What could be one of the most overlooked retrospectives, appearing in the Business Section of the Christmas Eve edition of the Toronto Star, is a retrospective of significant events in Canadian Tech Law. Most relate to online privacy and piracy.
For anyone who follows tech law, it makes for an interesting stroll down memory lane, which many of us are prone to do this time of year.
Happy Holidays.
Read more: “The year in Canadian tech law, A to Z”
One of the benefits of being in the MaRS environment is that it presents opportunities for exposure to a wide variety of activities and events. In addition to the programming that MaRS and our partners provide, there are many other third parties that make use of the space. While they may not always seem directly relevant to our work, they provide those cross-pollination opportunities that can sometimes spark really interesting ideas.
Case in Point:
Not long ago, MaRS was selected as the venue to an event organized by the Canadian Red Cross, ‘Covering Conflict: A Journalist’s Guide to the Laws of War.’ The keynote speaker of this full day event was journalist Roy Gutman, who received a Pulitzer Price for international reporting for his coverage of the conflicts in the Balkans.
His key message was that journalists have a profound responsibility to know and understand the rules of the game that they are covering. He used his experience in the Balkans to highlight this. During the beginning of the series of wars between and within those states, it wasn’t clear what was happening.
Was it a Serb-led attack on Slovenia and Croatia or the federal state trying to breakup? Was this a civil war brought about secessionists or were the smaller states forced to secede by a bullying Serb state? Was it a civil war or an International conflict?
longhorn statue, originally uploaded by xgray
This week a gubernatorial request to the Teacher Retirement System (TRS) of Texas will be reviewed that would see up to $600 Million for direct venture capital investments into Texas-based companies.
Currently, the public pension system in Texas makes all of its venture capital investments as a limited partner in unaffiliated venture capital funds, as do most public pensions in Canada and the US. The Venture Capital Institute provides a great history of how a series of legislative and regulatory changes in the late 70s permitted risk-equity investment by pension funds, spurring on venture funds and providing the partnership capital that comprises both venture and buy-out investment we know today.
Though risk-equity investment by public funds has been a bonanza for venture capital, it still usually represents a very meager portion of their overall investment, TRS having invested only 3.3% of the $93.32 billion system.
However, with a few clear stats (Texas receives the third-most venture capital of any state, but this year will receive less than 25% from in-state investors), it is clear to Gov. Perry that changes are needed to boost the local VC funds to ensure their best companies aren’t poached to the coasts.
Gates Foundation
Major changes are coming to the organization that is fundamentally changing global health, by which I mean the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. With the pending massive cash infusion from one Warren Buffet, the Foundation is altering its internal financial structure to cleanly separate its program work from investment of its assets. Additionally, the foundation has also set time limit on the money, requiring that the funds be spent within 50 years of the deaths of both Gates. The foundation expects to steeply increase its grant-making from the current level of $1.75 billion per year to $3.5 billion by 2009. Its giving is focused in the areas of global health, global development, education and technology in public libraries.
Read the full story here.
Learn more about the Gates Foundation here.
Donkey – Sleepy Sandokan
originally uploaded by kenyai
Despite the best efforts by pharma, which I covered recently, the Democrats won control of the US House and Senate.
Now, in the aftermath of the midterms, the wooing commences. Lobbying against some key Democrat policies has already begun. Pharmaceutical companies are recruiting Democratic lobbyists, lining up allies in the Bush administration and Congress, renewing ties with patient organizations, and even lobbying for enough republican support to give them a potential veto from the White House.
The attitude, though hopefully exaggerated, expressed by Ken Johnson, a senior vice president at Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, as “It’s all hands on deck. It’s like a hurricane warning flag. You don’t know where it will hit. You don’t know who will be affected. But everybody has to be prepared.”
So why so much lobbying? Why so afraid of these big bad Democrats? While many of the issues are well document and old news, I’ll try and present ‘The Stakes.’
