On September 25th earlier this year, California became the third state in the US, following Nevada and Florida, to pass legislation in allowing the operation of driverless cars on the road. Two short years earlier, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab director Sebastian Thrun unveiled that Google had created the world’s first autonomous car.
Turns out the internet isn’t all about porn. Just kidding, it mostly is. But underneath the debate sparked by the .XXX domain question at last week’s international website regulatory conference are a series of fundamental issues about internet freedom of expression, the process for determining what new URLs will be on offer, the tension between […]
Entrepreneurs create ideas that turn into worldwide sell-out products. Whichever country has the talent to conceive of these products will have a thriving economy. For these reasons, various governments are developing programs to attract entrepreneurial talent to their country. It is, therefore, not surprising that both the Canadian and American governments have announced their intentions […]
The following is an excerpt from a speech given by Neelie Kroes at the 2012 Intellectual Property and Innovation Summit, hosted by The Lisbon Council in Brussels.
The extremely variable pricing of diamonds has made them a historically difficult and unstable commodity to trade. However, recent advents in diamond technology have been patented, and industry insiders such as Martin Rapaport have suggested that diamonds will become akin to gold from an economic standpoint.
When Judy Mikovits had a ‘keystone’ scientific discovery widely discredited, resulting in the loss of her job, it is unlikely that she considered the state of the intellectual property laws governing the work that she performed for her former employer, the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI). However, in November 2011, following the initiation of civil action […]
At the Rio + 20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development -- which followed by forty years the Stockholm Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and by twenty years the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development -- the negotiators sought to “reinvigorate political will and raise the level of commitment by […]
In late March, The United States Supreme Court ordered the U.S Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit to reconsider Myriad Genetics’ existing patent on two genes associated with a high risk of breast and ovarian cancer, in light of the judgement rendered in Mayo Collaborative Services v Prometheus Labs (Prometheus). A unanimous Supreme Court […]
A team of Hamilton scientists at the Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute (SCC-RI) of McMaster University have made a breakthrough discovery (reported by CTV here) with the potential to significantly impact future cancer treatment, and provide new hope for people living with cancer including tens of thousands of Canadians. Published in last Thursday’s edition […]
On Friday May 25th, the Government of Canada announced a series of investments that seeks to create research partnerships among the academic, public, private and not-for-profit sectors. The effort will be conducted by the Federal Government through grants administered through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).