The Legal Janitor

Anyone who knows me will no doubt know my skepticism towards any extension and/or expansions of “intellectual property rights”. Roger Bate’s article to the American Enterprise Institute however provides an unconventional and interesting suggestion that quite could quite possibly allow for a positive purpose for patent extensions.

Here’s how patent extensions would work: If a company were to develop a new HIV drug, it would give up the patent voluntarily in the developing world, or perhaps worldwide. As a quid pro quo, the government would grant it an extension on the patent of any drug of its choice in the U.S. for a set period of time.

For instance, Pfizer could choose to lengthen its patent on Viagra. A two-year patent extension on a blockbuster drug like this could earn Pfizer enough to make it profitable to spend scarce R&D time on developing a new HIV medication.

Any good ideas to encourage research into cure and treatment for AIDs would be great. Let us remember that AIDs is not just a health problem, it is also a social problem. It afflicts those who are the most vulnerable in society, the poor, women, homosexuals (sometimes, if they are disenfranchised).

Link via A Constrained Vision

Ok, those of us 80’s babies, how many of you still remember the Transformers?

If you were a Transformer-crazy kid, then you’ll love this latest ad from Citroen.

Link via Instapundit

New site up! This really took blood, sweat and tears… I was in PHP and CSS crash-course learning mode for the last 5 days. Now, I’ve got this blog to call my own! Finally! Proudly powered by the open-source goodness of Wordpress, free as in beer, free as in speech!

So far I’ve tested this blog with Firefox 1.0, IE6 and Opera 7.5, so it should work fine with most modern browsers. Some pages don’t render properly on IE6 occasionally, and I’m still trying to figure out where the bugs are, but by and large, this blog is ready for prime time. It still looks a little plain, but I’m planning to work on the aesthetics as soon as I’ve got all the bugs ironed out… in the meantime, this theme will do. It doesn’t look too bad anyway, I think.

Wordpress has given me features that I’ve wanted for a long time, such as trackbacks, pingbacks, and an integrated blogroll. Now you can see who I read! To my Singaporean friends, please do visit the Singaporean blogs, they are truly a very impressive group of people.

I’ve still got to create my gallery and upload my pictures, cos Blogger won’t allow external sites to access Bloggerbot hosted pics. On with the work!

In the meantime, play around with the blog, and gimme some feedback. If you could let me know where the bugs are, I would really appreciate it!

Update: I’ve put this post on sticky so it’ll stay at the top of the main page. I just want to apologise to my OS X using friends, because I don’t personally have access to OS X, the only person who can give me feedback on Safari compatibility is Adri, so yeah, I’m working on all the bugs as quickly as I can…

In the meantime, if you see any strange messages at the top of the page when you load up the browser, just refresh/reload the page and everything will be fixed.

Update 2: I think my last post on Singapore politics sounded very ranty and unprofessional, hence I’m a rewrite before putting them up again. This is, after all, a new beginning, right?

Update 3: I realised that I was wrong, Blogger DOES allow off-blogger linking of Blogger hosted pics. I just have to format the tags in the right way. haha, yay! free-non-bandwidth-sapping picture hosting!

Update 4: I’m done with the sticky, this blog is finally out of beta! =)