Introduction to Part VII: R&D and intellectual property

On 27 February 2006, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced that the European Commission had granted approval of Rotarix™ in the European Union (EU), allowing active vaccination of infants from the age of six weeks, against the highly contagious rotavirus (which causes gastroenteritis). This vaccine had been developed since 1997 by GSK Biologicals for a research and development (R&D) expenditure estimated between EUR 500 and 800 million. On the same day, Yahoo filed a lawsuit against wireless content company MForma, charging this company and a group of ex-Yahoo employees there with theft of trade secrets. According to the lawsuit, the group of seven former Yahoo employees copied large amounts of confidential business and technical data when they left the Web portal company, and brought it to use in their new positions at MForma. Still on that very same day, Ben Franzen (an artist from Atlanta) and Kembrew McLeod (an assistant professor of communications studies at the University of Iowa) presented their documentary, called ‘Copyright Criminals’, which gathers interviews of musicians, artists, lawyers, scholars, music industry executives and others about the rise of sampling and remix culture. The authors believe that creativity is better served by letting artists freely borrow from others. A few hours before, France's highest court (‘Cour de Cassation’) ruled that the right to make a personal copy (‘copie privée’) of cinematographic works on DVD can be restricted by copyright holders when duplication ‘could cause an unjustified damage to the legitimate interests of authors’.