An anti-vaccination group is under fire for allegedly breaching copyright laws by selling newspaper and medical journal articles online without permission from the authors.
The Australian Vaccination Network, which was the subject of a public warning issued by the Health Care Complaints Commission last month, withdrew 11 information packs from its website yesterday after complaints from authors.
The packs, which were selling for up to $128, included home-made books filled with articles photocopied from journals around the world, information on drugs taken from MIMS, the medical guide used by doctors and nurses, and copies of brochures inserted in medication boxes by pharmaceutical companies.
I first got the news via Antivaxers.com (‘Ignorant about vaccines, NOT copyright’) – there you can find a detailed breakdown of the situation and how Meryl Dorey seemed to be aware of what she was doing, stemming from her comment on the official AVN discussion group in August 2010.
‘We Nout. Left. Yet! I have it now, just waiting to see if she replies, like…’
So, nothing really that much out of the ordinary. I have tried pretty much all of the olive-types on offer from the buffet and I’m going to try the cappuchino machine next. I am, however, terribly grateful to Milton for sending me something to read, as I have a rather lengthy flight ahead of me (which has been delayed, due to the incoming plane getting itself lost or some such nonsense).
I have at least three different business magazines next to me and a large, cheerfully glowing LED sign telling me all the stock market results. It’s kind of cosy in a ‘greed is good’ kind of way. I might go see if I can write “Gordon Gekko was ‘ere” in a bathroom stall or something.
And, as a great start to it all? I left my tickets at the front counter and they had to call me to go get them. Sheesh. It was kind of like getting lost at the shopping centre when you’re ten.
Other than that, I think it might be time to get out of here. See you, Australia, back in… however long it takes.
Two well-worth-reading articles by Gia Milinovich (whose work I’ve read and enjoyed long before I knew who this ‘Brian Cox’ fellow was – she inspired me to see about getting a proper photograph done of myself for the website! :p):
When we first met, I was the expensively groomed television professional, working on mostly science and technology shows, and he was the newly appointed physics academic with a student’s wardrobe and a single bed. All that remained of his music days with D:Ream were a few William Hunt suits in his wardrobe and framed backstage passes on his bathroom wall. It may have been my love of the Apollo moon missions or him telling me he worked at Cern, but we instantly struck up a geeky friendship. Together we started writing ambitious documentary ideas with the sole aim of “making science part of popular culture”. Fast-forward 10 years and we’re a lot closer to our goal, but it’s not quite how I imagined it would be.
When Brian first started appearing on TV, he was more of a cult figure than a celebrity. People would occasionally come up to him with a question about black holes or the Higgs boson, having seen him on Horizon or This Morning. The only time he was asked for his autograph was after a talk he’d given in a school, or occasionally at a nerd gathering such as Skeptics In The Pub. Then he presented Wonders Of The Solar System and everything changed.
The other night we attended a screening of one of his programmes to a sold-out audience filled with adoring young women. After the screening, there was a Q & A. I’d seen the programme many times so all I wanted to see was the Q & A. Our son luckily fell asleep in my arms just before the screening, so slept peacefully during it. The moment it ended, however, he woke up. As my husband sat down on stage, our son shouted out… So I left the auditorium and spent the next hour sitting with my son in the exit stairwell. And all I could think of was what a perfect analogy it was…
Live-Blogging The Telethon Institution Lecture On ‘Vaccination. The Experts. The Facts.’
![[Valid RSS]](http://img501.imageshack.us/img501/9879/validrsscf0.png "Validate my RSS feed")
