,’ Congress was clearly referencing a natural person,” Brikema said in her ruling, which you can read in full at the Verge. “Because ‘there is a presumption that a given term is used to mean the same thing throughout a statute,’ the term ‘individual’ is presumed to have a persistent meaning throughout the Patent Act.”
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“As technology evolves, there may come a time when artificial intelligence reaches a level of sophistication such that might satisfy accepted meanings of inventorship. But that time has not yet arrived, and, if it does, it will be up to Congress to decide how, if it at all, it wants to expand the scope of patent law,” Brikema said.
In a recent update, Summers shared the grim news that the books would no longer go into production.
“Tonight I pulled the plug on the Hand-Drawn Game Guides Kickstarter. Yes, for exactly the reason you think it’s for,” he said in an update on Kickstarter. “I had hoped that I could successfully navigate any legal trouble, but alas I wasn’t able to do so.”
For fans of the project, it’s a major bummer — but Summers says he’s still grateful for the experience.
“Of course I’m disappointed, but I completely understand why this happened,” he explained. “It’s okay. I’m not mad.”
For now, all orders for the game guides will be cancelled, although Summers says he’ll find out whether the project is truly dead in the water “in the coming days”. Backers can expect a cancellation email shortly if they don’t already have one, and all money will be refunded via your payment method.
Here’s to hoping Summers is still able to produce these guides in some capacity, whether that be through official channels or an entire rework of the project.
These Hand-Drawn Game Guides deserve their time in the sun, and a place on all our shelves, regardless of Nintendo’s efforts to nuke the project.
Receiving a publishing deal from an indie publisher can be a turning point for an independent developer. But when one-man team Jakefriend was approached with an offer to invest half a million Canadian dollars into his hand-drawn action-adventure game Scrabdackle, he discovered the contract’s terms could see him signing himself into a lifetime of debt, losing all rights to his game, and even paying for it to be completed by others out of his own money.
In a lengthy thread on Twitter, indie developer Jakefriend explained the reasons he had turned down the half-million publishing deal for his Kickstarter-funded project, Scrabdackle. Already having raised CA$44,552 from crowdfunding, the investment could have seen his game released in multiple languages, with full QA testing, and launched simultaneously on PC and Switch. He just had to sign a contract including clauses that could leave him financially responsible for the game’s completion, while receiving no revenue at all, should he breach its terms.
“I turned down a pretty big publishing contract today for about half a million in total investment,” begins Jake’s thread. Without identifying the publisher, he continues, “They genuinely wanted to work with me, but couldn’t see what was exploitative about the terms. I’m not under an NDA, wanna talk about it?”
Over the following 24 tweets, the developer lays out the key issues with the contract, most especially focusing on the proposed revenue share. While the unnamed publisher would eventually offer a 50:50 split of revenues (albeit minus up to 10% for other sundry costs, including—very weirdly—international sales taxes), this wouldn’t happen until 50% of the marketing spend (approximately CA$200,000/US$159,000) and the entirety of his development funds (CA$65,000 Jake confirms to me via Discord) was recouped by sales. That works out to about 24,000 copies of the game, before which its developer would receive precisely 0% of revenue.
Even then, Scrabdackle’s lone developer explains, the contract made clear there would be no payments until a further 30 days after the end of the next quarter, with a further clause that allowed yet another three month delay beyond that. All this with no legal requirement to show him their financial records.
Should Jake want to challenge the sales data for the game, he’d be required to call for an audit, which he’d have to pay for whether there were issues or not. And should it turn out that there were discrepancies, there’d be no financial penalty for the publisher, merely the requirement to pay the missing amount—which he would have to hope would be enough to cover paying for the audit in the first place.
Another section of the contract explained that should there be disagreement about the direction of the game, the publisher could overrule and bring in a third-party developer to make the changes Jake would not, at Jake’s personal expense. With no spending limit on that figure.
But perhaps most surprising was a section declaring that should the developer be found in breach of the contract—something Jake explains is too ambiguously defined—then they would lose all rights to their game, receive no revenue from its sales, have to repay all the money they received, and pay for all further development costs to see the game completed. And here again there was no upper limit on what those costs could be.
It might seem obvious that no one should ever sign a contract containing clauses just so ridiculous. To be liable—at the publisher’s whim—for unlimited costs to complete a game while also required to pay back all funds (likely already spent), for no income from the game’s sales… Who would ever agree to such a thing? Well, as Jake tells me via Discord, an awful lot of independent developers, desperate for some financial support to finish their project. The contract described in his tweets might sound egregious, but the reality is that most of them offer some kind of awful term(s) for indie game devs.
“My close indie dev friends discuss what we’re able to of contracts frequently,” he says, “and the only thing surprising to them about mine is that it hit all the typical red flags instead of typically most of them. We’re all extremely fatigued and disheartened by how mundane an unjust contract offer is. It’s unfair and it’s tiring.”
Jake makes it clear that he doesn’t believe the people who contacted him were being maliciously predatory, but rather they were simply too used to the shitty terms. “I felt genuinely no sense of wanting to give me a bad deal with the scouts and producers I was speaking to, but I have to assume they are aware of the problems and are just used to that being the norm as well.”
Since posting the thread, Jake tells me he’s heard from a lot of other developers who described the terms to which he objected as, “sadly all-too-familiar.” At one point creator of The Witness, Jonathan Blow, replied to the thread saying, “I can guess who the publisher is because I have seen equivalent contracts.” Except Jake’s fairly certain he’d be wrong.
“The problem is so widespread,” Jake explains, “that when you describe the worst of terms, everyone thinks they know who it is and everyone has a different guess.
While putting this piece together, I reached out to boutique indie publisher Mike Rose of No More Robots, to see if he had seen anything similar, and indeed who he thought the publisher might be. “Honestly, it could be anyone,” he replied via Discord. “What [Jake] described is very much the norm. All of the big publishers you like, his description is all of their contracts.”
This is very much a point that Jake wants to make clear. In fact, it’s why he didn’t identify the publisher in his thread. Rather than to spare their blushes, or harm his future opportunities, Jake explains that he did it to ensure his experience couldn’t be taken advantage of by other indie publishers. “I don’t want to let others with equally bad practices off the hook,” he tells me. “As soon as I say ‘It was SoAndSo Publishing’, everyone else can say, ‘Wow, can’t believe it, glad we’re not like that,’ and have deniability.”
I also reached out to a few of the larger indie publishers, listing the main points of contention in Jake’s thread, to see if they had any comments. The only company that replied by the time of publication was Devolver. I was told,
“Publishing contracts have dozens of variables involved and a developer should rightfully decline points and clauses that make them feel uncomfortable or taken advantage of in what should be an equitable relationship with their partner—publisher, investor, or otherwise. Rev share and recoupment in particular should be weighed on factors like investment, risk, and opportunity for both parties and ultimately land on something where everyone feels like they are receiving a fair shake on what was put forth on the project. While I have not seen the full contract and context, most of the bullet points you placed here aren’t standard practice for our team.”
Where does this leave Jake and the future of Scrabdackle? “The Kickstarter funds only barely pay my costs for the next 10 months,” he tells Kotaku. “So there’s no Switch port or marketing budget to speak of. Nonetheless, I feel more motivated than ever going it alone.”
I asked if he would still consider a more reasonable publishing deal at this point. “This was a hobby project that only became something more when popular demand from an incredible and large community rallied for me to build a crowdfunding campaign…A publisher can offer a lot to an indie project, and a good deal is the difference between gamedev being a year-long stint or a long-term career for me, but that’s not worth the pound of flesh I was asked for.”
[…]Rockstar Games has previously had its own run-in with its modding community, banning modders who attempted to shiftGTA5’s online gameplay to dedicated servers that would allow mods to be used, since Rockstar’s servers don’t allow mods. What it’s now doing in issuing copyright notices on modders who have been forklifting older Rockstar assets into newer GTA games, however, is totally different.
Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two has issued copyright takedown notices for several mods on LibertyCity.net, according to a post from the site. The mods either inserted content from older Rockstar games into newer ones, or combined content from similar Rockstar games into one larger game. The mods included material from Grand Theft Auto 3, San Andreas, Vice City, Mahunt, and Bully.
This has been a legally active year for Take-Two, starting with takedown notices for reverse-engineered versions of GTA3 and Vice City. Those projects were later restored. Since then, Take-Two has issued takedowns for mods that move content from older Grand Theft Auto games into GTA5, as well as mods that combine older games from the GTA3 generation into one. That lead to a group of modders preemptively taking down their 14-year-old mod for San Andreas in case they were next on Take-Two’s list.
All of this is partially notable because it’s new. Like many games released for the PC, the GTA series has enjoyed a healthy modding community. And Rockstar, previously, has largely left this modding community alone. Which is generally smart, as mods such as the ones the community produces are fantastic ways to both keep a game fresh as it ages and lure in new players to the original game by enticing them with mods that meet their particular interests. I’ll never forget a Doom mod that replaced all of the original MIDI soundtrack files with MIDI versions of 90’s alternative grunge music. That mod caused me to play Doom all over again from start to finish.
But now Rockstar Games has flipped the script and is busily taking these fan mods down. Why? Well, no one is certain, but likely for the most obvious reason of all.
One reason a company might become more concerned with this kind of copyright infringement is that it’s planning to release a similar product and wants to be sure that its claim to the material can’t be challenged. It’s speculative at this point, but that tracks with the rumors we heard earlier this year that Take-Two is working on remakes of the PS2 Grand Theft Auto games.
In other words, Rockstar appears to be completely happy to reap all the benefits from the modding community right up until the moment it thinks it can make more money with re-releases, at which point the company cries “Copyright!” The company may well be within its rights to operate that way, but why in the world would the modding community ever work on Rockstar games again?
The Open App Markets Act, which is being spearheaded by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, and Marsha Blackburn, is designed to crack down on some of the scummiest tactics tech players use to rule their respective app ecosystems, while giving users the power to download the apps they want, from the app stores they want, without retaliation.
“For years, Apple and Google have squashed competitors and kept consumers in the dark—pocketing hefty windfalls while acting as supposedly benevolent gatekeepers of this multibillion-dollar market,” Blumenthal told the Wall Street Journal. As he put it, this bill is tailor-made to “break these tech giants’ ironclad grip open the app economy to new competitors and give mobile users more control over their own devices.”
The antitrust issues facing both of these companies—along with fellow tech giants like Facebook and Amazon—have come to a boiling point on Capitol Hill over the past year. We’ve seen lawmakers roll out bill after bill meant to target some of the most lucrative monopolies these companies hold: Amazon’s marketplace, Facebook’s collection of platforms, and, of course, Apple and Google’s respective app stores. Last month, three dozen state attorneys general levied a fresh antitrust suit against Google for the Play Store fees forced on app developers. Meanwhile, Apple is still in a heated legal battle with Epic Games over its own mandated commissions, which can take up to 30% from every in-app purchase users make.
Blumenthal and Blackburn target these fees specifically. The bill would prohibit app stores from requiring that developers use their payment systems, for example. It would also prevent app stores from retaliating against developers who try to implement payment systems of their own, which is the exact scenario that got Epic booted from the App Store last summer.
On top of this, the bill would require that devices allow app sideloading by default. Google’s allowed this practice for a while, but this month started taking steps to narrow the publishing formats developers could use. Apple hardware, meanwhile, has never been sideload-friendly—a choice that’s meant to uphold the “privacy initiatives” baked into the App Store, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Here are some other practices outlawed by the Open App Markets Act: Apple, Google, or any other app store owner would be barred from using a developer’s proprietary app intel to develop their own competing product. They’d also be barred from applying ranking algorithms that rank their own apps over those of their competitors. Users, meanwhile, would (finally) need to be given choices of the app store they can use on their device, instead of being pigeonholed into Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store.
Like all bills, this new legislation still needs to go through the regulatory churn before it has any hope of passing, and it might look like a very different set of rules by the time it finally does. But at this point, antitrust action is going to come for these companies whether they like it or not.
Amazon.com Inc. withdrew a set of staff guidelines that claimed ownership rights to video games made by employees after work hours and dictated how they could distribute them, according to a company email reviewed by Bloomberg.
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The old policies mandated that employees of the games division who were moonlighting on projects would need to use Amazon products, such as Amazon Web Services, and sell their games on Amazon digital stores. It also gave the company “a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferable license” to intellectual property rights of any games developed by its employees.
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The games division has struggled practically since its inception in 2012 and can hardly afford another reputational hit. It has never released a successful game, and some current and former employees have placed the blame with Frazzini. Bloomberg reported in January that Frazzini had hired veteran game developers and executives but largely dismissed or ignored their advice.
So tbh if they can’t make games during work hours, what difference is it that their incompentence after work hours can’t be sold outside of Amazon. Or are the employees ripping the Amazon Games division off?
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) sets the term of protection for works protected copyright. For artistic works, the term of protection is life of the author plus 70 years. For more information on the term of copyright, see our Copyright Notice: Duration of copyright (term) on this subject. Section 52 CDPA previously reduced the term of copyright for industrially manufactured artistic works to 25 years.
In 2011, a judgment was made by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in relation to copyright for design works. The government concluded that section 52 CDPA should be repealed to provide equal protection for all types of artistic work. This repeal was included in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013. The main copyright works affected were works of artistic craftsmanship. The primary types of work believed to be in scope were furniture, jewellery, ceramics, lighting and other homewares. This would be both the 3D manufacture and retail and the 2D representation in publishing.
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The Copyright (Amendment) Regulations 2016 came into force on 6 April 2017. They amended Schedule 1 CDPA to allow works made before 1957 to attract copyright protection, whatever their separate design status. They also removed a compulsory licensing provision for works with revived copyright from the Duration of Copyright and Rights in Performances Regulations 1995 (1995 Regulations). Existing compulsory licences which had agreed a royalty or remuneration with the rights holder could continue. The relevant documents can be found in the Changes to Schedule 1 CDPA and duration of Copyright Regulations consultation.
The Blackstone-owned genealogy giant Ancestry.com raised a ton of red flags earlier this month with an update to its terms and conditions that give the company a bit more power over your family photos. From here on out, the August 3 update reads, Ancestry can use these pics for any reason, at any time, forever.
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By submitting User Provided Content through any of the Services, you grant Ancestry a perpetual, sublicensable, worldwide, non-revocable, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, publish, distribute, provide access to, create derivative works of, and otherwise use such User Provided Content to the extent and in the form or context we deem appropriate on or through any media or medium and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed or discovered. This includes the right for Ancestry to copy, display, and index your User Provided Content. Ancestry will own the indexes it creates.
[…]
The company also noted that it added a helpful clause to clarify that, yes, deleting your documents from Ancestry’s site would also remove any rights Ancestry holds over them. But there’s a catch: if any other Ancestry users copied or saved your content, then Ancestry still holds those rights until these other users delete your documents, too.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will expand on existing rules covering all research papers produced from its £8 billion in annual funding. About three-quarters of papers recently published from U.K. universities are open access, and UKRI’s current policy gives scholars two routes to comply: Pay journals for “gold” open access, which makes a paper free to read on the publisher’s website, or choose the “green” route, which allows them to deposit a near-final version of the paper on a public repository, after a waiting period of up to 1 year. Publishers have insisted that an embargo period is necessary to prevent the free papers from peeling away their subscribers.
But starting in April 2022, that yearlong delay will no longer be permitted: Researchers choosing green open access must deposit the paper immediately when it is published. And publishers won’t be able to hang on to the copyright for UKRI-funded papers: The agency will require that the research it funds—with some minor exceptions—be published with a Creative Commons Attribution license (known as CC-BY) that allows for free and liberal distribution of the work.
UKRI developed the new policy because “publicly funded research should be available for public use by the taxpayer,” says Duncan Wingham, the funder’s executive champion for open research. The policy falls closely in line with those issued by other major research funders, including the nonprofit Wellcome Trust—one of the world’s largest nongovernmental funding bodies—and the European Research Council.
The move also brings UKRI’s policy into alignment with Plan S, an effort led by European research funders—including UKRI—to make academic literature freely available to read
[…]
It clears up some confusion about when UKRI will pay the fees that journals charge for gold open access, he says: never for journals that offer a mix of paywalled and open-access content, unless the journal is part of an agreement to transition to exclusively open access for all research papers. (More than half of U.K. papers are covered by transitional agreements, according to UKRI.)
[…]
Publishers have resisted the new requirements. The Publishers Association, a member organization for the U.K. publishing industry, circulated a document saying the policy would introduce confusion for researchers, threaten their academic freedom, undermine open access, and leave many researchers on the hook for fees for gold open access—which it calls the only viable route for researchers. The publishing giant Elsevier, in a letter sent to its editorial board members in the United Kingdom, said it had been working to shape the policy by lobbying UKRI and the U.K. government, and encouraged members to write in themselves.
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It would not be in the interest of publishers to refuse to publish these green open-access papers, Rooryck says, because the public repository version ultimately drives publicity for publishers. And even with a paper immediately deposited in a public repository, the final “version of record” published behind a paywall will still carry considerable value, Prosser says. Publishers who threaten to reject such papers, Rooryck believes, are simply “saber rattling and posturing.”
It’s pretty bizarre that publically funded research is hidden behind paywalls – the public that paid for it can’t get to it and innovation is stifled because people who need the research can’t get at it either.
In what can only be considered a triumph for all robot-kind, this week, a federal court has ruled that an artificially intelligent machine can, in fact, be an inventor—a decision that came after a year’s worth of legal battles across the globe.
The ruling came on the heels of a years-long quest by University of Surrey law professor Ryan Abbot, who started putting out patent applications in 17 different countries across the globe earlier this year. Abbot—whose work focuses on the intersection between AI and the law—first launched two international patent filings as part of The Artificial Inventor Project at the end of 2019. Both patents (one for an adjustable food container, and one for an emergency beacon) listed a creative neural system dubbed “DABUS” as the inventor.
The artificially intelligent inventor listed here, DABUS, was created by Dr. Stephen Thaler, who describes it as a “creativity engine” that’s capable of generating novel ideas (and inventions) based on communications between the trillions of computational neurons that it’s been outfitted with. Despite being an impressive piece of machinery, last year, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) ruled that an AI cannot be listed as the inventor in a patent application—specifically stating that under the country’s current patent laws, only “natural persons,” are allowed to be recognized. Not long after, Thaler sued the USPTO, and Abbott represented him in the suit.
More recently, the case has been caught in a case of legal limbo—with the overseeing judge suggesting that the case might be better handled by congress instead.
DABUS had issues being recognized in other countries, too. One spokesperson for the European patent office told the BBC in a 2019 interview that systems like DABUS are merely “a tool used by a human inventor,” under the country’s current laws. Australian courts initially declined to recognize AI inventors as well, noting earlier this year that much like in the US, patents can only be granted to people.
Or at least, that was Australia’s stance until Friday, when justice Jonathan Beach overturned the decision in Australia’s federal court. Per Beach’s new ruling, DABUS can neither be the applicant nor grantee for a patent—but it can be listed as the inventor. In this case, those other two roles would be filled by Thaler, DABUS’s designer.
“In my view, an inventor as recognised under the act can be an artificial intelligence system or device,” Beach wrote. “I need to grapple with the underlying idea, recognising the evolving nature of patentable inventions and their creators. We are both created and create. Why cannot our own creations also create?”
It’s not clear what made the Australian courts change their tune, but it’s possible South Africa had something to do with it. The day before Beach walked back the country’s official ruling, South Africa’s Companies and Intellectual Property Commission became the first patent office to officially recognize DABUS as an inventor of the aforementioned food container.
It’s worth pointing out here that every country has a different set of standards as part of the patent rights process; some critics have noted that it’s “not shocking” for South Africa to give the idea of an AI inventor a pass, and that “everyone should be ready,” for future patent allowances to come. So while the US and UK might have given Thalen the thumbs down on the idea, we’re still waiting to see how the patents filed in any of the other countries—including Japan, India, and Israel—will shake out. But at the very least, we know that DABUS will finally be recognized as an inventor somewhere.
Bungie and Ubisoft have filed a lawsuit against five individuals said to be behind Ring-1, the claimed creator and distributor of cheat software targeting Destiny and Rainbox Six Seige. Among other offenses the gaming companies allege copyright infringement and trafficking in circumvention devices, estimating damages in the millions of dollars.
[…]
Filed in a California district court, the lawsuit targets Andrew Thorpe (aka ‘Krypto’), Jonathan Aguedo (aka ‘Overpowered’), Wesam Mohammed (aka ‘Grizzly’), Ahmad Mohammed, plus John Does 1-50. According to the plaintiffs, these people operate, oversee or participate in Ring-1, an operation that develops, distributes and markets a range of cheats for Destiny 2 and Rainbow Six Seige, among others.
Ring-1 is said to largely operate from Ring-1.io but is also active on hundreds of forums, websites and social media accounts selling cheats that enable Ubisoft and Bungie customers to automatically aim their weapons, reveal the locations of opponents, and see information that would otherwise be obscured.
“Defendants’ conduct has caused, and is continuing to cause, massive and irreparable harm to Plaintiffs and their business interests. The success of Plaintiffs’ games depends on their being enjoyable and fair for all players,” the lawsuit reads.
[…]
According to the lawsuit, the cheats developed and distributed by Ring-1 are not cheap. Access to Destiny 2 cheats via the Ring-1 website costs 30 euros per week or 60 euros per month while those for Rainbox Six Seige cost 25 euros and 50 euros respectively, netting the defendants up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
The plaintiffs believe that Ring-1 or those acting in concert with them fraudulently obtained access to the games’ software clients before disassembling, decompiling and/or creating derivative works from them. These tools were then tested on Destiny 2 and Rainbow Six Seige servers under false pretenses by using “throwaway accounts” and false identities.
Copyright Infringement Offenses
Since the cheating software developed and distributed by Ring-1 is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures that control access to their games, the plaintiffs state that the defendants are trafficking in circumvention devices in violation of the DMCA (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(2)).
[…]
In addition, it’s alleged that the defendants unlawfully reproduced and displayed the plaintiffs’ artwork on the Ring-1 website, adapted the performance of the games, and reproduced game client files without a license during reverse engineering and similar processes.
In the alternative, Ubisoft and Bungie suggest that the defendants can be held liable for inducing and contributing to the copyright-infringing acts of their customers when they deploy cheats that effectively create unauthorized derivative works.
[…]
In addition to the alleged copyright infringement offenses, Bungie and Ubisoft say the defendants are liable for trademark infringement due to the use of various marks on the Ring-1 website and elsewhere. They are also accused of ‘false designation of origin’ due to false or misleading descriptions that suggest a connection with the companies, and intentional interference with contractual relations by encouraging Destiny 2 and Rainbow Six Seige players to breach their licensing conditions.
Wow, this seems to me to be a stretch. Nobody likes playing online against a cheat but calling it copyright infringement and creating derivative works seems like a stretch, as does saying people might think the cheat creators (which to me seems like original work) might be mistaken as being affiliated with the companies. Even Trump and QAnon followers aren’t that stupid. Then as for the licenses imposed: yes, people click yes on the usage licenses but I’m pretty sure almost no-one has any idea what they are clicking yes to.
EU countries may be taken to court for their tardiness in enacting landmark EU copyright rules into national law, the European Commission said on Monday as it asked the group to explain the delays.
The copyright rules, adopted two years ago, aim to ensure a level playing field between the European Union’s trillion-euro creative industries and online platforms such as Google, owned by Alphabet (GOOGL.O), and Facebook (FB.O).
Note: level if you are one of the huge tech giants, not so much if you’re a small business or startup – in fact, this makes it very very difficult for startups to enter some sectors at all.
Some of Europe’s artists and broadcasters, however, are still not happy, in particular over the interpretation of a key provision, Article 17, which is intended to force sharing platforms such as YouTube and Instagram to filter copyrighted content.
[…]
The EU executive also said it had asked France, Spain and 19 other EU countries to explain why they missed a June 7 deadline to enact separate copyright rules for online transmission of radio and TV programmes.
The other countries are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia.
Japan’s onerous Unfair Competition Prevention Law has created what looks from here like a massive overreach on the criminalization of copyright laws. Past examples include Japanese journalism executives being arrested over a book that tells people how to back up their own DVDs, along with more high-profile cases in which arrests occurred over the selling of cheats or exploits in online multiplayer video games. While these too seem like an overreach of copyright law, or at least an over-criminalization of relatively minor business problems facing electronic media companies, they are nothing compared with the idea that a person could be arrested and face jail time for the crime of selling modded save-game files for single player game like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
A 27-year old man in Japan was arrested after he was caught attempting to sell modified Zelda: Breath of The Wild save files.
As reported by the Broadcasting System of Niigata (and spotted by Dextro) Ichimin Sho was arrested on July 8 after he posted about modified save files for the Nintendo Switch version of Breath of The Wild. He posted his services onto an unspecified auction site, describing it as “the strongest software.” He would provide modded save files that would give the player improved in-game abilities and also items that were difficult to obtain were made available as requested by the customer. In his original listing, he reportedly was charging folks 3,500 yen (around $31 USD) for his service.
Upon arrest, Sho admitted that he’s made something like $90k over 18 months selling modded saves and software. Whatever his other ventures, the fact remains that Sho was arrested for selling modded saves for this one Zelda game to the public. And this game is fully a single-player game. In other words, there is not aspect of this arrest that involved staving off cheating in online multiplayer games, which is one of the concerns that has typically led to these arrests in Japan within the gaming industry.
Google was fined €500m ($590m, £425m) by the French Competition Authority on Tuesday for failing to negotiate fees with news publishers for using their content.
In April last year, the regulator ruled the American search giant had to compensate French publishers for using snippets of their articles in Google News, citing European antitrust rules and copyright law. Google was given three months to figure out how much to pay publishers. More than a year later, no licensing deals have been struck, and Google did not “enter into negotiations in good faith,” we’re told. For one thing, it just stopped including snippets from French publishers in all Google services.
[…]
Now, the FCA has sanctioned the Chocolate Factory €500m and has given it two months to negotiate with French publishers. If the web giant continues to dilly-dally after this point, it’ll be fined up to €900,000 (over $1m or around £767,000) a day until it complies with the FCA’s demands.
DRM has shown time after time to be of almost no hindrance whatsoever for those seeking to pirate video games, but has done an excellent job of hindering those who actually bought the game in playing what they’ve bought. Ubisoft, in particular, has had issues with this over the years, with DRM servers failing and preventing customers from playing games that can no longer ping the DRM server.
And while those instances involved unforeseen downtime or migrations impacting customers’ ability to play their games, this time it turns out that Ubisoft simply stopped supporting the DRM server for Might and Magic X-Legacy. And now basically everyone is screwed.
Last month, Ubisoft decided to end online support for a bunch of older games, but in doing so also brought down the DRM servers for Might and Magic X – Legacy, meaning players couldn’t access the game’s single-player content or DLC.
As Eurogamer reports, fans were not happy, having to cobble together an unofficial workaround to be able to continue playing past a certain point in the single-player. But instead of Ubisoft taking the intervening weeks to release something official to fix this, or reversing their original move to shut down the game’s DRM servers, they’ve decided to do something else.
They have simply removed the game for sale on Steam.
This, of course, does nothing for the people who already bought the game and now suddenly cannot progress through it completely, as all the DLC is non-functional. They can play the game up until a point, but then it just doesn’t work.
There are multiple bad actions on Ubisoft’s part here. First, using DRM like this is a terrible idea with almost no good consequences. But once it’s in use, you would think it would be the obligation of the company to ensure any changes it makes on its end don’t suddenly render purchases made by its customers unplayable. In other words, rather than ending support for a DRM server that nixes parts of a paid-for game, the company could have rolled out patches to remove the DRM completely so that none of this happened. After all, with the game no longer even available as a new purchase, what would be the harm in removing the DRM? And, of course, there’s the total lack of communication to Ubisoft customers about basically all of this.
Which is what has people so understandably pissed.
One such project can be found on GitHub, with user “cookiengineer” proclaiming themselves “evil benevolent temporary dictator” in order to get the ball rolling.
Oh boi, #audacity issue regarding legal terms and privacy policy exploded yesterday. Like, for real.
I created a fork that removed all those features, and we’re currently working on a rebrand, github orga, and automated builds via GitHub actions:https://t.co/6hOI5oHVGF
“Being friendly seemed to have invited too many trolls,” observed the engineer, “and we must stop this behaviour.”
Presumably that refers to the trolling rather than being friendly. And goodness, the project has had somewhat of a baptism by fire in recent hours as a number of 4chan users elected to launch a raid on it.
As expected, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal in cassation by Dutch FilmWorks.The highest judicial body follows the motivation of the Prosecutor General, who previously issued advice on this.DFW announced in 2015 that it would take enforcement action against people who illegally download films.The matter was widely publicized.DFW wanted to address individual users and possibly even fine them.It engaged an outside company to collect the IP addresses.The distributor also received permission for this data collection.However, in order to address these users, DFW had to have their name and address details, which are only known to internet providers.Ziggo refused to provide that information.Dutch Filmworks was rejected by the court and the Supreme Court also sees no reason to annul the earlier judgment.
For the past few years, a YouTuber known as Krollywood has painstakingly recreated every level from GoldenEye 007 inside the level editor of Far Cry 5. This week, Ubisoft removed all of those levels from Far Cry 5 due to a copyright infringement claim.
Kotakufirst reported on Krollywood’s efforts earlier this month. Over the course of three years, in an endeavor that tallied more than 1,400 hours, Krollywood recreated every stage from GoldenEye 007, the classic N64 shooter (well, save for the two bonus levels). It was an impressive effort: a modernized recreation of a beloved yet tough-to-find old game. And it looked great, too.
You could find and play these levels yourself by hopping into Far Cry 5’s arcade mode and punching in Krollywood’s username. As of this writing, you no longer can. Ubisoft removed them all from Far Cry 5, a move that Krollywood described as “really sad,” noting that he probably won’t be able to restore them since he’s “on their radar now.”
“I’m really sad—not because of myself or the work I put in the last three years, [but] because of the players who wanna play it or bought Far Cry just to play my levels,” Krollywood told Kotaku in an email today.
When reached for comment, a representative for Ubisoft kicked over this statement:
In following the guidelines within the ‘Terms of Use’, there were maps created within Far Cry 5 arcade that have been removed due to copyright infringement claims from a right [sic] holder received by Ubisoft and are currently unavailable. We respect the intellectual property rights of others and expect our users to do the same. This matter is currently with the map’s creator and the rights holder and we have nothing further to share at this time.
Ubisoft did not immediately respond to follow-up requests asking whether the rights holder mentioned is MGM, which controls the license to the original GoldenEye 007.
The rights around the GoldenEye 007 game have been stuck in a quagmire for decades. Famously, Rare, the developer of the original game, planned a remake for the Xbox 360. That was cancelled in 2008. (Years later, Xbox boss Phil Spencer chalked up the cancellation to the legal rights issues being “challenging.”) That canned remake resurfaced as a full 4K60 longplay via a leak this January, with a playable version making the rounds online shortly after. A Kotaku report concluded: It was fun.
It is further unclear how, exactly, Krollywood’s map remakes in Far Cry 5 harm MGM at all—or how it violates Ubisoft’s terms of service in the first place. Krollywood didn’t use any assets or code from the original game. He didn’t attempt to sell it or otherwise turn a profit. And MGM doesn’t own any of the code from Ubisoft’s open-world shooter.
A sampling of Krollywood’s efforts…Image: Krollywood / Ubisoft
Those corpses represent every attempt to play GoldenEye 007 in any other format than the original game.Image: Krollywood / Ubisoft
Some of the remade levels stoke major wanderlust.Image: Krollywood / Ubisoft
Players just want a taste of nostalgia, and MGM has a track record of shattering the plates before they’re even delivered to the table. (Recall GoldenEye 25, the fan remake of GoldenEye 007 remade entirely in Unreal 4 that was lawyered into oblivion last year.) MGM has further neglected to do anything with the license it’s sitting on—for a game that’s older than the Game Boy Color, by the way. At the end of the day, shooting this latest fan-made project out of the sky comes across as a punitive move, at best.
“In the beginning, I started this project just for me and my best friend, because we loved the original game so much,” Krollywood said. “But there are many GoldenEye fans out there … [The project] found many new fans and I’m so happy about it.”
With streaming games and “let’s plays” becoming a dominant force of influence in the gaming world, one of the sillier trends we’ve seen is video games coming out with “stream safe” settings that strip out audio content for which there is no broadcast license. We’ve talked already about how this sort of thing is not a solution to the actual problem — the complicated licenses surrounding copyrighted works and the permission culture that birthed them — but is rather a ploy to simply ignore that problem entirely. That hasn’t stopped this from becoming a more regular thing in the gaming world, even as we’ve seen examples of “stream safe” settings fail to keep streams from getting DMCA notices.
Well, if there were a perfect example of a video game that highlights the absurdity of all of this, it may well be the forthcoming Guardians of the Galaxy title. If you’re not familiar with the GotG movies, you should know that retro music plays a major role in the films. The game promises that retro music will be just as important as in the films. And that’s what immediately set off concern for game streamers.
One group that is wary of this heavy emphasis on pop music is the livestreaming crowd, who are concerned that it could make the game near-impossible to broadcast. This is because Twitch and YouTube creators are regularly hit with what are known as Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices.
[…]
The game publisher of course secured the rights to the songs to be included in the game, but did not license the songs for rebroadcast. Because the world is an extremely stupid place, streaming a game equates to a rebroadcast of any music within it. And, also because the world is an extremely stupid place, Eidos-Montreal’s solution to this is once again to mute licensed music.
Newsweek contacted Eidos-Montréal to ask if they had made any considerations for Twitch streamers in respect to Guardians of the Galaxy’s music. Over email, a spokesperson confirmed that there will actually be an option to mute licensed tracks, if players want to be absolutely safe from potential DMCA takedowns.
And so a major thematic element for the franchise will be nixed in any live-streams of the game.
The GNU C Library (glibc) and GNU Portability Library (gnulib) are laying the groundwork to divorce themselves from the troubled Free Software Foundation by removing the requirement for copyright assignment.
This move follows in the footsteps of the same shift by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on 2 June.
Like many projects under the GNU umbrella, glibc and gnulib – the GNU Project’s C standard library and a collection of subroutines designed to ease cross-platform porting respectively – allow anyone to contribute code. Those doing so are asked to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation – for now, at least.
[…]
“The changes to accept patches with or without FSF copyright assignment would be effective on August 2nd, and would apply to all open branches.”
[…]
Andrew Katz, managing partner and head of tech and IP at Moorcrofts Corporate Law, said of the move: “My view is that the GPL is sufficient in itself. For GPL, licence in = licence out seems to be the fairest approach from both the developers’ and the project’s perspective, and it means that, ultimately, the developers remain in control of their code.
“Recent questions about governance of the FSF (specifically, concerning RMS’s departure and reinstatement) may cause people to be concerned about the quality of that governance as regards licensing decisions. Assigning copyright to an organisation requires a significant amount of trust, and developers may understandably be concerned that trusting a third party (whether a business or a not-for-profit) presents a greater risk than retaining their own rights in the code.”
As a recent Techdirt article noted, the European Commission was obliged to issue “guidance” on how to implement the infamous Article 17 upload filters required by the EU’s Copyright Directive. It delayed doing so, evidently hoping that the adviser to the EU’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), would release his opinion on Poland’s attempt to get Article 17 struck down before the European Commission revealed its one-sided advice. That little gambit failed when the Advocate General announced that he would publish his opinion after the deadline for the release of the guidance. The European Commission has finally provided its advisory document on Article 17 and, as expected, it contains a real stinker of an idea. The best analysis of what the Commission has done, and why it is so disgraceful comes from Julia Reda and Paul Keller on the Kluwer Copyright Blog. Although Article 17 effectively made upload filters mandatory, it also included some (weak) protections for users, to allow people to upload copyright material for legal uses such as memes, parody, criticism etc. without being blocked. The copyright industry naturally hates any protections for users, and has persuaded the European Commission to eviscerate them:
According to the final guidance, rightholders can easily circumvent the principle that automatic blocking should be limited to manifestly infringing uses by “earmarking” content the “unauthorised online availability of which could cause significant economic harm to them” when requesting the blocking of those works. Uploads that include protected content thus “earmarked” do not benefit from the ex-ante protections for likely legitimate uses. The guidance does not establish any qualitative or quantitative requirements for rightholders to earmark their content. The mechanism is not limited to specific types of works, categories of rightholders, release windows, or any other objective criteria that could limit the application of this loophole.
The requirements that copyright companies must meet are so weak that it is probably inevitable that they will claim most uploads “could cause significant economic harm”, and should therefore be earmarked. Here’s what happens then: before it can be posted online, every earmarked upload requires a “rapid” human review of whether it is infringing or not. Leaving aside the fact that it is very hard for legal judgements to be both “rapid” and correct, there’s also the problem that copyright companies will earmark millions of uploads (just look at DMCA notices), making it infeasible to carry out proper review. But the European Commission also says that if online platforms fail to carry out a human review of everything that is earmarked, and allow some unchecked items to be posted, they will lose their liability protection:
this means that service providers face the risk of losing the liability protections afforded to them by art. 17(4) unless they apply ex-ante human review to all uploads earmarked by rightholders as merely having the potential to “cause significant economic harm”. This imposes a heavy burden on platform operators. Under these conditions rational service providers will have to revert to automatically blocking all uploads containing earmarked content at upload. The scenario described in the guidance is therefore identical to an implementation without safeguards: Platforms have no other choice but to block every upload that contains parts of a work that rightholders have told them is highly valuable.
Thus the already unsatisfactory user rights contained in Article 17 are rendered null and void because of the impossibility of following the European Commission’s new guidance. That’s evidently the result of recent lobbying from the copyright companies, since none of this was present in previous drafts of the guidance. Not content with making obligatory the upload filters that they swore would not be required, copyright maximalists now want to take away what few protections remain for users, thus ensuring that practically all legal uses of copyright material — including memes — are likely to be automatically blocked.
The Kluwer Copyright blog post points out that this approach was not at all necessary. As Techdirt reported a couple of weeks ago, Germany has managed to come up with an implementation of Article 17 that preserves most user rights, even if it is by no means perfect. The European Commission, by contrast, has cravenly given what the copyright industry has demanded, and effectively stripped out those rights. But this cowardly move may backfire. Reda and Keller explain:
the Commission does not provide any justification or rationale why users’ fundamental rights do not apply in situations where rightholders claim that there is the potential for them to suffer significant economic harm. It’s hard to imagine that the CJEU will consider that the version of the guidance published today provides meaningful protection for users’ rights when it has to determine the compliance of the directive with fundamental rights [in the case brought by Poland]. The Commission appears to be acutely aware of this as well and so it has wisely included the following disclaimer in the introductory section of the guidance (emphasis ours):
“The judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in the case C-401/192 will have implications for the implementation by the Member States of Article 17 and for the guidance. The guidance may need to be reviewed following that judgment“.
In the end this may turn out to be the most meaningful sentence in the entire guidance.
It would be a fitting punishment for betraying the 450 million citizens the European Commission is supposed to serve, but rarely does, if this final overreach causes upload filters to be thrown out completely.
Techdirt has just written about belated news that the FBI gained access two years ago to the Apple account of Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of Sci-Hub. This is part of a continuing attempt to stop the widespread sharing of academic papers, mostly paid for by the public, and currently trapped behind expensive paywalls. You might think somebody helping scholars spread their work to a wider audience would be rewarded with prizes and grants, not pursued by the FBI and DOJ. But of course not, because, well, copyright. It’s easy to feel angry but helpless when confronted with this kind of bullying by publishing giants like Elsevier, but a group of publicly spirited Redditors aim to do something about it:
It’s time we sent Elsevier and the USDOJ a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science: we are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many.
They have initiated what they term a “Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub”, in order to prepare for a possible shutdown of the site:
A handful of Library Genesis seeders are currently seeding the Sci-Hub torrents. There are 850 scihub torrents, each containing 100,000 scientific articles, to a total of 85 million scientific articles: 77TB. This is the complete Sci-Hub database. We need to protect this.
The Redditors are calling for “85 datahoarders to store and seed 1TB of articles each, 10 torrents in total”. The idea is to download 10 random torrents, then seed them for as long as possible. Once enough people start downloading random torrents using these seeds, the Sci-Hub holdings will be safe. That would then lead to the “final wave”:
Development for an open source Sci-Hub. freereadorg/awesome-libgen is a collection of open source achievements based on the Sci-Hub and Library Genesis databases. Open source de-centralization of Sci-Hub is the ultimate goal here, and this begins with the data, but it is going to take years of developer sweat to carry these libraries into the future.
The centralized nature of Sci-Hub is certainly its greatest weakness, since it provides publishers with just a few targets to aim for, both legally and technically. A truly decentralized version would solve that problem, but requires a lot of work, as the Reddit post notes. Still, at least this “rescue plan” means people can do something practical to help Sci-Hub; sadly, protecting Elbakyan is harder.
Earlier this year fans reversed engineered the source code to Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. They released it to the web, but Grand Theft Auto copyright holder Take-Two pulled it offline via a DMCA claim. But one fan stood up to the publisher and has now succeeded in getting the reverse-engineered source code back online.
Deriving the source code through reverse-engineering was a huge milestone for the GTA hacking scene. Players would still need the original game assets to run either classic GTA title, but with accessible source code, modders and devs could begin porting the game to new platforms or adding new features. That’s exactly what’s happened this past year with Super Mario 64.
However, as TorrentFreak reports, a New Zealand-based developer named Theo, who maintained a fork of the removed code, didn’t agree with Take-Two’s claims and pushed back, filing their own counter-notice with GitHub last month. This counter-claim seems to have succeeded, as GitHub’s made the fan-derived source code available to download once more.
Theo explained in their counter-claim that the code didn’t, in fact, contain any original work created or owned by Take-Two Interactive, so it should not have been removed. They filed their claim last month after Take-Two removed over 200 forks of the reversed source, all built off of the original reversed-engineered code. That original repository and all the rest remain unavailable, as only Theo’s fork was restored by the DMCA counter-claim.
Grand Theft Auto III
Screenshot: Rockstar Games
In an interview with TorrentFreak, the dev explained that he believes Take-Two’s DCMA claim is “wholly incorrect” and that the publisher has “no claim to the code” because while it functions like the original source code that went into GTA III and Vice City, it is not identical.
While it might seem like GitHub has taken a side and decided that Take-Two was wrong, this isn’t accurate. DMCA rules state that content that is disputed must be restored within 14 days of a counter-notice being received. At this point, if Take-Two wants the source code removed again, it would become a legal battle. Theo says he understands the legal risk he faces, but doesn’t expect the publisher to pursue this to court any time soon.
While it’s possible Take-Two could challenge Theo’s counter-claim in court at a later date, this is still a nice win for the Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City modding scene. It’s also another reminder that modders, pirates, and fan developers are often the only ones doing the work to keep old games around in an easily playable form.
A U.K. company behind digital addressing system What3Words has sent a legal threat to a security researcher for offering to share an open-source software project with other researchers, which What3Words claims violate its copyright.
Aaron Toponce, a systems administrator at XMission, received a letter on Thursday from London-based law firm JA Kemp representing What3Words, requesting that he delete tweets related to the open-source alternative, WhatFreeWords. The letter also demands that he disclose to the law firm the identity of the person or people with whom he had shared a copy of the software, agree that he would not make any further copies of the software and to delete any copies of the software he had in his possession.
The letter gave him until May 7 to agree, after which What3Words would “waive any entitlement it may have to pursue related claims against you,” a thinly-veiled threat of legal action.
“This is not a battle worth fighting,” he said in a tweet. Toponce told TechCrunch that he has complied with the demands, fearing legal repercussions if he didn’t. He has also asked the law firm twice for links to the tweets they want deleting but has not heard back. “Depending on the tweet, I may or may not comply. Depends on its content,” he said.
U.K.-based What3Words divides the entire world into three-meter squares and labels each with a unique three-word phrase. The idea is that sharing three words is easier to share on the phone in an emergency than having to find and read out their precise geographic coordinates.
But security researcher Andrew Tierney recently discovered that What3Words would sometimes have two similarly-named squares less than a mile apart, potentially causing confusion about a person’s true whereabouts. In a later write-up, Tierney said What3Words was not adequate for use in safety-critical cases.
It’s not the only downside. Critics have long argued that What3Words’ proprietary geocoding technology, which it bills as “life-saving,” makes it harder to examine it for problems or security vulnerabilities.
Concerns about its lack of openness in part led to the creation of the WhatFreeWords. A copy of the project’s website, which does not contain the code itself, said the open-source alternative was developed by reverse-engineering What3Words. “Once we found out how it worked, we coded implementations for it for JavaScript and Go,” the website said. “To ensure that we did not violate the What3Words company’s copyright, we did not include any of their code, and we only included the bare minimum data required for interoperability.”
But the project’s website was nevertheless subjected to a copyright takedown request filed by What3Words’ counsel. Even tweets that pointed to cached or backup copies of the code were removed by Twitter at the lawyers’ requests.
Toponce — a security researcher on the side — contributed to Tierney’s research, who was tweeting out his findings as he went. Toponce said that he offered to share a copy of the WhatFreeWords code with other researchers to help Tierney with his ongoing research into What3Words. Toponce told TechCrunch that receiving the legal threat may have been a combination of offering to share the code and also finding problems with What3Words.
In its letter to Toponce, What3Words argues that WhatFreeWords contains its intellectual property and that the company “cannot permit the dissemination” of the software.
Regardless, several websites still retain copies of the code and are easily searchable through Google, and TechCrunch has seen several tweets linking to the WhatFreeWords code since Toponce went public with the legal threat. Tierney, who did not use WhatFreeWords as part of his research, said in a tweet that What3Words’ reaction was “totally unreasonable given the ease with which you can find versions online.”
Virologist and medical researcher Jonas Salk developed a successful polio vaccine that was approved in 1955, helping the world all but eradicate the disease.
When the late journalist Edward Murrow asked Salk who owned that vaccine’s patent, he famously responded, “Could you patent the sun?” It was in large part his commitment to keeping the jab’s recipe open-source that vaccines were produced globally and millions around the world were able to get it.
As the covid-19 health crisis unfolds, multinational pharmaceutical corporations like Moderna and Pfizer have taken a different approach. Their tight hold on the technology for their covid-19 vaccines has made them billions of dollars. While these strict intellectual property laws protections have allowed the rich to get even richer, they’ve put a damper on efforts to manufacture vaccines at scale. And with supply limited, the U.S. and other rich nations have engaged in bilateral negotiations with pharmaceutical corporations and hoarded all the doses they can, leaving poor nations in the dust.
The loss of life and suffering sparked by these strict patent protections are a major warning sign for our climate future. To avert environmental catastrophe, everyone needs access to clean energy. Intellectual property law could get in the way of that. And in the end, we could all suffer the consequences of a clean energy apartheid.
[…]
At its general council meeting next week, the World Trade Organization has the opportunity to help staunch the spread of covid-19 by waiving some protections on covid-19 vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement. More than 100 nations, including India, have urged it to do. The Biden administration is reportedly considering endorsing this move, though then again, it’s been reportedly “considering” it for months.
This isn’t just something World Trade Organization negotiators should do out of the goodness of their hearts—though it absolutely is that, assuming they have hearts. Failing to do so could result in variants that bypass vaccines, which could harm those lucky enough to have gotten the shot and send the world economy back into a tailspin.
“As the pandemic ravages the Global South, what are wealthy northern countries going to do? Just completely ban all contact with poorer countries? It won’t work,” said Basav Sen, climate justice project director at the Institute for Policy Studies. “It is extremely short-sighted to push this kind of logic of intellectual property and corporate profit over what is clearly a prominent threat for all of humanity.”
