Procuring and implementing an ICT system within an organisation can be a stressful task. High profile failures in both the public and private sectors hit the headlines all too often. The National Audit Office's report last month on the £6.2bn NHS IT upgrade in England put many of the challenges firmly in the spotlight. In the heat of the procurement process it is easy to forget some basic procurement principles ...
Every day in Mumbai, India, a team of 5,000 couriers deliver, collect and return 200,000 lunch boxes. This massive logistics operation is undertaken with an error rate of less than 1 in 8 million deliveries and without using any information technology. Enormous labour cost disparities enable this manual operation to be undertaken cost-effectively ...
ALERT Hospital May Be Excluded For Physician Recruiting On May 8, 2006 the OIG announced that it intends to exclude San Diego-based Alvarado Hospital from participation in Medicare, Medicaid and all other federal health care programs because of payments the Hospital made under relocation agreements involving placement of newly-recruited physicians in established physician practices ...
Certificate of Need Strategies for New Nursing Home Beds Special Population Beds are Re-Approved At its March 2006 meeting, the Michigan Certificate of Need (“CON”) Commission took action to re-approve several state-wide pools of nursing home beds that are set aside to serve special populations, including: Alzheimer’s Use 60 beds Hospice 30 beds Religious Use 20 beds The Commission reserved 22 special population beds on a non-specified basis for future use ...
IN OUR JUNE 2005 “FDA WATCH” column, we provided an overview of the regulatory, political, and scientific landscape for follow-on biological products in the U.S. As reported a year ago, the biogenerics debate centers around whether generic biologics are scientifically possible (i.e ...
The Police and Justice Bill was put before the House of Commons on 25 January 2006. The main aim of the Bill is to improve the powers and scope of the police force but there are a number of sections which look to update the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (CMA) and in particular to make Denial of Service (DOS) Attacks illegal. DOS attacks can take many forms but are essentially an attempt to disrupt the use of a computer, server or website ...
Scope of this treatiseThe purpose of this discussion is to address those cases which are most likely to have a significant effect for those practicing in the chemical, pharmaceutical and biotech areas ...
Dominant companies have special responsibility to ensure that the way they do business doesn’t prevent competition on the merits and does not harm consumers and innovation», said European Competition Commissioner Mário Monti, regarding the Commission’s Microsoft decision dated March 24th, 2004 ...
The interoperability information on Microsoft’s decision deserves special attention by the undertakings that have a dominant position in the market. Intellectual property rights, granted as an incentive for the creation of innovation and as a tool to recoup the investments made by companies, used to be understood as providing several rights to its owners ...
Complaints by foreign businesses regarding protection of intellectual property rights in China have been a consistent feature in media reports since large scale foreign investment commenced some 20 years ago. However, China's economic revolution over the same period means that opinions based on negative experiences in the past must be constantly reassessed ...
In April 2005 a new Disability Discrimination Act was passed by Westminster. The Act extends existing non-discrimination legislation, primarily the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. While some provisions of the Act came into force in December 2005, many others will be coming into force over the course of 2006. It is essential that businesses are aware of their new responsibilities under the Act and prepare for its implementation ...
Internet telephones are set to take the global communications industry by storm. Big names like Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo! and eBay are piling into the market and former state-run telecoms providers like BT are also investing. The technology was first developed by the US Defense Department as part of a research project on interconnection in the 1970s. But until recently only techno-geeks have had the interest and ability to make any use of it. But times have changed ...
On 1 May 2004 a new and revised Technology Transfer Block Exemption Regulation (the TTBER) entered into force - Regulation No. 772/2004. The TTBER will provide block exemptions for IP licensing agreements, ensuring that certain technology transfer agreements are automatically exempt from the application of Article 81(1) of the EC Treaty, which prohibits anti-competitive agreements ...
The European Union has recently launched a new ccTLD (country code top level domain). Instead of using the various national European ccTLD's, such as .fr for French companies, .de for German companies, and .co.uk for U.K. companies, the EU has made available the .eu suffix as a Community-wide ccTLD. The new domain extension has already proved widely popular, with more than 100,000 applications for domain names filed thus far ...
Germany. November 9, 1938. Kristallnacht. “The Night of Broken Glass.” Nazi secret police and the Hitler youth swarm over Jewish businesses and homes, terrorizing and victimizing helpless individuals all over the country.1 SS leadership orchestrates attacks on every vestige of Jewish culture as “punishment” for fictitious crimes that will never be recognized by the rest of the world ...
Judgement of the European Court of Justice in case C-212/03 – Commission v. France, dated 26 May 2005 The Commission acted against France on the grounds that certain French rules on the importation of medicines are contrary to Article 28 of EC Treaty on the free movement of goods. The relevant national rules and administrative practice required a licence for the importation of medicines for personal use in France ...
At the end of June, the US entertainment industry won a long fought victory to help bring file swappers to heel ...
The European Parliament dealt a blow to programmers seeking clarity on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions last month when it rejected a draft European Directive on the subject (the "CII Directive") by an overwhelming majority ...
Summary ‡ Information security “breaches” take many forms and occur in a wide variety of settings. However, contrary to recent press reports, they do not appear to be increasing. ‡ Research indicates that only a small percentage of breaches result in any harmful use of data. ‡ Account fraud and true identity fraud — the two identity-based frauds most feared by consumers and policy makers — are actually declining ...
The Ministry of Information Industry ("MII") promulgated the Measures for the Administration of the Filing for the Record of Non-Commercial Internet Information Services (the "Recordal Measures") on 8 February 2005. The Recordal Measures took effect on 20 March 2005. It provides detailed guidelines on recordal filings for non-commercial websites ...
On June 28, 2005, amendments to Articles 420 and 421 as well as the addition of a new Article 414bis of the Health Law were published in the Federal Official Gazette, entering into force the following day. Article 414bis provides that herbal products, food supplements, perfumes and beauty products may be seized, as a precautionary measure, when they have been improperly advertised by being held out as medicines or as having characteristics or therapeutic qualities which they do not have ...
Judgments of the European Court of Justice in Merk, Sharp & Dohme BV v. Etat Belge (C-245/03) and Glaxosmithkline SA v. Etat Belge (C-296/03) of 20 January 2005 Directive 89/105, on the transparency of medicines pricing and reimbursement rules (hereinafter the “Directive”) was first interpreted in 2001 and 2002, when the European Court of Justice (hereinafter the “ECJ”) rendered two decisions regarding the implementation of the Directive in Austria and in Finland ...
Introduction: On June 9, 2005 the Supreme Court of Canada released its landmark decision in Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General) in which a majority of the Court struck down provisions of Quebec’s Health Insurance Act and Hospital Insurance Act which prohibit private insurance for health care services that are available in the public health care system ...
On May 20, 2005, the Supreme Court issued its judgment in the Smith & Nephew Inc. v. Louise Glegg and Christopher Carter and Gilles Dextradeur v. Louise Glegg cases1 ...
