Category: events/conferences

freedom to innovate: knowledge, tech and culture

mtadros

Some of the questions to be pursued by this panel include:

** What policy areas (e.g. spectrum policies, open access) are the critical topics of study to address the freedom to innovate? To what extent is a human rights framing for these issues helpful or desirable?

** What are the technological and legal architectures that are necessary to give individuals the space and the opportunity to innovate? How do these structures rely on, enhance or inhibit the enjoyment of rights?  Whose rights are counted in this story?

** Where will new content and information technologies come from and how we can empower as many different individuals as possible to maximize innovation? What is the role of civil and political liberties themselves in creating the conditions that facilitate innovation?

source: http://yaleisp.org/2010/02/ak4f2i/

right to health panel – a2k4 – public awareness and shared global responsibility

mtadros

A2K4 Panel III. The Right to Health: Promoting Innovation and Equity

Thana Cristina de Campos, Fundação Getúlio Vargas Law School – Sao Paulo

Wants to raise public awarness on a shared global responsiblity. Phramaceutical companies have the knowledge and power and responsibility bec it places us in a position to act.

Access to medicine is a human right. 4 principles: availability, accessibility, treatment acceptablity, and good quality. Accessibility is most important esp in marginalized communities.

Amy Kapczynski, UC Berkeley School of Law

What do we mean by human rights in this context? is it a philosophical perception or economic and welfare system etc. There is also the human rights machinery. Focusing on access to medicine issues because they are the most developed in human rights health issues.

There are issues of obligations to non-state parties, and also obligations to non-nationals. How does the right to medicine apply transnationally? It is hard to talk about corporate responsibility and about transnational responsibility.

Talha Syed, UC Berkeley School of Law

Distributed justice is much better framework than human rights. Information economics is not that bad.

Christopher Mason, Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University

Patenting Genes: what are genomic rights? What if someone took some of the cells you leave behind when you walk or sit and created a clone of you? this is not illegal, but it is most certainly disturbing. There is precedent to genomic rights in US history.

technologies of dissent – a2k4 – anupam chander

mtadros

Anupam Chander, UC Davis School of Law

We might see the perfection of surveillance. Because dissidents use the internet to identify dissent. Coffee shops were considered places where dissent plots occurred and were shut down in the 1700s. There is a narrowness of the pre-internet discourse. Traditional media failed and continues to fail in providing voices for the masses. Nowhere is this more apparent than in undemocratic societies.

Technologies of dissent cannot be undermined. The internet is helping develop a critical public sphere. The internet offers a means to express dissatisfaction. Bloggers and twitterers have a big impact – videos of incidents [such as that in Iran] are prevalent.

What should citizens of developed countries do? they should resist surveillance and providing surveillance to autocratic and non-democratic countries. New media can either give voice to dissent or quite the contrary.

technologies of dissent – a2k4

mtadros
A2K4 Panel II: Technologies of Dissent: Information and Expression in a Digital World-  the panel will look into:
  • What are examples of online technology and expression that may be empowered or made vulnerable? How are governments responding to these new forms of dissent? Is there anything truly new about these forms of protest versus more traditional forms?
  • What is the nature of the technical architecture that enables these new types of democratic expression and protest? In what ways can the same technologies be used to violate human rights? Is there a human right to any particular form of technology, or rights vis a vis technology?
  • What is the role of corporate social responsibility in relationship to Internet freedom? To what extent should we be concerned about private control over new forms of dissent and speech, as well as government control?
  • What is the role of government investment in telecommunications, universal access and closing the digital divide, and infrastructure design as human rights issues? Does freedom of expression require positive government efforts to extend technological access and what would these look like? [source: http://yaleisp.org/2010/02/a2k4dissent/]

intellectual property and a2k

mtadros

Ahmed Abdel Latif, illness International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development

A2K was born out of frustration of lack of knowledge. Intellectual property – the system of exclusion of rights is not a human right. One enters a trap. Intellectual property rights people tried to push those rights in A2K and there was a lack of progress in this debate. There is a primacy of the diffusion of culture. The protection of moral and material rights of others is important. There is a possiblity of progress.

There is a complimentarity of the two movements is important to emphasize. We have not done enough to formulate a human rights discourse in this regard. The rights of users and the rights of consumers as well as the rights of the visually impaired etc.  They need to look at the convention on the rights of the disabled.

There is very powerful human rights language that provides momentum to the A2K movement.

The WIPO development agenda does not mention a2k specifically but it can be developed as a framework for that.  The issue of climate change can also benefit from access to knowledge.

How do we operationalize and translate this a2k to concrete guidelines that need to be advanced and presented. Much more can be done.