"to further promote the awareness of intellectual property protection, expand the influence of intellectual property protection across the world, urge countries to publicize and popularize intellectual property protection laws and regulations, enhance the public legal awareness of intellectual property rights, encourage invention-innovation activities in various countries and strengthen international exchange in the intellectual property field."

But all that was really a cover for WIPO's true intention to make the world celebrate one of the finest intellectual property lawyers ever to walk the Earth: me. Really, why else would they have chosen my birthday as the perfect occasion for their so-called "IP celebration"?

Of course, as long as WIPO continues to be coy about its true intentions, we might as well celebrate some intellectual property today. Thus a perfect host for this week's Blawg Review was Jeremy Phillips at his IP-focused IPKat blog. Not all the posts he reviews this week are necessarily IP-related ones, but he did kindly include a link to my Blawg Review covering the 300th birthday of the Statute of Anne.

Clearly WIPO's not the only one who recognizes my awesome IP skillz…

Obviously the Statute of Anne, having been put in force 300 years ago, almost to this day, is no longer good law in any jurisdiction. In fact, almost immediately after it was enacted it began to be transformed. But it stands as a turning point in the history of English law-based systems by being the first true instance of copyright law as we've come to know it. Prior to the Statute of Anne, the privilege to publish was invested by the monarch in just a handful of companies who had an exclusive monopoly on all publication. Nothing could be printed that the Stationers’ Company and its select few brethren did not deign to print, and they were endowed with police powers to enforce their total control of the market for printed works.

Clearly such total power over the creation and dissemination of written works would cause a politically restless populace to bristle, and Parliament eventually acted to wrest the Royal Privilege to publish from this cabal and restore it to the population at large. It is thus bitterly ironic that today, almost exactly 300 years later, the English Parliament stands ready to do the exact opposite and restore total control over the creation and dissemination of work to a new generation of monopolists.

What makes it so ironic is, of course, what has long been forgotten: that the Statute of Anne was passed as “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning.” The intent of the copy right it created was always to stimulate the dissemination of knowledge. Now, three hundred years later, we have the ultimate disseminator of knowledge: the Internet, yet in England -- as well as countless other countries -- copyright law is evolving to stop the spread of information -- the exact opposite effect.

But its project has not yet succeeded, and the Internet is so far still able to provide a wealth of information, a small portion of which this Blawg Review will highlight as I explore the premise, promise and problems of the Statute of Anne and its legacy.

Hearing a Seal song the other day reminded me of my visit to Russia way back in 1992. It was part of a high school exchange, and my host student and I got along great. So well, in fact, that it was incomprehensible that our worlds had been so closed off from each other. Now that they were open it was so nice to be free to connect with someone so much like me.

One of the ways we connected was through music. As I wrote a few years ago:

Although [my friend's] English was good enough that we were able to converse, she wasn't able to pick up the lyrics to songs she liked. One of them was [Seal's] "Kissed by a Rose." She had a sense that it was deeply poetic and asked me to transcribe the lyrics for her. The exercise forced me to listen to it closely and I realized she was right.

So I shared with her that music. She, for her part, gave me Yuri Shevchuk, whose lyrics were much the same.

I have always thought it good form to acknowledge the hosts who have acknowledged me. Unfortunately, I have often failed to live up to that ideal. Checking my records I see I've missed recognizing some hosts and would therefore like to use this opportunity to make amends.

I am both glad and horrified by the news. Glad that it's at least something, including some very necessary restraints on the private health insurance business. But horrified that (a) it really ONLY amounts to some regulation of private health insurance, (b) those reforms, without a public option or any concerted overhaul of how health care is provided in the United States, are likely to make healthcare even more expensive for many (including myself), and (c) the political posturing, even from both sides of the aisle, was so dysfunctionally entrenched, and just as frequently paranoid and obtuse, as to prevent a better solution from emerging.

I will be quite candid: I am no fan of Nancy Pelosi. Yes, the political values she represents are my values as well. But I thought both she and Rahm Emanuel were both so politically aggressive and obnoxious as to prevent good policy from emerging. On the other hand, maybe the heavy-handed strategy was necessary to get at least *something* done. The pushback by so many conservatives, and even some Democrats, against the notion of a public solution to health care provision was frightening, bewildering, and counter-productive to any of their stated agendas, and that's what I write about here.

I saw on BoingBoing recently a harrowing blurb:

Phone texts in Nigeria urged mass murder

"War, war, war. Stand up and defend yourselves. Kill before they kill you. Slaughter before they slaughter you. Dump them in a pit before they dump you." — One of many mass-text-messages sent last week in Nigeria, inciting people to murder. And they did: some 350 were killed in Christian/Muslim violence.

What was so particularly disturbing about this news was watching history repeat itself (albeit this time in Nigeria). In the 1994 Rwanda genocide cell phones weren't widely available, but there was the radio, and xenophobic Hutus used this media to convince ordinary Hutus to do their murderous bidding.

So what is the antidote for this sort of thing? To clamp down on free speech so no one may ever seek to inflame violent ethnic tensions? Hardly.

But they do have so much to overcome. Though often blessed with an abundance of natural resources, many African countries have generations-long histories of exploitation and heartache, either from external colonization forces or internal ethnic tensions, or some combination of the two.

Rwanda is no exception to this. This small but verdant country sits tucked away near the geographic crossroads of this vast continent: just below the Equator and wedged in between the large English-speaking East African countries of Uganda to the north and Tanzania to the east, and the French-speaking tiny Burundi to the south and enormous Democratic Republic of Congo to the west. Rwanda has no oceanfront; all connections to the world need to pass through at least one of its neighbors.

The upside to this situation is that Rwanda's geographic isolation protected it from some of the earlier ravages of colonization. But by the beginning of the 20th century colonization had begun to take hold, and by the end of World War I it was firmly under Belgian control.

Colonization can be something of a double-edged sword. While it often brings handy western technologies, it does so with the loss of local autonomy -- or worse. In Rwanda's case, what Belgium wrought was much worse, taking a largely stable society and turning its peoples against each other with the most catastrophic results. Thus Rwanda is not just a developing former colony struggling to attain its place among modern countries; it is also a young country struggling to heal a most grievous internal wound. By many accounts it has done remarkably well. But at the beginning of this decade Rwanda is at a crossroads: can it continue to progress towards prosperity and stability, or will it give in to the darker forces that have pulled it into pieces before?

So for my out of town friends, especially those from other countries, I thought I'd post some information to help get people oriented. Feel free to add more information or post questions to the comments; since I don't currently live there now I included only what I was most familiar with or could readily remember, but other people have since added more notes in the comments.

(updated 2/9/10 and 5/13/10)

I myself do use Facebook, albeit reluctantly. It seemed like something I needed to do if I wanted to have any credibility as a cyberlawyer, to go there and see how it worked and what the appeal of it was. Because its appeal wasn't at all obvious to me: there was nothing Facebook offered in its closed, proprietary way that basic Internet technologies didn't offer in their more open and flexible way. I've never understood the point of closed systems. I didn't get them back when AOL was the closed system of choice either. As an Internet user, why restrict yourself to the finite universe of content and users AOL or Facebook provides when there is an unlimited universe just beyond its borders in the Web at large?

But perhaps I'm not sufficiently crediting individual preference. Just as I preferred a large university to a small college, many others prefer the exact opposite. Small feels safe. Predictable. Knowable. Limited. So perhaps that's why so many people have liked Facebook, because it felt like a quiet cul-de-sac away from the tumult of the information superhighway. A quiet place for just you and your friends. But maybe it's not the quiet, out-of-the-way place people thought after all, thanks to Facebook's inadequate privacy model.

There are lots of horror stories about Facebook users being "outed" in some unfortunate way in their real lives by something seen on their Facebook pages, like people being denied insurance coverage for looking too healthy, or even fugitives ending up captured because they posted about where they were. But interesting as those stories may be, what I want to focus on is the illusion of privacy Facebook fosters for its users, which thus enables so many to later be blindsided when content they thought was private is later proved not to be. In particular, I want to focus on the weakest link: friends.

Rwanda's main tourist attractions lie outside the central capital, in the further corners of the country. To the east is Akagera, the portion of the country most similar to Kenya and Tanzania and home to the elephants, giraffes, hippos, crocodiles, et al. that one would expect to see on a safari. To the southwest is the lush rainforest of Nyungwe Forest, and to the northwest Parc National des Volcans, which is home to Rwanda's share of the volcanic range that runs through the Rift Valley section of middle Africa. (Rwanda's volcanoes are all extinct, but some of the ones on the other side of the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo remain active.) Meanwhile, running along much of the country's western border is Lake Kivu, a sizeable lake separating Rwanda from the DRC. Several cities and towns dot the Rwandan coastline, including Gisenyi to the north.

Unfortunately I never made it to Akagera. By the time my schedule settled down it was too late to research and organize affordable transportation. (Nothing in Rwanda is more than a few hours away from Kigali, but unless you are prepared to take local buses or matatus, which still requires figuring out, the other options are to take an organized tour or organize your own transport. I think the latter, especially if you join up with others, makes the most sense. Private car rental may be possible in Kigali, but for sanity's sake it probably is a better idea to hire a driver with a car.) But for the second weekend we headed to points west.