Letters and comment

P2P in Mexico

Following your article Pursuing the P2P Pirates - Balancing Copyright and Privacy Rights (Issue 2/2008), I would like to highlight Mexico’s experience in this area. In Mexico different musical firms have used the same legal tactic mentioned in the article, that is denouncing Internet providers in criminal trials for the purposes of obtaining data from Internet users. It should be stated that in Mexico there is no national regulation protecting personal data and so users are at a disadvantage regarding these questionable practices insofar as these tactics are used for industrial property protection.

Despite the above, lawyers from such firms have encountered major problems in trying to institute civil proceedings against Internet users denounced by their service providers. The first problem is the fact that it is almost impossible to prove that the person that signed the Internet contract is the same person that has used said means to infringe copyright, since on many occasions it may be a family member, dependant or employee that is responsible for such conduct, without there being objective responsibility for the holder of the Internet account. The second is proving that the person distributed or benefited from the transfer of archives, and the third is the notable lack of civil procedure expertise in these lawsuits, including missing deadlines and forgetting to exercise basic rights.

From Sergio A. Bravo Valle, National Deputy Director of Litigation, Alvarez Puga and Associates, S.C., Mexico.

Kerala State (India) IPR Policy - rights creation on Traditional Knowledge

Readers of your article Digitizing TraditionalCulture (Issue 3/2008) may be interested to learn of the Kerala IPR Policy 2008 which proposes legislation to prevent misappropriation of Traditional Knowledge (TK) and knowledge associated with biodiversity. The Policy outlines the Government’s concern about protecting its rich traditional wealth, comprising TK practices, tribal medicines, Ayurveda practices and biodiversity, which attribute to and forms the basis of livelihoods of many TK practitioners and which, in the absence of legal property rights, may be appropriated by private businesses.

Codification of TK into Digital Libraries is not a complete solution to misappropriation. Hence the...