President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Friday authorized Brazil to break the patent on an AIDS drug made by Merck & Co. Inc. and import a generic version from India instead.

It was the first time Brazil bypassed a patent to acquire cheaper drugs for its AIDS prevention program, a step recently taken by Thailand. Other countries, including Canada and Italy, have also used a clause in World Trade Organization rules to flout drug patents in the name of public health.

Brazil's government provides free universal access to AIDS drugs and distributes condoms and syringes free as part of a prevention program the United Nations has lauded.

The program helped Brazil slow infection rates and avoid what experts predicted would become an AIDS epidemic. Infection rates among adults have stabilized at about 0.6 percent -- similar to the United States.

Drug makers often reduce prices to keep countries as clients and avoid compulsory licensing. Merck said most middle-income countries like Brazil paid $1.80 per pill for Efavirenz.

Lula's decree could also strain relations with the U.S. government, which has threatened to revoke Brazil's trading partner status unless it does more to protect patents.

The International Chamber of Commerce 'Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting And Piracy' initiative has been accused of pirating thousands of documents from anti-piracy tracking service Gieschen Consultancy. The documents apparently later reappeared in a slightly different format under the ICC's own brandname.

The ICC and BASCAP misrepresented themselves as a partner in 2006 and 2007, gained access to proprietary information and then took what they learned and incorporated it into their own product offerings.

Its functionality, user interface, presentation, method of classification, and delivery is clearly based on our designs and existing products. It is extraordinary that an organization committed to fighting counterfeiting and piracy would steal the intellectual property of another organization.

Curious how LSD and other hallucinogens might be used in treating patients, Andrew Feldmar turned on and tuned in himself.

Thirty-two years, however, turned out to be but an instant in the long, unrelenting U.S. war on drugs. Last summer, in an incident that has just come to light, Mr. Feldmar, now 66, was banned from entering the United States because of his long-ago use of LSD.

The guards simply looked up Mr. Feldmar on the Internet and discovered his own article about using LSD, written for the scholarly, peer-reviewed journal Janus Head.

Given the United States' "almost fanatical position on drugs," Mr. Oscapella said, even a teenager who simply writes in a blog about smoking marijuana is now vulnerable to online scrutiny by U.S. border guards.

Mr. Feldmar was held at the border for five hours, before being allowed to return to Canada after signing an admission that he had once violated the U.S. Controlled Substance Act.

Mr. Feldmar is now banned permanently from entering the United States, unless he applies for and receives a waiver.

After months of consideration, Mr. Feldmar said he has decided not to apply for a waiver, despite the hardship of not being able to visit his two adult children, who live in Los Angeles and Denver.

Jack Valenti, the former White House aide and film industry lobbyist who instituted the modern movie ratings system and guided Hollywood from the censorship era to the digital age, died Thursday. He was 85.

When he took over as president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Mr. Valenti was caught between Hollywood's outdated system of self-censorship and the liberal cultural explosion taking place in America.

In Mr. Valenti's later years he handled tricky new challenges from the Internet and technologies that allow movies to be illegally reproduced and distributed in an instant. Mr. Valenti also travelled worldwide seeking to thwart movie piracy and boost film exports to reluctant countries such as China.

while some pundits are insisting that Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung Hui must have been influenced by violent video games, police have ruled that line of inquiry out.

A search of Hui's dorm room has not found any game gear of any type in his room. His roommate has also told coppers that during Hui's rare appearances in the dorm he never saw him play any computer games either.

Those who want to dust off the idea of violent television programmes and videos as the cause of Hui's murder rampage will be disappointed that he didn't have a TV or video either.

It seems that the most recent DVDs released by Sony — specifically Stranger Than Fiction, Casino Royale, and The Pursuit of Happyness — have some kind of 'feature' that makes them unplayable on many DVD players. This doesn't appear to be covered by the major media yet, but this link to a discussion over at Amazon gives a flavor of the problems people are experiencing. A blogger called Sony and was told the problem is with the new copy protection scheme, and they do not intend to fix it. Sony says it's up to the manufacturers to update their hardware.

Hackers appear to have figured out how to access one of the crucial HD DVD encryption keys without having to authorise the data - potentially rendering the latest attempt to block such activity useless.

The crack, posted on the Xboxhacker website, uses a standard, unmodified Microsoft's Xbox 360 HD DVD drive to hand over a disc's Volume ID without ensuring AACS has authenticated it first. Since no authentication is performed, even if the Volume ID has been rejected by the AACS Licensing Authority - the organisation that maintains the copy-protection system - it can still be used.

The crack doesn't facilitate copying per se, but it does appear to make it possible to play back copies as if they were the real thing. Until now, this has required the drive's firmware to be patched.

"TG Publishing, the publisher of Tom's Hardware Guide, has been sold. We expect the deal to close this month, and will make an official announcement at the appropriate time. We believe that there are some very exciting times ahead for the company, and that our readers have a lot to look forward to. I hope that I can share our expectations with you shortly."

A rumour is doing the rounds that long established hardware site, Tom's Hardware, has been sold for a sum of between $15 million to $20 million.

The RIAA has announced that the House Education and Labor committee is considering an amendment, HR1689, to the Higher Education Act of 1965. The proposal would allocate federal education funds to anti-piracy measures on college campuses. Most concerning is the bill's wording. It's claimed that the proposal would "save telecommunications bandwidth costs." In other words, the government will fund private packet filtering and preferential bandwidth allocation. "The Higher Education Act (HEA) generally allows schools to spend the money they receive only on certain prescribed areas such as financial aid grants and Pell loans. The new bill would allow that money to be used for more things, but does not contain a request for additional funding. Whether schools would be interested in using a limited pool of federal money to police student file-swapping remains to be seen."

For years there have been stories about people getting their unlimited Verizon EVDO Wireless accounts terminated because of excessive data usage, but Verizon never explicitly said that there is a limit. Now if you dive into the terms of the Unlimited Data Service plan they have put a section in that specifically states that anything over 5GB of data usage in a one month period is considered prima facie evidence that you must be downloading movies, and you will be cut off.