Indonesia Stops Sharing Avian Virus Samples

dankrabach writes "Indonesia has apparently decided to play the IP game, with the world's health at stake. The country, one of the hardest-hit by avian flu, has stopped submitting virus samples to the World Health Organization, and is negotiating to sell them to an American drug company that makes the vaccine. They feel slighted when they give away such samples, but then cannot afford the patented vaccines. Logical to me, given the rules of the game; however, can't we come up with some GPL'ish license to free any product based on this data?"

Pirates!

[drewzhrodague]

Looks like we're going to have to wait for the pirates to bring a few hundred million copies over through the airports, wide-open borders, by sea, or other means. Couldn't they have put some DRM into this?

Seriously can't wait to get my copies!

Option 2

[Dorsai65]

Maybe make pricing inversely proportional to the number of samples provided?

Re:Pirates!

[crayz]

Just wait until the pharm companies find out you illegaly transferred H5N1 IP to your system, and then made *billions* of copies of it. Your doctor will get a strongly-worded takedown notice, that's for sure

Re:Avian Flu

[Sneftel]

The penguin lobby is pretty powerful here.

When viruses are outlawed...

[mblase]

...only outlaws will have viruses.

Hey, I actually like the sound of that.

Re:Pirates!

[Darth_brooks]

Oh, come on. You're just getting lawsuit happy. Those viruses were for *personal use*, he didn't know that he was also allowing others access to copyrighted materials. It must have been an accidental misconfiguration.

Re:When viruses are outlawed...

[wildwood]

Sure, you like it now... but wait until you're locked up for sneezing.