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The World Bank announced this week (April 2010) a new open data initiative, which provides free and open access to the Bank's health and development data, including 2,000 social, economic, financial, institutional, and environmental indicators. The World Development Indicators, the Bank's most popular statistical resource, consist of over 900 indicators for 200 countries alone, including many that go back to 1960. The Bank has also opened up access to the Global Development Finance, Africa Development Indicators, Global Economic Monitor, and indicators from the Doing Business Report.

Very interesting analysis by Jeremy Wagstaff on Google search trends for "commit suicide painlessly", "how to commit suicide", and suicide statistics. He questions the possible correlation of this to economic climate.

This course surveys the political and economic history of the commons, its strengths and limitations over the centuries, and its burgeoning contemporary manifestations.  We will be guided by the writings of Elinor Ostrom, Peter Linebaugh, Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig, Peter Barnes, Lewis Hyde and David Bollier as well as by a range of films, essays and Web resources.  The course will have direct conversations with policy experts, academics and activists who are at the forefront of commons work, and confront the ambiguities and perplexities of this still-emerging realm of thought and action.

"In fact, more than combating corruption, the RTI campaign can serve as an effective tool to control the arbitrary use of power, and combat the failure of regulatory mechanisms in maintaining the rule of law. In all arenas - whether in economic policy or human rights - the need to make the matter public can act as a constraint on misgovernance. In this framework, the right to information is both a basic principle and a tool to enhance the political participation of ordinary citizens, where ethics and accountability work both ways - for the government to inform and people themselves to be more ethical in public life. By reinserting public ethics into our political discourse, it reinforces a position that no real alternative politics is possible without firmly establishing public ethics."

"What does all this mean for Americans? It is easy to be annoyed at cheap and shoddy copycat products pouring out of China. The Brits in their time were very annoyed at upstart Yankee copycats and tried to protect their own knowhow from imitators. It didn't work then and it will certainly not work now. The only realistic course of action is to keep markets open and not try to block Chinese catch-up."

"Oded Shenkar, Professor of Business at Ohio State University, has written widely on the Chinese economy, notably in his acclaimed book "The Chinese Century" (2004). He has argued that China has been one of the main drivers and a primary beneficiary of the emergence of a 'copycat economy', where imitators increasingly win over innovators in capturing economic value. It's a subject he explores further in his new book, "Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain Strategic Edge" (Harvard Business Press). In this talk, he will discuss whether Chinese businesses will, in the coming years, succeed in adding innovation to their repertoire, and whether this could result in a hybrid imitation/ innovation formula which will enable them to trump the competitive advantage of the world's major multinationals - or whether these multinationals will respond by learning the art of imitation themselves. Edwin Chan of the Harvard Design School and Tony Chen of Jones Day in Shanghai will also join in the debate on innovation and imitation in China. Moderated by Russell Flannery, Shanghai Bureau Chief of Forbes magazine."

"While appreciating the need for stopping "Software Piracy", the attention of the Government should however be drawn to long term strategies to make Piracy un economical to both the "Pirate" and the "Consumer". The industry has seen a dramatic reduction of pirated copies of Windows since its prices were brought down. The continuation of piracy in other software is to a large extent a result of unreasonable pricing by manufactures. Prices are being determined by them based on their costs and profit requirements rather than the utility value of the software. For example, how many home users can justify the need to buy a Office 2000 paying say around Rs 20,000 which is the cost of the entire hardware system they have bought?. Most offices would find it uneconomical to buy software at such costs. "

"While governments throughout the world have different approaches to how they make their public sector information (PSI) available and the terms under which the information may be reused, there appears to be a broad recognition of the importance of digital networks and PSI to the economy and to society. However, despite the huge investments in PSI and the even larger estimated effects, surprisingly little is known about the costs and benefits of different information policies on the information society and the knowledge economy. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the current assessment methods and their underlying criteria, it should be possible to improve and apply such tools to help rationalize the policies and to clarify the role of the internet in disseminating PSI. This in turn can help promote the efficiency and effectiveness of PSI investments and management, and to improve their downstream economic and social results. The workshop that is summarized in this volume was intended to review the state of the art in assessment methods and to improve the understanding of what is known and what needs to be known about the effects of PSI activities."

"Today I want to make three points about the theory of access to knowledge. First, Access to Knowledge is a demand of justice. Second, Access to Knowledge is both an issue of economic development and an issue of individual participation and human liberty. Third, Access to Knowledge is about intellectual property, but it is also about far more than that."

The Long Tail was a response to an essay by Clay Shirky, a prominent technology writer who also teaches at New York University. Shirky's argument dampened much of the nascent utopianism about blogs, pointing out that the readership of early blogs followed what economists call a Pareto curve, or "power curve": a small number of sites (the "head") attracted a huge number of readers, but most (the "tail") had few or none. This jarred with the utopian notion of the internet as a new kind of democracy. Why bother to participate if our fates were decided for us by a few block votes? So Anderson turned the notion upside down. The blockbuster was over, he proclaimed, and, like a man possessed, he began to see long tails everywhere. It was the Guardian that lauded this logic by comparing Anderson to Copernicus. The implicit message was that the little people would win. Many people were so keen to believe that Web 2.0 would make the world fairer that they rejected any evidence to the contrary. It was only last year, with an exhaustive study of online music sales by the economist Will Page and an experienced digital retailer, Andrew Bud, that a more useful picture of digital markets begin to emerge. Page and Bud found that most of the songs available for purchase had never been downloaded, and that the concentration of hits was more pronounced than ever before. On the file-sharing networks, the same pattern emerged. So, carrying a huge retail inventory, though cheaper than before, was of little or no value. Now, with Free, Anderson has turned to the criticism that the internet destroyed the value of movies, newspapers and music. Firms could, and now should, cross-subsidise this unprofitable activity, he argues. But cross-subsidies aren't new: they have been the subject of decades of observation by economists. Nor are they a panacea. Alan Patrick, co-founder of the Broadsight media and technology consultancy, points out that despite falling marginal costs, th

"I guess spending $350 for the lowest-capacity Meizu M8 can put too much strain on on our bank accounts in this economic environment, which is what the good people of MeiLi must be thinking when they made their own version of the M8 Apple iPhone clone. The MeiLi M8 is undeniably a lookalike of the Meizu M8, a phone generally acknowledged as the finest iPhone clone there ever was. The question is if the MeiLi M8 is a Meizu M8 clone and the latter is a clone of the iPhone, then theoretically Apple can sue MeiLi for copyright infringement, too. Right?"

The new policy will allow businesses to place trademarked terms directly in the copy of text advertisements that run in the U.S. starting next month, the company announced in a blog post on Thursday. The move, which Google said will improve the quality of its advertisements, comes as advertisers have begun bidding less money for the individual search terms that their ads appear alongside and as Google's revenue growth slows in the dismal economic climate. Until now, Google has forbidden companies from placing trademarked terms in their advertising copy unless they owned the trademark or had explicit permission from the trademark owners. Brand owners have historically had serious concerns about Google's policy with regards to trademarks, said Eric Goldman, Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law.

"As the world economy increasingly centers on "memes, genes, and bits," new technologies permit new production models that threaten entrenched interests. As a consequence, we face a looming political battle that could reshape the information society. There are three main barriers to democratic participation in setting the rules of the information economy that bias the playing field in favor of entrenched interests and old models. The first is that the harms of bad A2K policy often take a long time to manifest themselves, making it difficult to instill a sense of urgency in the body politic and among policy elites. The current experience of "information overload" obscures increasing regulation of the use of knowledge. The second is that information policy issues tend to be highly technical and esoteric to the uninitiated, and difficult even for the initiated to analyze effectively. The third is that the promises of a world where knowledge is free as the air we breathe seems ephemeral in the face of the concrete harms claimed by those who would fence off the information commons."

The global software piracy rate rose to 41% in 2008 from 38% in 2007, costing rights owners an exchange-rate adjusted $50 billion, according to a joint study between the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and IDC released last week. One of the factors driving greater piracy is increased high-speed Internet access, particularly in emerging markets where piracy rates are the highest. Software piracy is rampant on many Internet channels, including peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, auctions sites and websites. On auction sites alone, software piracy is estimated to be between 50% and 90%, according to an earlier BSA report. Other key findings from the May 2009 joint study include: * Even though global software piracy increased overall in 2008, the piracy rate actually dropped in 52% of the 110 countries studied and stayed the same in 35% of them * The impact of the global economic recession on software piracy is so far mixed, as reduced buying power is just one of many factors affecting piracy * Sites offering access to pirated software also spread malware. According to a 2006 IDC study, 29% of websites and 61% of P2P sites offering pirated software attempt to distribute malware. * While the US has the lowest piracy rate in the world-20%-it suffered the largest revenue loss in 2008 due to piracy given its leadership position in the global software industry

South Korea's democracy seems to be deteriorating by the day - this time with the proposed 18-month incarceration of a blogger critical of the South's economic policy. The 31-year-old blogger's crime: falsely reporting that South Korea had barred banks from purchasing U.S. currency. The authorities said the blogger, Park Dae-sung, will find out his sentence on April 20 for posting the inaccurate story that prosecutors said undermined the county's credibility, The Associated Press reports.

Recently, countries from China and Brazil to Malaysia and South Africa have passed laws promoting the patenting of publicly funded research [1,2], and a similar proposal is under legislative consideration in India [3]. These initiatives are modeled in part on the United States Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 [4]. Bayh-Dole (BD) encouraged American universities to acquire patents on inventions resulting from government-funded research and to issue exclusive licenses to private firms [5,6], on the assumption that exclusive licensing creates incentives to commercialize these inventions. A broader hope of BD, and the initiatives emulating it, was that patenting and licensing of public sector research would spur science-based economic growth as well as national competitiveness [6,7]. And while it was not an explicit goal of BD, some of the emulation initiatives also aim to generate revenues for public sector research institutions [8]. We believe government-supported research should be managed in the public interest. We also believe that some of the claims favoring BD-type initiatives overstate the Act's contributions to growth in US innovation. Important concerns and safeguards-learned from nearly 30 years of experience in the US-have been largely overlooked. Furthermore, both patent law and science have changed considerably since BD was adopted in 1980 [9,10]. Other countries seeking to emulate that legislation need to consider this new context.

According to department of telecom (DoT) sources, an inter-ministerial group meeting has been called on August 20 and will be attended by senior officials from DRDO, the Cabinet secretariat, security agencies, National Technical Research Organization (NTRO), Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT ) and DoT, to review the internet monitoring systems deployed nationwide by C-DOT . It seems there are new requests from the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) and National Investigation Agency (NIA) for internet monitoring systems. Internet traffic in India is monitored at international internet gateways using C-DOT systems. Unlike mobile voice and data traffic, the government does not issue specific warrants for intercepting and monitoring messages on specific targets in case of internet services. The government has access to these through CDOT-deployed systems and can use them to access messages based on the needs of security agencies. Internet traffic monitoring also raises some serious issues of consumer privacy, because unlike mobile telephones , the operator has no role in carrying out specific interceptions.

Review of Michael Heller's "The Gridlock Economy"

Contributors consider the concept of the commons historically and offer an analytical framework for understanding knowledge as a shared social-ecological system. They look at ways to guard against enclosure of the knowledge commons, considering, among other topics, the role of research libraries, the advantages of making scholarly material available outside the academy, and the problem of disappearing Web pages. They discuss the role of intellectual property in a new knowledge commons, the open access movement (including possible funding models for scholarly publications), the development of associational commons, the application of a free/open source framework to scientific knowledge, and the effect on scholarly communication of collaborative communities within academia, and offer a case study of EconPort, an open access, open source digital library for students and researchers in microeconomics. The essays clarify critical issues that arise within these new types of commons-and offer guideposts for future theory and practice.

The Songwriters Assn. of Canada proposes to allow domestic consumers access to all recorded music available online in return for adding a $5 Canadian ($4.96) monthly fee to every wireless and Internet account in the country. It has been slammed as "a pipe dream" by Canadian labels.