Drug patent protection: How long is long enough? A recent Senate committee hearing on Bill S-17, Parliament's effort to comply with international trade rules by extending pharmaceutical patent protection to 20 years, inadvertently opened the door to a broader investigation of the inner workings of the country's pharmaceutical patent legislation.
The Virtual Currency Landscape. Virtual currencies such as Bitcoin are digital representations of value that function as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and/or a store of value. In many cases, virtual currencies are âconvertibleâ currencies; they are not legal tender, but they have an equivalent value in real currency. In terms of value, Bitcoin is the most prominent virtual currency. As of late January 2015, one bitcoin equaled roughly $207 (though the value is volatile), and all bitcoins in circulation totaled $2.85 billion.
Virtual water trade refers to the hidden flow of water if food or other commodities are traded from one place to another. For instance, it takes 1,340 cubic meters of water to produce one metric tonne of wheat. The precise volume can be more or less depending on climatic conditions and agricultural practice. Hoekstra and Chapagain have defined the virtual-water content of a product as the volume of freshwater used to produce the product, measured at the place where the product was actually prod