Australia’s High Court Upholds Cigarette Promotion Law


Australia's highest court upheld the world's toughest law on cigarette promotion despite protests from tobacco companies.

Cigarette companies had been arguing that the value of their trademarks will be destroyed under the new rules.

These rules demand that all cigarette packs are stripped of all logos and company colors.

The decision by the High Court means that starting December 2012, tobacco companies are prohibited from displaying their distinctive colors, brand designs and logos on their cigarette packs. The packs will instead come in a uniformly unglamorous design.

Furthermore, they will feature graphic health warnings and graphic images of cancer-riddled mouths and blinded eyeballs.

This way, the Australian government hopes that the new packs will make smoking as unglamorous as possible.

What do you think? Will be successful and should other countries follow?

The whistle-blower of the Amsterdam Hospital VUmc is fighting back in court

It all started with the surgeons of the department Lung Surgery Department in the University Hospital VUmc quarreling. It went to such an extent that it endangered the safety of patients.

Piet Postmus MD, a residing lung surgeon, was so concerned, that he became a whistle-blower and informed the Supervisory Board as well as the Inspection of National Health.

The latter confirmed that the management of the Hospital had withheld crucial information and started monitoring the VUmc. The Hospital will enjoy unannounced checks during the coming 6 months. Even Minister Schippers of National Health Care labeled the situation at the Hospital as “unacceptable”.

However, the Board (and management) did not see any reason to resign, since matters could be solved internally. They also were taking measures - the first being to suspend (and fire) the whistle-blower Postmus.

He promptly turned to the courts, demanding that he will be able to resume working. Pending the court’s decision about his firing, he hopes that the two new members of the Board will have a fresh perspective of what was and is going on in the Hospital.

Postmus is getting more and more support from his colleagues, former colleagues and medical personnel. There is even a dedicated website to support Postmus, who is also a Professor Lung Diseases.

It will be interesting to see how the court will decide.

(Photo courtesy of Hollandse Hoogte / Peter Hilz)

Columnist and TV host Fareed Zakaria admits to copying parts of Lepore’s article

Again, a famous columnist admitted of copying someone else’s writings. FareedZakaria is a Washington Post columnist, TV host of CNN’s foreign affairs show GPS, as well as an editor-at-large at Time.

Mr. Zakaria has apologized for using several paragraphs in his column in Time magazine that were written by another writer saying that he made "a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault." As a result, his column has been suspended for a month.

In a separate statement, Time spokesman Ali Zelenko said the magazine accepts Zakaria's apology, but would suspend his column for one month "pending further review."

He stated: "what he did violates our own standards for our columnists, which is that their work must not only be factual but original. Their views must not only be their own but their words as well.

Media reporters noticed that passages in Zakaria's column about gun control that appeared in Time's issue 20 of August issue closely resembled paragraphs in an article written by Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore. Her assay was published in the April 2012 issue of The New Yorker magazine.

Zakaria's column "The Case for Gun Control" starts with a paragraph containing the following text: “Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in 'Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.' Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic."

Jill Lenore's New Yorker "Battleground America" assay starts with: "As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A. demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, 'Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,' firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start."

In his statement, Zakaria "unreservedly" apologized to Jill Lepore, the Time’s editors and his readers.

Was it enough? Obviously, since both Time and CNN have reinstated Fareed Zakaria after consulting their plagiarism investigation, stating that it was "an unintentional and an isolated incident".

Yeah, sure, and I am a supermodel!

(Image courtesy of TalkoftheTown)

Microsoft’s European Legal Problem

On every PC sold in the U.S., Internet Explorer is the default Web browser. According to the European Commission, this is unacceptable, and wants Microsoft (MSFT) to display a “Browser Choice Screen” (BCS) on every copy of Windows that has Internet Explorer set as the default browser.

Microsoft has announced that it found out that the BCS wasn’t showing up on some computers. They were able to pinpoint the problem to a fluke within Windows 7 SP1. When using regular Windows 7, Vista or XP the BCS should pop up when Internet Explorer is set as the default browser. Microsoft is taking steps to avoid paying (even more) fines to the EU.

For starters, Microsoft developed a quick fix and distributed it on July 3 to all Windows PCs running Windows 7 SP1. Microsoft also made sure that the BCS was available on all new Windows PCs shipped with Windows 7 SP1.

Microsoft also hired an outside investigation company to interview Microsoft employees about the problem. Getting to the bottom of this compliance issue is paramount. Microsoft will send the findings to the European Commission. This way, the Company hopes to avoid a fine.

Microsoft is extending the time in which they must display the BCS by 15 months for all PC users. The company rusts that this should pacify the European Commission.

Microsoft identified the cause of the problem. Its engineers were unaware that they had to update the BCS code for Windows 7 SP1. If Microsoft is found that they intentionally didn’t add the BCS, they could face up to $7 billion in fines.

Let’s wait and see....

About Plagiarism

In Roman times the author Marcus Valerius Martialis (40–102 BCE and) realized that it was bad for his business to be copied by others without being given credit.

He launched a campaign to denounce what he considered to be literary thieves. He coined the phrase plagiārius (kidnapper, someone who ensnares children or slaves in a plaga or net). Since copyright law did not exist yet, and there was also no other legal recourse open to him, he came up with a clever idea.

Being known for his acid stylus, he put his writing skills to good use. He wrote several verses aimed at copycats.

One that survived is a wonderful quip about Fidentinus, whom he perceived at being a plagiarist.

“Fame has it that you, Fidentinus, recite my books to the crowd as if none other than your own. If you’re willing that they be called mine, I’ll send you the poems for free.
If you want them to be called yours, buy this one, so that they won’t be mine.”

Nowadays, plagiarism is a criminal offense that will also ostracize an author. Some famous examples include:

• Alex Haley settled a 1977 lawsuit with Harold Courlander that cited approximately 80 passages in Haley's novel Roots (1976) as having been plagiarized from Courlander's novel The African (1967)
  

• Kaavya Viswanathan's first novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life is reported to contain plagiarized passages from at least five other novels. All editions of the book were subsequently withdrawn, her publishing deal with Little, Brown and Co. was rescinded, and a film deal with Dreamworks SKG was canceled.

• Paul Crouch, the televangelist founder of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, was sued in 2000 by novelist Sylvia Fleener. She claimed that Crouch's novel The Omega Code was plagiarized from her unpublished manuscript, The Omega Syndrome. Crouch and Fleener's attorneys reached an out-of-court settlement for an undisclosed sum.
  
  
• In 2007 at the age of 12, Marie-Pier Côté, a Canadian, published a novel titled Laura l'immortelle.The author later admitted that she plagiarized a Highlander fan fiction, rewrote it, and presented it as an original work.

• In December 2011, Naomi Ragen was convicted of using parts of Sarah Shapiro's 1990 book “Growing with My Children: A Jewish Mother’s Diary” in her book "Sotah," which appeared in 1992. In addition to levying damages, as well as court costs and lawyer's fees, the court ordered Ragen to remove the plagiarized passages in future printings of the book.