It's in Italy, but today I am in Washington DC. So I hope the connection is fine. Can you see my slides? I think I can. Thank you. My apologies. I have to make a layout change because you have slides in the usual place, one moment. Yeah, I just applauded them. Sorry. OK. There you go. No, that's it. So thank you for the introduction. Yes, I mean, this is a presentation that I've been giving sometimes in Europe, especially at FOSDEM. But I really wanted to share it with an Asian audience. Because, of course, this could be the example of what would happen in several Asian countries and other countries of the world in terms of regulation for the digital platforms. And so I will briefly recap. First of all, why is Europe acting? So what's the problem that Europe is trying to address? And then how? So which regulatory items are coming? And then maybe we can have a discussion and see if we have questions. So, well, who am I? You already introduced me. I'm working for an open source company. Possibly people know Dovcott, which is our best known product and the most widely used IMAP server in the world, or PowerDNS. So let's get into what they call Hotel California. Hotel California is basically the current situation in most of our online digital services and devices, in which we, at least with the exception of China, of course. But in the rest of the world, especially in Europe, we are mostly stuck with the services offered by very few companies. And so this is the scenario in financial terms. I mean, this is what I now updated it, but basically it never happened before in the history of the world that we had five tech companies being the five biggest ones. Now there's been some change. I mean, Facebook has become meta, has lost some value. But I mean, the biggest of these companies now is Apple. Their market cap is almost $3 trillion, which is basically the Francis GDP. So even in European terms, some of these companies are becoming as big as the biggest Europeans countries. And so this was a contraction. Because this implies a lot of power. So for example, in the smartphone market, I mean, there's been a lot of consolidation. And nowadays, if you get a smartphone, basically it's by, the operating system is made by one of the two of these companies. You can just choose between two. And even the apps, as you see, for example, the social and messaging apps are very consolidated into the hands of basically a single company. And the same with the cloud. I mean, the move to the cloud has also been consolidating the internet and the market for internet services a lot. Well, we have some Chinese companies in this space, but again, the biggest ones are the American ones. And together, they basically have most of the market and it's getting worse. The market is getting more and more consolidated. And so the same for revenues, one of the issues that Europe is trying to address is taxation. There is the perception that these companies do not pay enough taxes in the place where they make business in European countries. And in fact, I mean, this was an analysis that was made on Google revenues, but you could do the same with other companies. I mean, these companies tend to invoice your revenues from a different country and then move the biggest chunk of the invoices into international places, sometimes tax havens, sometimes simply their home country. And so what gets taxed in local countries is really a limited amount. And governments, of course, in Europe are absolutely not happy about this. And then there's more. I mean, you do see that this has an effect in terms of wealth transfer. So there is a general concern that the digital market is now basically a way to transfer wealth out of Europe into, well, in this case, the US, but could be China, I mean. But in general, countries that are outside of Europe. And so there is a concern in how can we keep this wealth here, keep the wealth local, keep the growth local, the jobs and make it so that we can, as Europeans, we can use more and more European services. Not because we dislike the Americans, but because we need to grow our own internet market and services. And so you see this transfer wealth. I mean, this is one possible anecdotal indicator, but you see the value of houses going up in, I mean, like 2.5 times in seven years in San Francisco. It's really a sign of movement of wealth across the planet. So this is what I call, I mean, Hotel California, because these are services where you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. So these are services in which you get into the services, you start using whatever, WhatsApp, Google, one of the Google services, whatever. And then it's very hard to switch to another one. And so you're locked in. And there are a number of devices that are used. And basically the assessment in Europe is that these are devices that Trump competition, in that Humber competition, and I mean, a fair chance for European companies to compete for these markets. And there are several ways to show this, but the example I like to make is the comparison between the original internet services, like email or the web, and the most current services. I mean, so email, for example, is a fully compatible interoperable service, which means that you can get your email address from, and your email service from any provider, and you will be able to exchange email with any other user or any other provider, anywhere in the world. So there's just one email service. You get it from, you can get it from different providers, but it's just one global service. And this makes it easy for people to offer email services. There are, I mean, the standards are open. There are many free software implementations, so anyone can just run their own email service and immediately be connected to the rest of the plant, with some issues sometimes. But in general, it's very easy to compete for email services if you want to compete on email services. Well, on the other hand, the newer services were not made this way. So we have what we call siloed services. And instant messaging is a good example because in theory, it works exactly like email. There's not a lot of difference in conceptually and even technically between email and instant messaging. But the way the market has developed is very different because here, in more recent times, where venture capitalists and dreams to conquer the world were involved, I mean, the services were developed as wall gardens. So if you get a WhatsApp account, you can only exchange messages with other WhatsApp users. You cannot exchange messages with telegram users or with Skype users, with line users, with whatever. And so you are logged in. You need as a user to install each and every application and have an account on each and every service if you need to communicate with people in different services, which is an inconvenience. You don't know which application you're using to talk to whom. And you cannot really move because if you move, you lose your contacts. If a new, I mean, someone comes up with a new brilliant application, including an open source one. And maybe it's better than the previous ones, but if you move to it, then you don't have anyone to talk with. And so this makes it very difficult to switch to a different instant messaging application. Not impossible, but very difficult. It's a big barrier to competition. And also in general, these are closed deployments. So there's no openness. Sometimes the standards are open, but the deployment is closed. You're not allowed to interoperate. And there's other tactics that are used also by these companies to establish this domination and they are now addressed by Europe. And one is bundling. I mean, this is very difficult. You get one service, you get the mobile operating system and you already get the apps from the same maker pre-installed and they work better than the others because they have better access to the operating system and they are selected by default and so on. And if you want to use one service, you have to use the others. Like, I mean, for some cases of the commerce platforms with Amazon, it used to be like that. Or in general with Apple, if you use Apple's, if you want to distribute an app on Apple, you have to use their app store and you have to use their payment system and pay a 30% commission. So this is where basically the result, it's a system that gives control to these companies, sometimes not just to these companies, but to the government that has the authority to control these companies because they are based there, as we saw in the Google Huawei case. And so this is a concern, a geopolitical concern for Europe. And in the last few years, we've seen activism and by the European Commission to address this situation. And the last danger that I wanted to mention that now I'm seeing is that now we're, these companies are building what I call the Internet of Other People's Things because we are filling our homes with devices, even the computers, the mobile phones, but then also the IoT devices, the smart TVs, whatever, all these devices now encrypt everything, which is a good thing for privacy, of course. But it means that you as a user don't know what's going on. You do not have any way to control the flow of traffic which starts from one of these devices or from one of the apps on your mobile phone and goes directly to the cloud or to the server of the maker. And so you have to trust these companies, they could gather any data on you, they could actually spy on you if they wanted. And there's no way you can check, evaluate or stop this. So encryption is being used as a form of control to move points of control, traditional ones from the ISPs, the governments that use to block stuff and whatever, maybe it's better if they don't do it. But on the other hand, now control is fully into the hands of the makers of these devices and services. And so this is also a big concern now. And so in general, this is not a problem just about money and competition, it's much more than that. And so the concern about the big platforms is also about other things that we shall not related to making money or transition. And it's really about surveillance and privacy. So we're saying it's about political power. It's about the national security. I have some examples here. So in general, all these things were, I mean, for example, when President Trump was censored by Twitter, Merkel, the chancellor of the Germany was concerned that she made a concern, a concern declaration, not because she liked the Trump, but because she was concerned about basically a sitting US president being censored by a private company. So this kind of struggle of power is what also concerns the Europeans. And there's all the discussion, for example, about the US Cloud Act, which allows US companies to access the information of private citizens anywhere in the world. So this is how Europe has been responding. This concept of digital sovereignty has been developing in the last few years, two or three years, is now generally accepted, but we are not really completely sure what it means. It's still under development. There are two main meanings in the idea of digital sovereignty. One is more like digital autonomy. It's about becoming self-sufficient so that you do not depend on foreign products. Whatever might happen in the future, any kind of geopolitical tension or even commercial tension, or even just one of these companies deciding that they don't want to make business in Europe anymore for whatever reason, you must be able to survive. So even if tomorrow Google became unavailable, Europe cannot stop, the economy, the society cannot stop. And so you need to have alternatives. And so this is mostly about developing local know-how, a local industry, economy, and being able to be autonomous. Another part of this concept is really about sovereignty. I mean, the autonomy one is more German. The sovereignty one is more French. The sovereignty part is about enforcing rules for internet services. So being able to basically tell these companies what they have to do here and a number of public policy relevant issues, like content moderation or whatever. So of course there's also taxation, but in general it's about ensuring that you as a country have control of the use of the internet by your citizens and in your internet market. And together these two sides from the European digital sovereignty concept. And so where open source is into this? I mean, open source is actually the subject of a lot of promotion, at least in words, not always in facts, but in Europe in the last few years, we've seen multiplying calls for adopting open source, promoting open source and public procurement and so on. And this is because this is really interesting. I think it's also interesting for several parts of Asia that the open source model is much better and much more fit for Europe than the American or Chinese model of a few very big companies. Europe does not produce very big companies because Europe is an archipelago of countries that we have 27 countries in the European Union, 26 languages and societies and markets. Yes, this is about the European Union because we're talking about European Union regulation. So that's the, so basically, if you want to have this kind of services in Europe, you will get alliances of small companies, mostly open source companies often. In each country you will have a company and they will exchange services and help. And even relatively bigger companies, my company is German and has 250 people, which for Europe is a pretty big internal company, at least in the software sphere. But we do, when we have to go to other European states to some of these states, we employ local partners. And so that we have a cooperation with local companies. And so in the end, this is why open source is also useful to this concept of digital sovereignty. So what we need to get out of this, it's what I call regulated openness. So we're trying to establish a mechanism of cooperation between the European institutions and the open source world industry, so that the open sources, the open standards provide the technical building blocks that are necessary for competing services to these ones. And we need regulation to force them onto them because the problem is that the dominant platforms, they have dominant market positions, they will never open up if they are not forced. And so this is why we need regulation. The regulation in Europe will be aimed at forcing these companies to open up services to competition. So not to disadvantage them, but to prevent them from unduly advantage. And so this is the list of all the regulations. Many of the regulations that Europe is working on because there are really many, many. So the first one is the digital services sector, which is about content. I will come to this in a minute. And the second one, maybe the most important one is the digital market sector. I will also come to this a little later. This is about competition. But there are more. I mean, now there's discussion starting on a data act, which means, I mean, setting rules so that the public data that these companies gather through their platforms can be shared, can be accessed through public policy or objectives. And so this will come out, that there's now a computer chips sector because somehow Europe has decided we need some, at least a bit of computer chip factor is back on our territory, there are some. I mean, but of course, as we know, most of the chips are now produced in three Asian countries. And so in any case, we want to be able to produce chips locally because during the COVID crisis, there was, I mean, the car factor is stopped because there were no chips and this is not something we want to see again. There's a minimum corporate access. There's an effort to establish a minimum tax everywhere in Europe so that companies are not enticed into moving into specific states that will let them pay a few taxes. There's EIDAS, which EIDAS is the European Identity Project and so we're trying to offer open identities to European citizens. There's GAIA-X, which is a funny project. I mean, hard to describe. Basically, it's a sort of private consortium blessed by the European Commission that is trying to establish common data, for example, common ontologies, if you want to cooperate among different companies in the car sector, for example. You need to have common ontologies to understand each other's data. So this is the work that they are doing. So there's a lot of work going on. And as I was saying, I would focus on the Digital Services Act, which is, I mean, basically, it's the old e-commerce directive. All of the world has this kind of laws that establish that intermediaries have a limited liability. They are not fully responsible for the content, for example, that they get from users and publish, because otherwise it would be impossible to have user-generated content.  And there will be, I mean, attempts to ensure that they do not close accounts and do not close accounts when it's necessary. So this kind of guarantees around content, which is now very important in Europe because there is a lot of sensitivity about the political propaganda, especially by foreign countries, especially foreign countries in which there's a war. And so there are attempts to make sure that there's a way to control the content, which is flowing on, which is maybe not the best of free expression idea, but it is not necessary in this environment. So let's come to the Digital Markets Act, which is the most recent one. Actually, the text was, it's not final yet, it's still to be approved, but the final text was basically agreed at the political level two weeks ago. And there's open source industry and digital rights organizations. We did a big campaign to get, especially the interoperability requirements. So the idea is that Europe will define gatekeeper platforms, for example, those that have a market value of 75 billion euros. And so basically the names we've seen before and very few others, like it's going to be like six, seven, eight companies, mostly American, maybe one European.com. And the idea is to have to establish a sort of non-traditional anti-prust instrument to ensure that there can be competition with these mega services. And so there will be a number of services. This is a list. So basically only these services are covered. So if you're doing other services, you're not covered. But as you see, there's the biggest, I mean the most common online services from including the operating systems and then social media, marketplaces, search engines and so on. Browsers are now covered. And so whoever is a gatekeeper in one of these services will be subject to these provisions. And this is the kind of stuff that is now prohibited, will be prohibited once this comes into force, which will happen possibly in a couple of years when all the process is completed. And so for example, there will be the attempt to stop a forced diet integration. You will not be able to exchange data between different services. You will not be able to require people to buy a second service from you if you have one of the dominant ones. So again, spandling against, for example, you will be required to let users use different identity systems, not just your own and so on. But the most interesting ones are the ones bundling and interoperability, which are just the key concerns that I mentioned before. So the idea is basically in terms of bundling that we still have to see the final text, but this more or less should be there, that there will be the prohibition basically to force users to use multiple services. So you have, USI business user have to be able to use, for example, Amazon's marketplace without being forced to use Amazon's delivery service and so on. So this kind of bundling will be prohibited. And in terms of software, when you will install a mobile phone, you will have to be asked which search engine you want to use, which email application and so on. So the idea is that you will favor the choice of different apps by not allowing a default. And then there's the interoperability clauses. Unfortunately, we lost interoperability for social media, exactly for the concerns in terms of content control that I mentioned before. But we got the interoperability for instant messages. So WhatsApp and other dominant messengers will be required to open up interfaces and allow at least third parties to interact with an API and exchange messages and so on. And then there's also the same for auxiliary services. So stuff like identification payments, you will be required, I mean, they will be required to let you use different login systems, different payment systems and so on. And this was a great victory. It took a lot of effort by the European open source community, but apparently we got there. We still have to see the final text. Sorry. Why is interoperability so important? Because interoperability allows competition. So if the original internal services are competitive because they are based on interoperability modularity, so you can separate different services and you can replace individual blocks. And so you can, as a company, as a start as an individual, an open source project, you can make a new, for example, block of identity and then you plug into it in place of the dominant one. And this enables competition. So this is why we are aiming to get into our system of interoperable apps in which you just have one. You pick the one which is best for you. So there's competition, maybe one which is more privacy friendly and is not spying on you and you're able to communicate with all the other users. So thank you. This is the end of the presentation and I'm happy to take comments, questions and whatever.


Hey there friends, thanks for checking in. The question for today is do you prefer magazine-fed shotguns? What I have here are two 12-gauge shotguns, both magazine-fed, also known as box-fed shotguns. Right here is a Remington 870 DM. The DM stands for Detachable Magazine, comes with two six-round magazines, and this is the MagPol Edition. There are several different models with the DM series, but it has an SGA adjustable stock and excess ghost ring rear sight connected to an all-metal rail. 18 and a half inch barrel comes with two magazines, I already mentioned that, an M-lock forend also made by MagPol. There is your front dot and a ported choke. Very nice shotgun, does have a cross bolt safety right there, and it has performed great for me since I've owned it, real happy with it, and once again it's a box-fed magazine shotgun. But over here we have a Rock Island Armory VR-80, this is a semi-auto shotgun that has AR-like control. So we've got the polymer stock here, it does have an aluminum lower receiver and an aluminum handguard. Five round magazines, and it also comes with flip-up sights. The rail is metal, okay, and here's your front flip-up sight. Also comes with three chokes, I've got to modify it in there right now, and then there is a barrel shroud. This comes with a five-round magazine, it does come with two, but also you can purchase separately a nine or a 19 round magazine, and that's what I have here. This will accept two and three-quarter inch shells, and I've got 19 loaded up right now. So we're going to check those out, we're going to take a few shots with both of these, but is this your preference? You know it does have some advantages considering quick mag reloads is the primary advantage. Also you can stagger your rounds in the mag, you can do that with two fed shotguns too, but here you can do it in advance, and many people find that to be an advantage. Let's start with the Remington 870 DM. Six round magazine is very easy to load. The first three shells will be double up buck shot with nine pellets, followed by seven and a half shot target loads. Six rounds, Fioki, high velocity, seven and a half shot bird loads. Wow this thing is a beast, really handles well, and I like the mag pull addition, I think it looks cool and it's very functional. That ghost ring sight that's built into the rail is really nice, and that front dot sticks out a bit. Very much a warm barrel right now, but over here we've got the Rock Island Armory VR80, I've got a target about 10 yards away, it's about to fall a second now, and I know that it will because it's just taking so much abuse with all these shotgun loads, but I like to flip up sights, I like everything about this, it has a great feel to it, and it's a gas piston semi auto shotgun, so it definitely cuts down on some of the recoil, let's go ahead and fire this a few times, see what you think. Nice, and then like I said it's AR-ish as far as the controls are concerned, but what we have here is a 19 round magazine, it will accept two and three quarter inch shells, both these models will accept three inch loads by the way, not sure I mentioned that, but check that out, that is a magazine to write home about, 19 rounds. Many years ago the Saiga models were primarily the shotguns that you would expect to have a box fed magazine, now they're all over the place, but we're going to go ahead and check this out, see if it'll fire all 19 rounds, and it did, very nice deal, so do you like the magazine fed shotguns? I think they're pretty awesome, this Remington 870 DM is a nice shotgun pump action, and it sure does perform well, they have semi auto shotguns as well called V3 with the VersaPort system, I've got the tactical model that I'm going to be reviewing shortly, and I'm super excited about that because that VersaPort system is nice, this here has what is labeled over on the bolt called a buffer bolt system, it really cuts down on the recoil, the handguard got a bit warm there because of just the constant firing, you can see that the rail there, even up here there's a rail you can adjust that front site wherever you want, but what an awesome shotgun both of these are, there is a fine example of two very nice box fed 12 gauge shotguns, let me know if you prefer the magazine fed shotguns or the tube fed side by side over under single shot, whatever the case as long as we're talking about shotguns we're having a great day, if you like videos like this please subscribe and share, I always appreciate thumbs up button, thanks for watching and you guys be safe


So as Richard only started us with, this is certainly an auspicious time to be having a conference on IP and health and to consider how the patent system should be fine-tuned to promote the development of better products and simultaneously ensure public access to the fruits of that work. In that endeavor, I think inventive step is certainly a tempting target. I always tell my students that the doctrine is like a water tap.  And it also controls the relationship between successive generations of innovators, how far up the quality ladder the next guy has to get in order to merit a patent on something like a new use. But as Catherine Modridge recounted, it's not a tap that's easy to churn. She gave us a long series of cases and a lot of intensive thought, but the factors that were started with are still the factors that remain in place today. Her presentation reminded me very much of former Chief Justice Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court. He hated multi-factor tests and he would have certainly gotten rid of this one. He regularly did, but what he would do is he'd replace a ten-factor test with a two-factor test and each of those factors would have five-step parts. So he would get absolutely nowhere and that seems to be what we have here as well. Trevor Cook offered us another approach adopting new types of rights that can be more closely tailored to the specific goal that a particular kind of exclusivity was intended to encourage. The regulatory data protection was, to my mind, the most interesting because there were several parts to play with, as John suggested in his talk about reforms. And as the Zeitgeist story showed, it can be more effective than patent protection. Maybe not for repositioning, as John also talked, but it does seem to be effective for some patents to create a longer period for new discoveries. And yet it allows for other socially important activity. So the data can be generated by a second comer if the right-holder gets too greedy and the clinical trial data itself can be made public. And that's great because it allows for a meta-analysis across a variety of different products and that's something that we can learn from. The second set of panels dealt directly with the access question on more accurately, at least Chris, preventing the patent holder from impeding access. So Chris Souther's discussed the use of competition law to protect the patent period, 20 years or fewer years if the patent is in fact invalid. And so he talked about preventing the patentee from paying for delay, preventing it from making competition, less alluring by dropping prices, and preventing other kinds of hanky-panky after patent expiration. Note, though, that none of this increases access during the patent term. Catherine Stevens discussed that problem and she talked about allowing access to products where they are cheaper and then bringing them back into another market. Now that's a big issue in the United States because the prices of our pharmaceuticals are extraordinarily high. The term reasonable prices has no meaning in the United States as it relates to medicine. And yet we sit right next to Canada where the prices are controlled and therefore considerably lower. But again, the right holder tries to prevent that this time by exploiting the territoriality of patents and demanding rules of national exhaustion. That, as we heard, was blocked in a limited way in the EU. But even though the U.S. has a doctrine of international exhaustion, there is, as Trevor pointed out in the Q&A, regulatory hurdles that can be imposed and the regulatory authorities are being asked to do that in the United States. And as Catherine mentioned, parallel importation can have bad effects in the country of export. So in the U.S. Canada situation, we see pharmaceutical firms cutting off Canadian drug stores that sell more medicine than there are local patients who have that particular disease. So I am left with concerns about access. Now the U.S. Supreme Court tried to deal with that by attacking the subject matter of patents and making it harder to get patents on inventions related to the life sciences. Matt Aboia examined that issue and found the U.S. cases barring patents on laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas did indeed decrease patenting but was an incredibly blunt instrument. The effect is too broad, it results in high costs and legal uncertainty and has a heavy impact on small entities. My own take on this is that it has to be remembered that our access problems are much worse than yours. So we have no price control, again the term reasonable prices has no resonance. We have a weak experimental use defense, almost nothing, and expensive insurance that can make it hard to get a first diagnosis and patentees who make it impossible to get a second diagnostic opinion. So maybe these cases show that the Supreme Court does a really, really bad job but what it might be demonstrating is that the balance between proprietary and access interest in the United States is just altogether wrong. And then we heard from Wolf Sardar and gave some more sophisticated approaches to these problems, things like reference pricing, negotiation strategies, collective purchasing, theories of competition law that deal with abuse of the patent system, theories that are intended to control price taking into account the cost of development and the need to encourage very risky research. I would love to see an example of that. These attempts to refine and balance the patent system, they're all very interesting. However, they do leave one important question and that's how do we encourage research on diseases that are not incentivized by the patent system. Helen Tone was scheduled to be here today but had to cancel as you heard for personal reasons but I'm an avid follower of her work so I thought I'd use some of my time to finalize concerns for situations where the strong patent protection are required by international law is highly inapposite. So one question of course is access for the global south. The patent system may lead to innovation but medicines are of no value to those who can't afford it. Now part of that problem is assuaged by some of what we heard today, measures that control abuse of prices and also compulsory licensing. I would have loved to see that last slide that Wolf showed us because my impression is that that's not working all that well and has been very controversial so I would have glad to have heard more about that. But there's also another extremely worrisome problem. In many cases the treatments just plain aren't there. First patents simply cannot incentivize research on diseases that selectively afflict the poor because those patients have no profit potential. There's no part of the goal to motivate research. Patents are about voting with money and these patients have no money. So drugs for neglected diseases such as tropical diseases have an abysmal approval rate. There's also a problem for diseases suffered by small populations which is, I guess, part of the repositioning issue. Now one answer to that, as Richard noted in the past thing, is philanthropy. Giving the example of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has really taken on malaria and produced some really interesting results. A second idea is prizes. So famously that's how the problem of determining a ship's longitude was solved and there's now something called the Longitude Prize for innovations in the medical arena. Both of these approaches have problems though. Adequate funding is one. Choosing the right goal to reward is another. And recognizing the solution is interestingly a third. So John Harrison had a very hard time convincing the Longitude Committee that the solution to the problem was a clock. You can go see it in Greenwich. The philosopher Thomas Poguy has proposed setting up something he calls the Health Impact Fund which would use quality adjusted life years, qualities to determine whether a solution was successful. Interestingly, this system would not only reward inventing new therapies because profits depend on actually making people healthy. It also encourages the development of versions of the product that would meet local needs especially the needs of the poor. For example, people who don't have refrigerators, a version of the drug that doesn't require refrigeration. And it also would encourage the development of delivery systems to get the therapy to where it's needed. But again, there's a funding issue and a surprisingly contentious question on what actually constitutes the quality of life. What is the good as Kathy put it in her introductory talk this morning? So those solutions have limit. But there's a growing literature on what I've called IP without IP which is a term coined by Mario Biascioli. This literature recognizes that the money that comes from IP rights is only one driver. That there are other motives that can be harnessed to promote IP, intellectual production. So chefs, comedians, fashion, academics, there's very little IP in these fields and yet a huge amount of original production based on norms of attribution and originality enforced by various sanctions. Gossip, Twitter, blogging, ostracism, and among comedians apparently fisticuffs. Now to be sure there's reason for skepticism. Among other things, groups have to be relatively small for social sanctions to work. Some of this IP without IP has lots of IP like cookbooks, potential TV deals, or there's IP lurking in the background. So IBM for example supports Linux so its customers have a free operating system on which they can use the applications they buy from IBM.  And most important, this system doesn't appear workable when development costs are high. But as Amy Kapcinski pointed out in an impression article she wrote in 2017, there is a model of IP without IP that has some real potential even for expensive and decentralized undertakings, and it's interestingly the vaccine network. So the coronavirus has led us all to take social measures, washing our hands, singing happy birthday, self-quarantining, limiting travel, closing schools, but what we really want of course are medical interventions, vaccines and treatments to prevent infection and improve survival rates. Now this is another sphere where IP is not very helpful. Developing these interventions requires surveillance to identify new viruses quickly. It also requires genetic sequencing, data about and samples from patients, the creation of new reagents for diagnostics and treatment purposes. To do this rapidly, that information has to be shared so IP could in fact be a disaster. In any event, much of this information is not protectable like patient data. And for interventions themselves, it might not make any sense to patent. So if a cure for the new coronavirus were found, public pressure alone would keep the price down. And that's likely the reason that to date the pharmaceutical industry has shown very little interest in the COVID-19 situation. The world has however been thinking about this problem since at least the influenza epidemic that followed World War I. In 1947 the World Health Organization, the WHO, created the flu network which now includes some 140 national influenza centers in 110 countries. They collect local data and send it to the collaborating centers of which there are now six. The one I know best is the US CDC, but there are ones in other places in the US and the UK, China, Australia and Japan. They do things like standardized diagnostic and lab practices, engage in and coordinate vaccine development, and much of the work happens in the national influenza centers and also in other participating labs. Now it's relatively easy to see why scientists eagerly join in the effort. Contributing brings joy, right? It's what they went into science to do, cured diseases. They also get reputational benefits, networking benefits because they need new people, opportunities to learn new research techniques and create inputs like reagents useful in their other work. But the effort requires a lot of money, cooperation among scientists, and no defections. Things like what is distressingly supposedly happening in Wuhan where there are attempts to patent the approaches that appear to be working. So it's a real test of IP without IP. And indeed the whole thing broke down in 2007 when Indonesia furnished the H5N1 virus to researchers and then didn't receive credit for their work or worse enough of the medicines developed to treat their population. Its threat to withhold samples in the future led to a five-year high-profile global negotiation within the WEHO and to something called the Pandemic Influence Preparedness Framework or PIP Framework. It's a really interesting model. It invisions funds supplied by private enterprise in addition to government and charities and so it provides a crucial template for interfacing the public and the private. Under this framework, insiders, those doing the work in the labs, agree to attribute all contributions in their publications and to structure their research to involve the local labs that contributed information. These were both problems under previous versions of this effort and of course they're the main reason for scientific cooperation so that you can get attribution and get involved in the research. There's also a defined set of materials that can't be the subject of patents. Interestingly some of the same things the U.S. Supreme Court says you can't patent. So the genomic DNA of the virus. Insiders also agree to submit all sequences they discovered to a public database and they can use a genuinely public database or they can use EpiFlow which has its own set of restrictions on people who use the database. Disputes are settled informally through the WEHO. For outsiders, access to information generated is governed by contract and there are standard agreements available such as standardized material transfer agreements. Apart from the defined list, patenting is possible so developing countries had wanted to mandate compulsory transfers of patents and know how compulsory licenses but that was not included in the framework in order to promote private participation and here disputes are resolved by binding arbitration. So my understanding is that the framework was developed around the work on the H1N1 virus and was successful there but whether it's in play right now is an interesting question. I couldn't find evidence for it on the WEHO's website and according to Ellen it's something called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations which is funded solely by charities and government that's taking the lead on finding an approach to the current coronavirus. She apparently has strong doubts that the funding is sufficient and has been calling on Big Pharma to consider its ethical duty to participate some more but to me without any kind of legal support it seems unlikely that that's going to happen and this framework certainly furnishes an interesting model so I'm curious if it's in use now and also whether it can be generalized to the development of cures for other diseases maybe some of the panelists here or other people here know but I would certainly like to find out. So thank you very much.