Transformative User-Generated Content in Copyright Law: Infringing Derivative Works or Fair Use?

In the United States, the line between the type and level of transformation required for a copyrightable derivative work and that required to constitute fair use has not been drawn clearly. With the rise of user-generated content, this question (which arises in two distinct copyright contexts) has become even more important. At the same time, copyright law has generally shied away from defining authorship as a legal concept, preferring instead to develop and rely on the related (but not identical) concept of originality. This has resulted in a low copyrightability threshold that does not adequately account for the fact that most creative works in some way rely on and build upon existing works that often were created by another person and are protected by copyright law. This Article examines the consequences of such vagueness for user-generated content in an international and comparative context. Taking the U.S. position as a starting point, it examines the state of the law in other common law jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, and considers whether the legal rules in all these jurisdictions\u27 treatment of derivative works and fair use comport with the international treaty framework and related norms. The Article also discusses the ramifications of recent U.S. judicial applications of transformativeness in both the fair use and derivative works contexts, and proposes a clearer, more distinctive set of criteria that should serve to clarify the distinctions between these concepts, and that will also legally recognize the existence of authorship in transformative user-generated content

Age-Dependent Differences in Frequent Mental Distress (FMD) of US Older Adults Living in Multigenerational Families versus Living Alone

Frequent mental distress (FMD) is prevalent among older Americans, but less is known about the disparities in the FMD of older adults living in multigenerational families versus living alone. We pooled cross-sectional data (unweighted, n = 126,144) from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) between 2016 and 2020 and compared the FMD (≥14 poor mental health days in the past 30 days = 1; 0 otherwise) of older adults (≥65 years) living in multigenerational families versus living alone in 36 states. After controlling for covariates, the findings indicate 23% lower odds of FMD among older adults living in multigenerational households compared to counterparts living alone (adjusted odds ratio (AOR): 0.77; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.60, 0.99). The findings also show that the reduction in the odds of FMD with each 5 year increase in age was larger among older adults living in multigenerational families by 18% (AOR: 0.56; 95% CI: 0.46, 0.70) compared to older adults living alone (AOR: 0.74; 95% CI: 0.71, 0.77), and this difference was significant at the 5% significance level. Multigenerational living may have a protective association with FMD among older adults. Further research is needed to identify multigenerational family and non-kin factors that translate into mental health advantages for older adults

Preparing for the worst: Utilizing stress-tolerant soil microbial communities to aid ecological restoration in the Anthropocene

1. Multiple drivers of environmental change pose a significant challenge for ecological restoration, including climate change, soil salinization and environmental pollution. Due to the important role that soil biota play in enabling plants to cope with a variety of abiotic stressors, there is growing interest in the use of microbial inoculations to facilitate native plant restoration in the face of such change. 2. Recently, novel methods have begun being explored in agriculture to harness stress-conditioned soil biota for improving abiotic stress tolerance in crop species. Similar applications in ecological restoration – where plants are inoculated with indigenous soil microbial communities that are preconditioned to various abiotic stressors – could potentially increase our capacity to restore degraded ecosystems under global change. 3. In this paper, we aim to (1) outline the ways in which soil microbial communities might be conditioned in order to confer greater stress tolerance to plants that are targets for restoration; (2) highlight successful (and unsuccessful) examples where stress-tolerant soil microbial communities were utilized to improve plant performance; (3) describe the ways in which stress-conditioned soil biota could be deployed in order to assist ecological restoration; and (4) discuss the potential risks and outstanding questions associated with such an approach. 4. If restoration practitioners are able to harness the soil microbiome to improve plant stress tolerance as is currently being explored in agriculture, this could revolutionize methods for the restoration of degraded lands in the Anthropocene

Modulation of Ca2+-dependent anion secretion by protein kinase C in normal and cystic fibrosis pancreatic duct cells

AbstractThe study investigated the role of protein kinase C (PKC) in the modulation of agonist-induced Ca2+-dependent anion secretion by pancreatic duct cells. The short-circuit current (ISC) technique was used to examine the effect of PKC activation and inhibition on subsequent ATP, angiotensin II and ionomycin-activated anion secretion by normal (CAPAN-1) and cystic fibrosis (CFPAC-1) pancreatic duct cells. The ISC responses induced by the Ca2+-mobilizing agents, which had been previously shown to be attributed to anion secretion, were enhanced in both CAPAN-1 and CFPAC-1 cells by PKC inhibitors, staurosporine, calphostin C or chelerythrine. On the contrary, a PKC activator, phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA), was found to suppress the agonist-induced ISC in CFPAC-1 cells and the ionomycin-induced ISC in CAPAN-1 cells. An inactive form of PMA, 4αd-phorbol 12,13-didecanote (4αD), was found to exert insignificant effect on the agonist-induced ISC, indicating a specific effect of PMA. Our data suggest a role of PKC in modulating agonist-induced Ca2+-dependent anion secretion by pancreatic duct cells. Therapeutic strategy to augment Ca2+-activated anion secretion by cystic fibrosis pancreatic duct cells may be achieved by inhibition or down-regulation of PKC

The incidence of all-cause, cardiovascular and respiratory disease admission among 20,252 users of lisinopril vs. perindopril: a cohort study

Background: Major international guidelines do not offer explicit recommendations on any specific angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor (ACEI) agent over another within the same drug group. This study compared the effectiveness of lisinopril vs. perindopril in reducing the incidence of hospital admission due to all-cause, cardiovascular disease and respiratory disease. Methods: Adult patients who received new prescriptions of lisinopril or perindopril from 2001 to 2005 in all public hospitals and clinics in Hong Kong were included, and followed up for ≥2 years. The incidence of admissions due to all-cause, cardiovascular disease and respiratory disease were evaluated, respectively, by using Cox proportional hazard regression models. The regression models were constructed with propensity score matching to minimize indication biases. Results: A total of 20,252 eligible patients with an average age of 64.5 years (standard deviation 15.0) were included. The admission rate at 24 months within the date of index prescription due to any cause, cardiovascular disease and respiratory disease among lisinopril vs. perindopril users was 24.8% vs. 24.8%, 13.7% vs. 14.0% and 6.9% vs. 6.3%, respectively. Lisinopril users were significantly more likely to be admitted due to respiratory diseases (adjusted hazard ratios [AHR] = 1.25, 95% CI 1.08 to 1.43, p = 0.002 at 12 months; AHR = 1.17, 95% CI 1.04 to 1.31, p = 0.009 at 24 months) and all causes (AHR = 1.12, 95% CI 1.05 to 1.19, p < 0.001 at 24 months) than perindopril users. Conclusions: These findings support intra-class differences in the effectiveness of ACEIs, which could be considered by clinical guidelines when the preferred first-line antihypertensive drugs are recommended

Alterations of Structures and Functions of Useful Proteins : Cholesterol Oxidase and Human Metallothionein

This paper overviews a series of the authors’ recent contributions to dynamic quantizer design for control. The problem considered here is to find a dynamic quantizer such that the resulting quantized system is an optimal approximation of an ideal unquantized system.We show here a fundamental solution to this problem and briefly review several results toward real applications

Chimeric Gαq mutants harboring the last five carboxy-terminal residues of Gαi2 or Gαo are resistant to pertussis toxin-catalyzed ADP-ribosylation

AbstractThree widely-used Gαq chimeras harboring the last five residues of Gαi, Gαo and Gαz (qi5, qo5 and qz5) were examined for their ability to serve as substrates for pertussis toxin (PTX)-catalyzed ADP-ribosylation. In COS-7 cells coexpressing one of the three opioid receptors (μ, δ, and κ) and a Gαq chimera, agonist-induced stimulation of phosphoinositide-specific phospholipase C (PI-PLC) was largely insensitive to PTX treatment. Only the qi5-mediated stimulation of PI-PLC by κ-opioids was partially inhibited by PTX. In βγ-release assays, PTX treatment did not affect the ability of opioid receptors to activate these chimeras. [32P]ADP-ribosylation labeled Gαi/o but not qi5 or qo5, although the expression of these chimeras was confirmed by immunodetection. Thus, Gαq chimeras with a Gαi/o-like tail are insensitive to PTX treatment

Association between statins and the risk of suicide attempt, depression, anxiety, and seizure: A population-based, self-controlled case series study

Background: Risk of suicide attempt, depression, anxiety and seizure and the association with statins is an ongoing debate. We aim to investigate the association between statins and the above neuropsychological outcomes, in specific pre- and post-exposure time windows./ Methods: We identified patients aged 40–75 years old who were dispensed a statin between January 1, 2003 and December 31, 2012 from the Hong Kong Clinical Data Analysis & Reporting System (CDARS), an electronic medical records database. Patients with new onset of suicide attempt, depression, anxiety and seizure were derived from the original dataset separately, in a self-controlled case series study design. A non-parametric spline-based self-controlled case series model was built to measure continuous changes of risk./ Results: We identified 396,614 statin users. The risk of each outcome was elevated prior to statin initiation with incidence rate ratios of 1.38 (95 % CI, 1.09–1.74) for suicide attempt, 1.29 (95 % CI, 1.15–1.45) for depression, 1.35 (95 % CI, 1.19–1.53) for anxiety, and 1.45 (95 % CI, 1.21–1.73) for seizure. The incidence rate ratios remained elevated after the initiation of statins during the first 90 and 91–365 days after statin prescription and decreased to the baseline level after 1 year of continuous prescription./ Limitations: CDARS includes prescription data but not adherence data, which could lead to misclassification of exposure periods./ Conclusions: Our study does not support a direct association between statin use and suicide attempt, depression, anxiety and seizure, whose risks could be explained by cardiovascular events, for which statins were prescribed

SARS Coronavirus Detection Methods

Using clinical samples from patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome, we showed that the sensitivities of a quantitative reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (80% for fecal samples and 25% for urine samples) were higher than those of the polyclonal (50% and 5%) and monoclonal (35% and 8%) antibody-based nucleocapsid antigen capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays