Lost in Transit: How Enforcement of Foreign Copyright Judgements Undermines the Right to Research

The ease of travel in the globalized, modern world is a doubleedged sword for the right to research: while research opportunities are bolstered due to information and data traveling extremely easily in the digital world, the right to research may be undermined by the easy travel of foreign copyright judgments between countries. This article analyzes thoroughly, for the first time, the threats posed to the right to research by private international law instruments on recognition and enforcement of foreign copyright judgments. This article uses a theoretical and doctrinal perspective to analyze the matter, demonstrating that the right to research, aimed at promoting innovation and creativity, is an integral part of, and an important balance within, the copyright paradigm. Since the right to research differs from country to country, it is especially vulnerable at the transnational level and is thus susceptible to abusive use of strategic foreign judgment enforcement proceedings. The article demonstrates that the risks to the right to research are intensified by a threefold bias that benefits the copyright holder while disadvantaging researchers, as the right holder is usually the initiator of the proceedings; has the choice of the forum; and has an incentive to request enforcement of the foreign judgment after it is granted—a bias summarized by the acronym ICE. These risks and vulnerabilities justify serious consideration in light of recent efforts to negotiate international instruments on the enforcement of foreign copyright judgments, especially in an age when national courts grant extraterritorial and even global injunctions in the realm of intellectual property. The article conceptualizes the application of private international law rules and notions to copyright law as akin to a legal transplant within copyright law, highlights the risks of such “transplant”, and demonstrates that private international law rules may not only interfere with internal copyright balances, but also undermine, and even nullify, the right to research. The article then outlines possible policy solutions to address these threats both on the national and international levels and, most importantly, proposes that the discussions on any international instrument on the enforcement of foreign copyright judgments take place under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a copyright-expert forum that will properly protect the right to research

Lost In Transit: How Enforcement of Foreign Copyright Judgements Undermines the Right to Research

The ease of travel in the globalized, modern world is a double-edged sword for the right to research: while research opportunities are bolstered due to information and data traveling extremely easily in the digital world, the right to research may be undermined by the easy travel of foreign copyright judgments between countries. This article analyzes thoroughly, for the first time, the threats posed to the right to research by private international law instruments on recognition and enforcement of foreign copyright judgments. This article uses a theoretical and doctrinal perspective to analyze the matter, demonstrating that the right to research, aimed at promoting innovation and creativity, is an integral part of, and an important balance within, the copyright paradigm. Since the right to research differs from country to country, it is especially vulnerable at the transnational level and is thus susceptible to abusive use of strategic foreign judgment enforcement proceedings. The article demonstrates that the risks to the right to research are intensified by a threefold bias that benefits the copyright holder while disadvantaging researchers, as the right holder is usually the initiator of the proceedings; has the choice of the forum; and has an incentive to request enforcement of the foreign judgment after it is granted—a bias summarized by the acronym ICE. These risks and vulnerabilities justify serious consideration in light of recent efforts to negotiate international instruments on the enforcement of foreign copyright judgments, especially in an age when national courts grant extraterritorial and even global injunctions in the realm of intellectual property. The article conceptualizes the application of private international law rules and notions to copyright law as akin to a legal transplant within copyright law, highlight the risks of such “transplant”, and demonstrating that private international law rules may not only interfere with internal copyright balances, but also undermine, and even nullify, the right to research. The article then outlines possible policy solutions to address these threats both on the national and international levels and, most importantly, proposes that the discussions on any international instrument on the enforcement of foreign copyright judgments take place under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a copyright-expert forum that will properly protect the right to research

Just in Time: Personal Temporal Insights for Altering Model Decisions

The interpretability of complex Machine Learning models is coming to be a critical social concern, as they are increasingly used in human-related decision-making processes such as resume filtering or loan applications. Individuals receiving an undesired classification are likely to call for an explanation -- preferably one that specifies what they should do in order to alter that decision when they reapply in the future. Existing work focuses on a single ML model and a single point in time, whereas in practice, both models and data evolve over time: an explanation for an application rejection in 2018 may be irrelevant in 2019 since in the meantime both the model and the applicant's data can change. To this end, we propose a novel framework that provides users with insights and plans for changing their classification in particular future time points. The solution is based on combining state-of-the-art algorithms for (single) model explanations, ones for predicting future models, and database-style querying of the obtained explanations. We propose to demonstrate the usefulness of our solution in the context of loan applications, and interactively engage the audience in computing and viewing suggestions tailored for applicants based on their unique characteristic

Testing transgenic regulatory elements through live mouse imaging

AbstractTo overcome positional and methylation effects on transgene expression, we developed a universal cloning cassette for in vivo assessment of regulatory elements using the luciferase reporter gene and the CCCD camera. Monitoring luciferase expression pattern in live mice enables screening of large numbers of transgenic founders quickly and inexpensively. We demonstrate that in the engineered transgenic mice, the chicken β-globin 5′HS4 insulator did not always provide the desirable expression pattern, and the Island Element, responsible for the demethylation of the surrounding DNA region, was not beneficial. Both tested liver-specific and developmentally regulated promoters exhibited the expected expression pattern in most transgenic founders

LOWER TRUNK MUSCLE ACTIVITY DURING FRONT CRAWL SWIMMING IN A SINGLE LEG AMPUTEE

This study examined lower trunk muscle activity during front crawl swimming in a single leg amputee and in a triathlete of equivalent swimming performance level. EMG of four lower trunk muscles was recorded and underwater video was made during a 50m all out front crawl swim. Compared to the triathlete, the amputee demonstrated relatively long periods of activity in the four muscles examined, less relaxation and less symmetry in muscle activity between right and left body side. In both athletes their individual lower trunk muscle activity patterns coincided with specific arm and leg kick movement phases. The individual patterns were consistent for all arm stroke cycles over the entire 50m swimming trial

Rapid diagnostic susceptibility testing of bacteria and fungi from clinical samples using silicon gratings

Bacterial and fungal infections persistently plague society and have amounted to one of the most prevalent issues in healthcare today. Thus, significant research effort is directed towards developing rapid diagnostic techniques for determination of the correct antibiotic (or antifungal) for a patient-tailored therapy. We have developed a rapid phenotypic antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) in which photonic 2D silicon microarrays are employed as both the optical transducer element and as a preferable solid-liquid interface for bacterial/fungal colonization. We harness the intrinsic ability of the micro-architectures to relay optical phase-shift reflectometric interference spectroscopic measurements (termed PRISM) and incorporate it into a platform for culture-free, label-free tracking of bacterial/fungal colonization, proliferation, and death. For example, bacteria proliferation within the microtopologies results in an increase in refractive index of the medium, yielding an increase in optical path difference, while cell death or bacteriostatic activity results in decreasing or unchanged values. The optical responses of bacteria, including clinical isolates and samples derived from patients at neighboring hospitals, to various concentrations of relevant antibiotics are tracked in real time, allowing for accurate determination of the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values within 2-3 hours in comparison to assay times of <8 hours (using standard broth microdilution techniques or state-of-the-art clinical automated systems. This has opened the door to the observation of unique bacterial behaviors, as we can evaluate bacterial adhesion, growth, and antibiotic resistance on different micro-architectures, different surface chemistries, and even different strains. Motility, charge, and biofilm abilities have been explored for their effect of bacterial adhesion to the microstructures as we further develop our method of rapid, label-free AST for full clinical application. © 2019 SPIE

SVNR: Spatially-variant Noise Removal with Denoising Diffusion

Denoising diffusion models have recently shown impressive results in generative tasks. By learning powerful priors from huge collections of training images, such models are able to gradually modify complete noise to a clean natural image via a sequence of small denoising steps, seemingly making them well-suited for single image denoising. However, effectively applying denoising diffusion models to removal of realistic noise is more challenging than it may seem, since their formulation is based on additive white Gaussian noise, unlike noise in real-world images. In this work, we present SVNR, a novel formulation of denoising diffusion that assumes a more realistic, spatially-variant noise model. SVNR enables using the noisy input image as the starting point for the denoising diffusion process, in addition to conditioning the process on it. To this end, we adapt the diffusion process to allow each pixel to have its own time embedding, and propose training and inference schemes that support spatially-varying time maps. Our formulation also accounts for the correlation that exists between the condition image and the samples along the modified diffusion process. In our experiments we demonstrate the advantages of our approach over a strong diffusion model baseline, as well as over a state-of-the-art single image denoising method

HCV Tumor Promoting Effect Is Dependent on Host Genetic Background

BACKGROUND: The hepatitis C virus (HCV) is one of the major risk factors for the development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Nevertheless, transgenic mice which express the whole HCV polyprotein (HCV-Tg) do not develop HCC. Whereas chronic HCV infection causes inflammation in patients, in HCV-Tg mice, the host immune reaction against viral proteins is lacking. We aimed to test the role of HCV proteins in HCC development on the background of chronic inflammation in vivo. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We crossed HCV-Tg mice that do not develop HCC with the Mdr2-knockout (Mdr2-KO) mice which develop inflammation-associated HCC, to generate Mdr2-KO/HCV-Tg mice. We studied the effect of the HCV transgene on tumor incidence, hepatocyte mitosis and apoptosis, and investigated the potential contributing factors for the generated phenotype by gene expression and protein analyses. The Mdr2-KO/HCV-Tg females from the N2 generation of this breeding (having 75% of the FVB/N genome and 25% of the C57BL/6 genome) produced significantly larger tumors in comparison with Mdr2-KO mice. In parallel, the Mdr2-KO/HCV-Tg females had an enhanced inflammatory gene expression signature. However, in the N7 generation (having 99.2% of the FVB/N genome and 0.8% of the C57BL/6 genome) there was no difference in tumor development between Mdr2-KO/HCV-Tg and Mdr2-KO animals of both sexes. The HCV transgene was similarly expressed in the livers of Mdr2-KO/HCV-Tg females of both generations, as revealed by detection of the HCV transcript and the core protein. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that the HCV transgene accelerated inflammation-associated hepatocarcinogenesis in a host genetic background-dependent manner

Risk assessment of the occurrence of aflatoxin and fungi in peanuts and cashew nuts

In the present study, the occurrence of fungi and aflatoxins (AFs) in peanut and cashew nut samples was investigated. Mycological analysis revealed the presence of fungi in 58.8% of samples, and assessment of AFs by chromatographic methods revealed that 52.9% were contaminated by AFs. AFB1 was the principal component in all AF-contaminated samples, with a mean level of 14.0, and 1.08 µg/kg in peanut and cashew nut, respectively. Eleven samples (32.4%) exceeded the total AF maximum level (4 μg/kg) and 8 samples (23.5%) exceeded the AFB1 (2 μg/kg) established by the European Commission. Our findings suggest that the incidence of AFs emphasizes the need for regular monitoring and a more stringent food safety system to control AFs at the lowest possible levels in peanuts and cashew nuts. The hypothetical dietary exposure suggests that the food products evaluated may significantly contribute to the overall human exposure