After digesting all the diplomatic slang at WIPO, a bit of nonsense really soothes the ear and eye. Today I stumbled upon an article on spiegel.de (in German) about three MIT students who have finally written the program every academic dreams about: An automatic research paper generator.

SCIgen is extremely easy to use. It just asks for one or several author's names. When you then hit "Generate", an article appears that just sounds great - but is guaranteed to make no sense at all. Here's the start of one I got:

SCSI Disks Considered Harmful Johannes T. Unger and Kristian Sand Abstract

"Fuzzy" algorithms and agents have garnered profound interest from both statisticians and analysts in the last several years [7]. In this work, we prove the exploration of Scheme. In this position paper, we confirm not only that superpages can be made multimodal, authenticated, and adaptive, but that the same is true for 802.11 mesh networks.

If you have ever suffered from overblown science lingo, you'll love sentences like " Reality aside, we would like to synthesize a model for how our approach might behave in theory." The program even generates graphics and a list of the works used. ("Raman, K. Bungo: Study of Internet QoS. In POT the Conference on Omniscient, Compact Methodologies (Jan. 2004).")

Be warned: Though actually reading these automatically produced texts seems relaxing at first, it will eventually turn your brain to mush. Feels good, though. And it's GPL software too!

Those delegations exclusively dedicated to the well-being of their country's rightsholder industries have made this IIM meeting end in extreme deadlock: The only report there will be is to be the delegation statements of the past three IIM meetings.

The US delegation is hell-bent on destroying the Development Agenda before it is even conceived. Japan is helping them (I should have asked the Japanese delegations if all or only a part of their salary is paid by Sony). The EU and Canada are usually aligning themselves with these Enemies of Development (well, what else is one to call this unholy alliance?). Though sometimes putting on a compromising face, they falter at the slightest grumble from the US.

Together with some of the comments ascribed to one of the German delegates, which referred to development being "a disease that is spreading all over Europe", this gives a rather clear picture. Industrialised countries, with the US leading the way, Japan restating US positions and the EU whimpering behind, will never voluntarily give a single sliver of their countries' industries' entrenched superior position in intellectual exclusion rights.

If you live in one of the G8 countries, which only weeks ago in Gleneagles made high-flying statements about their commmitment to development: Don't believe a word they tell you. If there is to be a more just order concerning copyrights and patents, it is not going to come from these countries.

The deadlock was so complete that the meeting had to be adjourned. A draft report will be available electronically on 15 August. Then comments can be made until 31 August. The meeting will then be resumed to adopt the report some time first week of September. This is going to be tough.