The Dominion - intellectual property

Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 20:03:49 +0000

As questions about the accuracy of the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia persist, academics are split on whether to ignore it, or start contributing

The journal Nature published a study comparing the accuracy of scientific articles in Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. photo: Wikipedia

Alexander M.C. Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, has spent hours and hours wading through Wikipedia, which has become the Internet's hottest information source. Like thousands of his colleagues, he has turned to the open-source encyclopedia for timely information and trivia; unlike most of his peers, he has, from time to time, contributed his own expertise to the site.

But to Wikipedia's legions of ardent amateur editors, Mr. Halavais may be best remembered as a troll.

Two years ago, when he was teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the professor hatched a plan designed to undermine the site's veracity — which, at that time, had gone largely unchallenged by scholars. Adopting the pseudonym "Dr. al-Halawi" and billing himself as a "visiting lecturer in law, Jesus College, Oxford University," Mr. Halavais snuck onto Wikipedia and slipped 13 errors into its various articles. He knew that no one would check his persona's credentials: Anyone can add material to the encyclopedia's entries without having to show any proof of expertise.

Some of the errata he inserted — like a claim that Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, had made Syracuse, N.Y., his home for four years — seemed entirely credible. Some — like an Oscar for film editing that Mr. Halavais awarded to The Rescuers Down Under, an animated Disney film — were more obviously false, and easier to fact-check. And others were downright odd: In an obscure article on a short-lived political party in New Brunswick, the professor wrote of a politician felled by "a very public scandal relating to an official Party event at which cocaine and prostitutes were made available."

Mr. Halavais expected some of his fabrications to languish online for some time. Like many academics, he was skeptical about a mob-edited publication that called itself an authoritative encyclopedia. But less than three hours after he posted them, all of his false facts had been deleted, thanks to the vigilance of Wikipedia editors who regularly check a page on the Web site that displays recently updated entries. On Dr. al-Halawi's "user talk" page, one Wikipedian pleaded with him to "refrain from writing nonsense articles and falsifying information."

Mr. Halavais realized that the jig was up.

Writing about the experiment on his blog (http://alex .halavais.net), Mr. Halavais argued that a more determined "troll" — in Web-forum parlance, a poster who contributes only inflammatory or disruptive content — could have done a better job of slipping mistakes into the encyclopedia. But he said he was "impressed" by Wikipedia participants' ability to root out his fabrications. Since then several other high-profile studies have confirmed that the site does a fairly good job at getting its facts straight — particularly in articles on science, an area where Wikipedia excels.

Among academics, however, Wikipedia continues to receive mixed — and often failing — grades. Wikipedia's supporters often portray the site as a brave new world in which scholars can rub elbows with the general public. But doubters of the approach — and in academe, there are many — say Wikipedia devalues the notion of expertise itself.

Perhaps because of the site's refusal to give professors or other experts priority — and because of an editing process that can resemble a free-for-all — a clear preponderance of Wikipedia's contents has been written by people outside academe. In fact, the dearth of scholarly contributions to the site has prompted one prominent former Wikipedian — Larry Sanger, one of the site's co-founders — to start an alternative online encyclopedia, vetted by experts.

Perhaps the biggest and most well-known attempt to grade the quality of Wikipedia was done last year by the journal Nature, which published a study comparing the accuracy of scientific articles in Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Staff members at the journal chose articles from each reference work and sent them to a panel of experts in the respective fields, who reviewed the texts for factual accuracy, misleading statements, and key omissions. The reviewers found, somewhat surprisingly, that Wikipedia was playing in Britannica's ballpark: An average Britannica article had about three errors, while a typical Wikipedia post on the same subject had about four.

But as the encyclopedia's popularity continues to grow, some professors are calling on scholars to contribute articles to Wikipedia, or at least to hone less-than-inspiring entries in the site's vast and growing collection. Those scholars' take is simple: If you can't beat the Wikipedians, join 'em.

Proponents of that strategy showed up in force at Wikimania, the annual meeting for Wikipedia contributors, a three-day event held in August at Harvard University. Leaders of Wikipedia said there that they had turned their attention to increasing the accuracy of information on the Web site, announcing several policies intended to prevent editorial vandalism and to improve or erase Wikipedia's least-trusted entries. "We can no longer feel satisfied and happy when we see these numbers going up," said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's other co-founder, referring to the site's ever-expanding base of articles. "We should continue to turn our attention away from growth and towards quality."

Still, not all of Wikipedia's most-active contributors want academics in their club. They argue that an army of hobbyists, teenagers, and even the occasional troll can create a more comprehensive, more useful, and possibly even more accurate resource than can be found in the ivied halls.

Read the original article in full at The Chronicle of Higher Education

As questions about the accuracy of the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia persist, academics are split on whether to ignore it, or start contributing.

Copyfight

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 23:37:17 +0000

Internet freedom comes of age

Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are two of the organizations leading the "copyfight". photo: Rob Maguire

As many a policy wonk/ green lobbyist/aging ex-frontman of the Boomtown Rats will tell you, there comes a time in the life of a political rebel when you cut your hair, put on a tie, put down the placard and walk into the building. Entering the corridors of power to make your case may involve a little compromise of your principles, but that's all part of growing up.

Similarly, it seems, the internet is entering a new age of responsibility. Where once the out-of-control look seemed sexy – all off-the-cuff and emergent in an oversized Grateful Dead t-shirt – now as the World Wide Web is increasingly finding its place in polite, and profitable, society, something a little more refined is in order. Something with a degree of self-control.

Before November's World Summit of the Information Society in Tunis, the idea that the internet could be controlled was anathema to the "network of ends". Then when Google went into China last month, it cast light into the shadowy corners of a regime bent on censoring the net and controlling the packets of data that pass between its citizens and the outside world, to perpetuate its iron grip over a nation by depriving them of information. The image of internet control that was projected back out to the rest of the world spurred the US Congress to draft the Global Internet Freedom Bill, bringing the impulse to legislate into the open.

But legislation to harness the net's unstoppable flow of information has been drafted, away from the public eye, ever since powerful rightsholder lobbies realised that the internet's potential to distribute information at zero cost had grave implications for the way they did business.

A disparate group of campaigners has been the only voice for internet freedom in this often rarefied and remote debate. Sitting in on working groups in forgotten corners of Brussels, attending endless hearings of court cases in Washington, it has marked up both defeats and successes in the quest to keep technological innovation in the information age free from inappropriate constraints pursued by rightsholder groups.

In January 2003, creative commons frontman Lawrence Lessig failed to persuade the US Supreme Court that extending the period of copyright to nearly a century hinders the progress of science and the useful arts. The case against copyright term extension is now being fought by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive on free speech grounds.

In May 2005, the Electronic Frontier Foundation successfully persuaded the DC Circuit Court of Appeals that a ruling by the Federal Communications Commission to disable digital recordings of television broadcasts and criminalize the sale of hardware that did not conform to the specifications of rightsholder groups was beyond the organization's remit. Following the US ruling's defeat, a similar piece of legislation developed by the Digital Video Broadcasting project is now making its way through Brussels.

In June 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that Grokster, the manufacturer of the peer-to-peer networking service Morpheus, was liable for copyright infringement that took place over its network. This reversed the precedent set by the famous Sony Betamax case against the video recorders, which decided that technologists working in the information field were free to create new ways of distributing and copying information so long as their inventions had significant non-copyright-infringing uses.

In July 2005, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject a European Commission recommendation to allow patents on software code, a development that could have led to the demise of free and open source software and the fossilisation of one of the most dynamic, innovative industries in "new Europe".

As these cases show, the fight between internet freedom and intellectual property law – the "copyfight" – is a never-ending one. Many characterise its protagonists as techno-utopians, or geeks worried that someone might take their toys away. But as the narrative of control over internet freedom joins the mainstream, it is worth remembering how long, and against what adversaries, the fight has been fought up until now.

The movement to keep the internet free will be the defining fight in the information age, just as the environmental movement is the defining fight of the industrial age. As our physical make-up is reduced to a string of ones and zeros, and knowledge replaces property and labour as the means of production, democratic access to information becomes a basic civil right.

The copyfight has many parallels with the early environmental movement. Valid interest in access to information unhindered by intellectual property law is diverse – from librarians to scientists to developing world campaigners fighting for the right to distribute lifesaving generic antiretrovirals in Africa. These parties are beginning to organise together, as shown by Consumers International's recent condemnation of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization's pursuit of tighter intellectual property controls. Just as peace campaigners joined with conservationists, animal rights activists with anti-nuclear protesters, so will the people who fight on the fringes of the information war join forces.

Copyfighters, like environmentalists, seek to protect a complex ecology. The abolition of copyright and patent law is not the goal of these defenders of internet freedom – they merely seek a balance between the needs of creators to profit from their work and the needs of the public eventually to own it. As players in the knowledge economy continue to prospect in the pool of collective wisdom, copyfighters ask only that they do not over-farm.

Now that the fight for internet freedom has moved from the corporate to the political stage, it is likely to gain more exposure and more support. But it should be noted that the arguments used in this fight – such as freedom of speech and transparency of government – are similar to those used in the copyfight.

On 14 February, Condoleeza Rice announced a Global Internet Freedom Task Force. It will "consider the foreign policy aspects of internet freedom, including the use of technology to restrict access to political content and…efforts to modify internet governance structures in order to restrict the free flow of information." The fight for internet freedom has finally entered the corridors of power. Let's hope it remembers its roots.

Originally published on OpenDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons Licence.

As the corridors of power resound with debate about internet control, Becky Hogge champions the internet freedom movement.

India Passes New Patent Law: Price of AIDS Drugs Expected to Soar

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 09:53:05 +0000

India's government passed a controversial patent law last week making it illegal for domestic firms to produce cheap generic copies of AIDS drugs developed by multinational pharmaceutical firms.

As a New York Times report suggests, the law has the potential to cut the supply of cheap generic AIDS drugs to millions in the developing world who rely on India as a supplier.

The patent law changes result from the nation's membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and India's commitments to the WTO's TRIPs agreement (Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). The TRIPs agreement obliges members to change their national patent rules in order to comply with the WTO standards.

An editorial in Nairobi's Nation blasts the TRIPs agreement, claiming that it hinders Africa's socioeconomic development and serves as a tool for multinational firms from the industrialized countries to "continue to reap huge profits."

It has been suggested by Nation that the cost of AIDS drugs in Kenya is likely to soar due to the new Indian patent laws. Currently, Kenyans pay approximately $20 US for generic drugs from India, while the cost of the patented versions from multinational pharmaceutical firms cost around $395 US.

The Nation (Nairobi):WTO Policy a Blow to Anti-Aids Drive

Business Week:Groups Slam Indian Passage of Patent Law

New York Times:India Tightens Law, Alarming Advocates for AIDS Patients

Revaluing Value

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:01:24 +0000

The Condition of Copyright

The Department of Behavioural Investigation's No Copyright Seal.

Copyright laws have always been a contentious issue. These laws are designed to provide economic protection for persons' and businesses' "intellectual property", which is defined by the World Intellectual Property Organization as "…creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce." Copyright is designed for inventors, artists, writers, and musicians to ensure that they are compensated monetarily when their work is reproduced and/or distributed. As it applies to art, copyright reinforces the value of authenticity. It ensures that a particular image or sound can be designated as the original (i.e. authentic), and that any reproduction of these items will be designated as a copy. This hierarchy establishes the value of the original as the point of reference by which the value of a reproduction is determined. This relies on a scarcity model, which means that if there is more of something, it is less valuable in general. This gives the object a capital and hence economic value. Copyright laws rely on this presumption, and posit that the value of an idea is primarily measured in economic terms.

As tools for the reproduction and distribution of art become more available, this value has to be reformulated to account for the changing needs of artists and their audiences. In many cases artists are producing work in which the copy is of primary importance, or in which there is no original proposed at all. There is a difference in how such a product is valued - rather than valuing it as an object that can be sold, and therefore benefited from monetarily, the object's value lies in how it is distributed and used. If I write a book and I decide that it is more important for people to read the book than to pay for it, I formulate the value of the book as one of information. In a broader sense, I privilege the value of the book's content entering the public sphere rather than the potential monetary gains of its distribution. Copyright as it exists today is unable to account for these different expressions of value. It is diametrically opposed to valuing an object differently because it is designed to formulate value only in terms of ownership and authenticity. Intellectual property must be reevaluated and revalued by the artists whose work challenges its principles.

Artists Revaluing Copyright

by Max Liboiron

For artists who believe that copyrighting their work restricts viewers' access to it, and that accessibility is central to the success of their art, there exists a "No Copyright Seal." The No Copyright Seal can be obtained from a website and once put on a piece of intellectual property, "[ensures] that it cannot be copyrighted by any person, business or organization; not even you."

The seal itself comes from an interesting place: the Department of Behavioural Investigation, whose mission is "to provide everyone the opportunity to voice their dissent, dissatisfaction and disgust with their government, their community, and their daily lives." Sound strange? The DBI is actually a continuing art project that functions as a satirical yet serviceable institution (of the anti-institutional variety). Created by Lawrence Mesich, the DBI operates as a temporary office in art galleries, and sponsors workshops, instructional videos, and activity kits for viewers to use to protest issues such as community garbage, institutional uses of space, or surveillance cameras and privacy infringement. The pieces only operate if "volunteers" are copying and carrying out the plans outlined by the DBI. Not only is the DBI copyright free, it needs to be copyright free in order to function.

There are now multitudes of art and music projects that are based on anti-copyright ideas.
The band Negativland, which is just as much a conceptual art piece as a band, operates by appropriating sound, image, and text in a such a way as to just barely miss the requirement of fair use. They exist in the grey area of copyright laws in order to comment on both the laws themselves and the source materials they have appropriated. The term "culture-jamming" was originally coined by the group to explain their appropriation process. They now have a radio show called "Over the Edge" where listeners can "deposit their programming into the mix" by calling in. Negativland also "manages" the Intellectual property Fund of ®™ark (read: Art Mark). ®™ark an activist institution much like the DBI made by the same people who head The Yes Men (see November 6, 2004 issue), which funds "corporate products sabotage and intellectual property disobedience."

In an atmosphere of art and digital culture that is beginning to blur the boundaries between the gallery and the public sphere, and, more specifically, using appropriation and interaction as some of its primary functions, the idea of strict copyright is not only contradictory and inappropriate, but is also becoming cannon fodder for subject matter.

The DBI currently has a temporary office at The Staller Gallery at Stonybrook University, NY from March 5 to April 9, 2005.
You can get your No Copyright Seal at http://emedia.art.sunysb.edu/lawrence/dbimo.html

Negativland will play at "Open Ears," a festival of music and sound to be held in Kitchener, Ontario, from April 6 to May 1, 2005. Information on how to contribute to Over the Edge can be found at http://www.negativland.com/ote_live/

Max Liboiron looks at the Department of Behavioural Investigation's anti-copyright art movement.

Canada to See Internet Levy?

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 18:53:44 +0000

In early November 2004, the standing committee on Canadian Heritage resubmitted its recommendations for updating the Copyright Act of 1998 and ratifying the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaty. Among the recommendations is the institution of an Internet "levy." The levy, paid by all Internet users, would go to a collecting society similar to CanCopy. The idea, says the committee, is that everything on the Internet is created — and thus copyrighted — by someone. The collecting society would gather money for copyright owners in exchange for the use of their material.

In comments that appeared in the Globe and Mail on November 11, 2004, copyright lawyers stated that if these changes are made into law, "You will not even be able to own your own wedding pictures or save a Web page without paying for it." Copyright laws currently regulate technologies used to make and distribute copies.

Some say that while an Internet levy is well-intentioned, it ignores the basic fact that the Internet functions as a medium for the inexpensive transfer of large amounts of information.

A technology news commentator for BoingBoing.net wrote, "The approach that WIPO took in regulating the net was to create a set of rules that tried to make the Internet act more like radio, or TV, or photocopiers — like all the things that it had already made rules for. The WIPO approach treated the ease of copying on the net as a bug and set out to fix it."

Chris Brand, a Vancouver software developer, launched a petition for users' rights in April 2004, calling for Parliament to respect public rights in the Copyright Act.

» Globe and Mail: Ottawa's copyright plans wrongheaded, experts say

» Boing Boing: Canada wants an internet lvy – fight back!

» Copyright Act ( R.S. 1985, c. C-42 )

» Petition for Users' Rights

Plunderphonics

Thu, 27 May 2004 22:25:32 +0000

DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album

Mix the Beatles' The White Album with rapper Jay-Z's Black Album and what do you get? DJ Danger Mouse's experimental CD, The Grey Album. You also get a cease-and-desist order from EMI Music. Tracks from the 3000 now-illegal copies of this CD have spawned countless downloads and are just one of hundreds of examples in the current debate over what is art and what is piracy.

Canadian artist John Oswald has made a career out of walking that line. He's been plundering sound archives since the early 1970s, when he began with the recorded works (and sanction) of William S. Burroughs. But Oswald specifies that it must be "blatant ... There's a lot of samplepocketing, parroting, plagiarism and tune thievery going on these days which is not what we're doing." Instead, Oswald plays with "transformed but still recognizable" audio quotations, delighting in their interaction.

Consider the same situation in print. If I wanted to write a book out of a thousand or so fused quotations, as Oswald's Plexure album is made with audioclips, I would put in a big fat bibliography or more footnotes than T.S. Eliot. Readable? Not so much; but legal? Certainly. In sound art, however, Oswald points out that creating such a "scholarly version" of Plexure would require negotiating "over a thousand clearances, and any one that is not obtainable would compromise the project." Is there no other way to create an audio footnote or sidestep sonic quotation marks?

Copyright showed up in the original American constitution, derived from England's 1709 Statute of Anne: for the encouragement of learning. The American exhibit Illegal Art points out the irony that copyright was "originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas, but is now being used to stifle it." Indeed, "if the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have existed." Canonical greats like Bach or Shakespeare would also have some answering to do.

Importantly, copyright is a commodity. Its tradability means that it is always the copyright holders, who may or may not be the artists, whose rights are protected. Financial and creative protection for artists become just financial interest protection for copyright purchasers.

What is most valued here? The right to make money off your own work? The right to determine who else is making money off your work? The right to have maximum influence over interpretation of your work, or to stave off its subversion?

There are two debates here. One is the question of what requires protection--creative production or the money it can generate. The second is between different conceptions of art. As Martin Cloonan, chair of the anti-censorship group Freemuse and Head of the University of Glasgow's Department of Adult and Continuing Education recently wrote: "One [conception] sees creativity as essentially social in nature and thus asserts that the rights of the public (or collective) are paramount...[T]he public's right to knowledge, to access the thoughts and deeds of others, is highly prized."

That's the belief of media project the DBI, propagators of the No Copyright Seal. Arguing that intellectual property concepts can only restrict the flow of info and ideas, the Department of Behavioural Investigation offers the seal to ensure that what it stamps can't be copyrighted by anyone, ever.

On the other hand, you could see "creation as an individualistic act where the rights of the artist (as vested in the copyright holder) are paramount. Here the right of the original artist is held to be paramount."

Between those polarized versions of art are the vast grey areas in which we find Oswald or DJ Danger Mouse, mucking around in other people's art to create artifacts anew.

So say the plunderers. Could we get a comment from the plundered?

William S. Burroughs, Elektra and The Grateful Dead, for example, have respected or requested that Oswald use their work. For his 1999 "sonic archeology" project Disembodied Voice, rights were not just given but the plundering project was actually commissioned. In this case, Oswald used pianist Glenn Gould's acclaimed recordings of The Goldberg Variations. What he used though, was not the sound of the piano, but of Gould himself, inadvertently humming along. Oswald isolated, enhanced, and in some parts replicated Gould's unconscious vocals and The National Ballet of Canada then danced to the virtuoso's haunting hum instead of his familiar piano performance.

At the other extreme, though, is Oswald's 1990 album Plunderphonic, which the recording industry demanded be destroyed. Because most looted work is represented by record labels, it is difficult to find artist to artist dialogue on the subject, but it is clear in this case that the industry was acting on the request of plundered artist Michael Jackson. No doubt the album's cover, which morphed an image of Jackson's body with that of a naked white woman, caused some offence.

Artistic integrity is certainly up for debate, but it is unfortunate that it takes place mostly in the courts and through sharply worded letters of warning to sound artists. The grey areas of intellectual property law leave room for experimentation and redefinition but the atmosphere is discouraging and it takes a certain amount of audacity to break through.

- by Jane Henderson -

Int'l News: Software Patents, Immigrant Warriors, Arms in Africa

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 13:51:53 +0000

Fight over Software Patents Rekindled in Europe

Programmers protest software patents in Brussels. Photo: Indymedia Belgium

Around 400 programmers took to the streets in Brussels last week to protest proposed software patent legislation in the European Union. During the week, over 2,700 web sites replaced their front pages with a message protesting software patents.

Companies like IBM and Microsoft, which support software patent legislation, argue that patents are necessary to encourage innovation. In the US, large corporations make extensive use of software patents to protect their interests.
Critics, however, argue that software patents hinder innovation by making certain ideas off limits to small software developers. British Telecom, for example, holds a patent on the use of links in conjunction with a dialup network connection. If the patent were enforced, the company would have the right to demand a licensing fee from any company that wrote software to access the world wide web, or provided access to the web via a dialup connection.

There are currently over 30,000 software patents filed in Europe; many small software companies and independent programmers are claiming that they will be obligated to look through the entire list of patents before engaging in any new projects, effectively stifling innovation.

But according to well-known programmer and Free Software advocate Richard Stallman, large corporations have the resources and clout to avoid paying licensing fees. Companies like IBM, he argues, have a large number of patents, and can use these as leverage to avoid having to pay licensing fees for access to other patents. (Indymedia UK, Indymedia Belgium) --Dru Oja Jay

» Richard Stallman: Software patents – Obstacles to software development

» Indymedia UK: Netwide Protests against EU Software Patents Bring Temporary Victory

* * *

Thousands of Non-citizens Serving in US Armed Forces

Many of the soldiers serving in the US armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are not US citizens. According to the Pentagon, 37,401 non-citizens are currently serving as active duty soldiers. A US Department of Defence spokesperson said that "the military services have processes and programs in place to help service members expedite their citizenship". Since September 11th, 2001, it has become increasingly difficult for many immigrants to apply for US citizenship.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, British MP George Galloway accused the US of continuing a "long tradition of using its underclass as cannon fodder." During Vietnam "the proportion of blacks in the army was 40%, while in the US population the number of blacks was a quarter of that... nothing has changed," he said. (Al Jazeera) --Dru Oja Jay

» Al Jazeera: US attacked over green card soldiers

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Reporters Sans Frontières Releases Press Freedom Index

Jourralist advocacy group Reporters sans Frontières (Reporters without Borders) recently released the first systematic index of press freedoms. Canada ranked a close fifth behind Finland, Iceland, Norway and the Netherlands.
Based on a questionnaire distributed to foreign and local journalists worldwide, the index granted each country a score based on several criteria, including violence against journalists, state interventions and censorship practices. The index does not take professional standards or ethical practices into account. (Reporters Sans Frontières) --Dru Oja Jay

» Reporters Sans Frontières: Reporters Without Borders publishes the first worldwide press freedom index

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Venezuela to Stage "Fight" at WTO

Victor Alvarez, Venezuela's Chief trade negotiator, says that Venezuela will propose that "no new commitments be adopted" at World Trade Organization negotiations next week in Cancún. "It makes no sense for countries like ours to add new points to the WTO agenda when there's such a long list of issues that haven't been satisfied," said Alvarez.

Along with many other developing countries, Venezuela is insisting that Europe and the United States remove the estimated $300 billion in subsidies that their governments give farmers annually before other negotiations can be considered. Poor countries say that these subsidies make it impossible for them to compete in international markets. (Reuters) --Dru Oja Jay

» Reuters: Say no at WTO, Venezuela tells developing nations

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British Arms Exports to Africa Double

According to a report released by the Campaign Against Arms Trade, a British activist group, arms exports from British countries to Africa have doubled over the last three years. (Observer) --Dru Oja Jay

» Observer: British arms sales to Africa soar