EconTech

Via the Healthcare Economist, Jason:
Ghostwriting by Pharmaceutical Companies
Academic journals are places where medical practitioners can go to view the latest, most cutting-edge, medical technologies. These journals are peer reviewed and are supposed to be places where rigorous, unbiased research is conducted. Some of these articles may not be as unbiased as once thought.
NPR’s Marketplace reports [...]

I’ve long thought that licensed ‘purchased’ materials is an asinine business plan that some day some hero will come through and shatter. Much of our cultural history has been created through sharing and reshaping. Now that the technology has come along to do it, companies and governments are attempting to create technological and legal barriers [...]

Certainly this, at a minimum, violates FOIA.
Oregon: publishing our laws online is a copyright violation
The State of Oregon takes exception to Web sites that republish the state’s Revised Statutes in full, claiming that the statutes contain copyrighted information in the republication causes the state to lose money it needs to continue putting out [...]

As I have noted, I have serious concerns about how medical research is conducted. Now, there is evidence that we should be worrying about the authorship of the articles.
JAMA article on ghostwriting medical studies
The Journal of the American Medical Association published a piece today on ghostwriting of medical research. Thanks to the Vioxx lawsuits, the [...]

I would contend that this is an excellent[1] way of solving the ‘languishing value’ of out-of-print but socially valuable material problem. The objection “If I have something in my house with sentimental value - a real piece of property worth something to me but worth nothing to anyone else - people shouldn’t be [...]

There is an interesting line between copyright law and policies regarding plagiarism. In my mind, the latter is clearly the worse offense, though it is often accompanied by the violation of the former. For example, unattributed sentences may not be copyright violations but are incidents of plagiarism. Randy Picker had an interesting series of posts [...]