50.000 records with personal data of beer drikers put on danger

It has been reported that unprotected file with 50.000 e-mail addresses of beer drinkers was found on the server of the web agency which takes care on Internet marketing of Zywiec , one of the biggest beer producers in Poland and, in my opinion, the best one in Poland. The file was accessible via web browser so anyone could pop in and just copy 50.000 addresses of customers who enjoy beer drinking and are interested in marketing activities. Certainly, the database is worth some money. Under Polish data protection law (patterned upon Data Protection Directive) such negligence is subject to criminal sanctions ranging up even to two years of imprisonment and some administrative measures.

Average = 1 patent application / 1 million Poles

It has been reported that Polish citizens submitted 40 European patent applications last year. Taking into account that our country has almost 40 millions of citizens we proudly reach level of 1 (one) patent application for 1.000.000 (one million) people. Funny, isn’t ? But I’m not joking …

Why it's so bad ? The entrepreneurs jointly say: the European patent system is too expensive for SME, especially from new EU members, and the procedure lasts too long. Thats true.

Maybe the proposal of improving European patent system announced by the European Commission will help our inventors, but I’m rather skeptical. Many of them don’t understand consultation paper – it’s available only in English and French. Responses also have to be in one of these languages so probably many voices remain unheard. Polish IT sector have already protested against that.

If you follow this link to Rzeczpospolita newspaper (non subscription needed) and click on the image at the left upper corner there are some statistics of patent activity in the PCT procedure, according to which Polish inventors applied for patents 79 times in year 2005 (comparing for example with 13.000 German applications) .

Life Science Cracow conference

Conference Life Science Cracow is organized by CITTRU UJ ( Jagiellonian University Tech Transfer Office) and it's aimed at promoting Cracow as a place for establishing a business based on biotechnology. I’ve registered as a participant, hope it will be fruitful. If you feel you’d like to come, please visit CITTRU’s web page and register. What is for sure – Krakow is the best place to invest in biotechnology - there are 12 universities here including 2 renowned biotech faculties, special economical zone (tax exemptions) and new legal instruments for R&D activities (tax deductions).