miscellaneous factZ

I’ve added a reasonably detailed treatment of Stackelberg Competition to the Atlas (of Economic Models).

The second (or third depending on how you are counting) Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) which is organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation and which I help coordinate is on tomorrow at LSE in London.

There are a lot of good sessions and so if you are interested in open knowledge and have Saturday free why not come along.

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking with Nate Olson at the latest Oxford Geek Night on the subject of Open Knowledge and Componentization. Here’s the blurb:

Componentization on a large scale (such as in the Debian ‘apt’ packaging system) has allowed large software projects to be amazingly productive through their use of a decentralised, collaborative, incremental development process. Componentization works so well because it allows us to ‘divide and conquer’ the organizational and conceptual problems of highly complex systems. Given this, what are the possibilities (and problems) of this approach for knowledge generally? How do we best design “knowledge APIs”, discover and distribute existing resources, and recombine decentralised datasets? In this talk we’ll discuss the answers to (some of) these questions focusing particularly on the role the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network can play.

So, if you’re in the Oxford vicinity and interested in Open Knowledge and related matters (there’s a good line-up of other speakers including Denise Wilton of moo.com) why not drop in to the Jericho Tavern around 7.30pm tomorrow evening.

Over Christmas I’ve had some spare time. This has permitted me to get the Atlas of Economics Models off the ground. This is a project I’ve been thinking about for some years, first motivated really by the experience of trying to discover what variations had been done on the basic Hotelling-line model of ’spatial’ product differentiation and competition (previous allusion earlier in the Autumn here).

So what is the Atlas supposed to be? From the front page:

The Atlas of Economic Models is a comprehensive list of the basic ‘building-block’ models used by economists. It also includes additional information, for example worked out analytical solutions to special cases and details as to how models inter-relate (hence the ‘Atlas’ in the title). More about the atlas can be found on the about page about page.

Other important features of the Atlas are that it is:

• Community Editable: the Atlas is a community-based project with most content editable by anyone who wishes to contribute. Specifically we’re managing the content in a wiki and to edit any given page all you need to do is click on the edit button at the bottom of that page.
• Openly Licensed: all content is openly licensed. That is all material is made available under a license that permits it to be freely used, reused, shared and redistributed by others. Further details on the license page.

As yet, it obviously does not have much content but that should be gradually remedied over the coming months. And if you’re economically inclined why not head over there and help out …

I record briefly my experience resolving this issue in case it helps others. As background I note that I use svk to allow local commit and replay for some of the subversion repos I use and over the last week I’d started encountering problems when trying to svk sync on one of these receiving the following error message:

Bad URL passed to RA layer: Malformed URL for repository

The solution to this is the following patch provided by Peter Werner to the svk-devel list a few days ago:

-------------- next part --------------
--- SVN-Mirror-0.73.orig/lib/SVN/Mirror/Ra.pm 2007-03-19 23:59:12.000000000 +0100
+++ SVN-Mirror-0.73/lib/SVN/Mirror/Ra.pm  2007-10-07 08:37:36.000000000 +0200
@@ -168,6 +168,9 @@
     $self->{config} ||= SVN::Core::config_get_config(undef, $self->{pool});
     $self->{auth} ||= $self->_new_auth;

+    # escape URI (% is already escaped)
+    $arg{'url'} =~ s/([^-_:.%\/a-zA-Z0-9])/sprintf("%%%02X", ord($1))/eg if defined $arg{'url'};
+
     SVN::Ra->new( url => $self->{rsource},
      auth => $self->{auth},
      config => $self->{config},

In addition to this solution below I report the process by which I discovered it. I do this as it provides an interesting case study of the way that open source communities work, and particularly how ‘user-driven bug-fixing’ happens.

1. Searching on the web turned up a variety of earlier reports [1][2][3] of this issue which it seemed related to having a spaces in svn url names (see [1.1] and [2] in particular). This seemed plausible as a source of the error as it occurred after someone had added a directory with spaces in it to the repository (a very rare occurrence).
2. This issue did not seem to occur for all users and CLK (the maintainer) suggested upgrading SVN::Mirror to 0.73. [2.1]
3. This I did but the bug was still there (as other users had noted [2.2]) however the source now seemed to be pinpointed as being in the SVN::Mirror perl module. Unfortunately I’m not a perl hacker …
4. Finally a hand search of the svk lists turned up a post from less than a week ago [4] (obviously too recent for Google to have picked up yet as I had earlier done a specific search for the error name over the svk lists …). In addition to reporting the problem this mail provided a 2 liner patch to a specific perl module. I applied this patch, tried svk sync and hey presto! the bug was gone.

The issue progressed from an unconfirmed one whose aetiology was unclear [1], to a confirmed one whose cause was fairly well known [2] (though not its source in code), solutions were suggested and tested by users [2.1, 2.2], the issue remained unresolved for several more months with the fix eventually provided by an independent user to the list [4].

It is also especially noteworthy that much of this tracking down was only possible because the software involved was open enabling users to poke around to see what was wrong. For example, tying the bug to spaces in the underlying repository url resulted from the original reporter of the issue hand-modifying a svn source file so as to make the error message more verbose [1.1] — something which is clearly only possible if the code is open.

• [1]:http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/svk-devel/2007-January/000570.html
• [1.1]:http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/svk-devel/2007-January/000571.html
• [2]: http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/svk-devel/2007-March/000755.html
• [2.1]: http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/svk-devel/2007-March/000757.html
• [2.2]: http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/svk-devel/2007-March/000766.html
• [3]: http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/svk-devel/2007-June/000944.html
• [4]: http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/svk-devel/2007-October/001065.html

Back in March Lillian Edwards was kind enough to ask me to come and give a talk about ‘open knowledge’ at a Law and Web 2.0 conference she was planning for the Autumn. As a result, yesterday I found myself at Herbert Smith’s London offices for the SCL’s “Law 2.0? : New Speech, New Property, New Identity” conference presenting on Openness, Web 2.0 and the Ethic of Sharing. The full text of my talk can be found below, with companion slides here.

1. Introduction

One of the first printed texts of which we have record is a copy of the Buddhist Diamond sutra produced in China around 868AD. In it can be found the dedication: “for universal free distribution”. Clearly, the idea of open knowledge, that is knowledge you are free to use, reuse and redistribute, has been present since humanity first began to formally transmit and share ideas. It is also likely that the urge to keep ideas secret, particularly those that had ‘commercial’ value, is equally old.

With the development of trade and technology, particularly during the Renaissance in Europe, these parallel approaches of openness and secrecy continued to evolve but the tension between them also increased. With the introduction of formal monopoly rights such as patents and copyrights during the sixteenth and seventeenth century there was now a halfway house of sorts whereby the monopoly (and the associated profits) of secrecy was combined with openness in the form of the disclosure of the work.

These alternatives of openness, secrecy and state-sanctioned monopoly have stayed with us down to the present day; while most of our ideas, particularly cultural ones, are ‘public domain’, free for anyone to use and reuse, a significant portion of the intellectual works and products created by the economies of the world are protected either by some form of intellectual property rights or by secrecy — or by both, as is the case with most proprietary computer software for example.

However there have also been considerable changes. On the one hand there has been a large increase, particularly over the last thirty to forty years, in the scope and duration of intellectual property rights. On the other hand, and at the same time, especially in recent years, we have seen the rise of self-consciously open models of innovation, particularly in software where the ‘copyleft’ approach to knowledge licensing first arose in the 1980s.

However the most significant of all changes underlies these others, for it is the change in the role of knowledge in society and the economy. Terms such as the ‘information age’ or the ‘knowledge economy’ are now commonplace and hard statistics point to the fact that in most western economies the information-based service sector is now more important than manufacturing. These changes in turn result from, or at least depend upon, a revolution in communication and computer technologies that has greatly reduced the cost of production, distribution and manipulation of knowledge. Whole industries which neither existed nor were imagined fifty, and possibly even twenty, years ago have grown up which exploit these new-found possibilities.

These are vast changes and they have profound implications for the production and dissemination of knowledge, as well as for their regulation and support by government. However, clearly addressing all of these implications is impossible and so in this talk I’m going to focus on giving a brief overview of the main ways that open approaches to knowledge production and distribution can deliver benefit to society.

2. Access and Use

Free, unencumbered access to a piece of knowledge whether it be a film or a database, is the most obvious way that openness delivers benefits. Because it is cheaper and easier to get hold of open knowledge it may be much more widely used than it would otherwise. Each such extra user, who gains access because open knowledge is cheaper or easier to get hold of than ‘closed’ knowledge, derives a benefit that increase the well-being of society.

Let me give a few examples of how profound these effects may be.

The first two are taken from a recent book by William St Clair entitled the Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.

In 1817 the publisher Sherwood put on sale printed copies of the manuscript of Wat Tyler a verse drama written by Southey in the early 1790s when he was briefly a republican radical.

Southey applied for an injunction and damages for breach of copyright. However, while it was undoubted he was the owner of the work, as the Lord Chancellor Eldon declared it was uncertain whether he retained a copyright. For under English law at the time, if the book were ‘injurious’ its intellectual property could not be protected by the courts and its copyright would be, in effect, void. Unable to enforce his copyright and left only with the option of suing for seditious libel Southey retired from the scene leaving the field open for ‘pirates’. As St Clair points out this provides us with a wonderful natural experiment:

Southey’s `Wat Tyler’, all pirated. (Source: St Clair, Table 16.1 p. 318)

Notes: ^a Isis, 7 July 1832; ^b Southey, Life iv 237; ^c Advertisements for Watson’s list 1830s and perhaps later, Ac.; ^d Quoted by Altick 352.

Date	Edition	Price (shillings)	Production
1817	Normal price of a book of this length	10.15	500 or 1000
1817	Sherwood’s editions	2	na
1817	Hone’s Editions with explanatory notes	1	na
1817	Fairburn’s Editions	1	na
1817	Bailey’s edition	1	na
1817	Carlile’s editiona	na	20000 sold
1817	Sherwin’s edition	0.25	na
	Another Sherwin Edition	0.16	na
Total immediate saleb		Believed to be ~60000
c.1817	Fordyce of Newcastle’s Edition	na	na
1830s	Watson’s edition	0.18	na
1830s	Cousin’s editions	0.16 post free	na
1840s	Cleave’s editions	0.16	na
1850s	Sales in Manchesterc	na	450 a week

As a result Wat Tyler, which Southey later refused to have printed in his collected works, sold 2 to 3 times as many as all his other works combined. A similar tale surrounds Shelley’s Queen Mab and Byron’s Don Juan.

Turning to a rather different and more recent example we have the case of pharmaceuticals — one of the most hotly contested areas in the access to knowledge debate. In a paper which appeared in the American Economic Review just this year, Chaudhuri, Goldberg and Jia attempted to estimate the impact of introducing product patents into one segment of the Indian pharmaceutical markets. Their results are summarized in the following table.

Estimated Impact of the Introduction of Product Patents for Fluoroquinolone Antibiotics in India as a result of TRIPS requirement of Pharmaceutical Product Patents

Loss Scenario	Consumer Losses	Domestic Producer Losses	Foreign Producer Gains
Medium (no upward price adjustments as a result of product withdrawals)	-495	-50	9.4

There are two main points to note. First, the benefits of open access are very large. Specifically around $500 million dollars per year. Second it shows clearly that this is not a zero-sum game. When prices are raised (due to patents for examples) the losses to consumers are larger than the gains of producers. In this case the asymmetry is particularly pronounced with external producer gains (these will be the firms who actually own the patents) around a 45th of the consumer losses — $10 million versus $450 million.

3. Production

While the benefits of openness for users are obvious, by contrast, the benefits for production are much less so. After all, by removing the possibility of monopoly provided by secrecy or intellectual property, openness may eliminate one of the primary means by which producers finance their activities. Nevertheless there are a variety of ways in which openness can be beneficial (as well as several reasons why it may not be as harmful for revenues as one might think). Due to time limitations I’m going to be able to give a few examples but those who want to know more detail can look at the essay on the Value of the Public Domain as well as my more academic work available on my personal website.

The main point to make is that in industries which are cumulative, that is new ideas and inventions build upon old, proprietary rights mean having to ask ‘permission’ (and pay for it) — while openness does not. With openness it is easier for subsequent innovators and creators to produce new work while with proprietary rights one have increased transactions costs as well as a whole bunch of bargaining issues — most prominently the risk of ‘hold-up’. Particularly in cases where the initial creator today may be the reuser tomorrow the benefits of openness in freer and more rapid reuse and cumulative innovation may outweigh the losses from lower immediate revenues. To put some flesh on the bones of these theoretical considerations here are two examples.

3.1.1: AT&T

I start with a classic example of the problems of ‘closed’ systems in the form of AT&T and its attitude to ‘foreign devices’. As some of you no doubt know, AT&T for a long period had a rule restricting users from attaching anything other from AT&T equipment to their phone system:

No equipment, apparatus, circuit, or device not furnished by the telephone company shall be attached to or connected with the facilities furnished by the telephone company, physically, by induction or otherwise

Not surprisingly this greatly retarded both competition and innovation in the provision of telephones and associated equipment. Gradually starting with Hush-a-Phone in 1948 and culminating with Carterfone in 1968 a series of companies challenged AT&T and won the right for independent firms to produce devices to the phone system. This is change in regulatory atmosphere was crucial in relation to the second example I would like to highlight:

3.1.2: The Internet, the Web and Google

The Internet, and the World-Wide-Web that is built on top of it are two of the most obvious and important examples of the benefits of being open. All of the basic protocols and standards that went into these technologies were open, free for anyone to implement, use, modify and examine. As a result innovation of the Internet and the Web has been phenomenally rapid creating immense wealth and value for society. The centrality of openness here, and the importance of the absence of the need to seek permission is illustrated by the example of Google.

Google, the provider of the planet’s most popular online search engine, is perhaps the best known Internet company in the world. With a market valuation in the tens of billions of dollars it is also one of the most successful. It is therefore the largest and most commercially successful open content company in the world even though it does not, at least at present, own any content at all. For Google derives the vast bulk of its present revenue from advertising. The ‘attention’ that sells the advertising is itself generated from Google’s role as a web search engine, the gatekeeper and organizer of the immense store of information that is the Web. Without the Web, Google, and the business model that supports it simply would not exist.

Thus Google has only been possible because the information on the web is almost all semi-open and anyone may freely access (and copy for their own purposes) the information posted on websites. Imagine if right from the start the web had been ‘closed’, and each website had required payment as well as an agreement not to copy its contents[^37]. Search engines, at least in their present form, would not exist and we would have seen neither the benefits of the services they provide nor the revenues they generate.

3.2 The Dictator and the Anarchist

These examples also conveniently brings me to the second point I would like to make about he benefits of openness, which I have put under the slightly provocative heading of ‘The Dictator and the Anarchist’.

One of the things that often strikes me about general discussion of open knowledge development whether it be about free software or open content is an assumption that because the end result is open the project itself must also be liberally run, with participation open to all, with an ultra-liberal decision-making process that verges on the communitarian.

This could hardly be farther from the truth. While it is certainly easy to participate — after all who doesn’t want free labour — the basic social structure of many open knowledge projects more closely resembles a dictatorship, albeit a benevolent one, than any democracy. There is usually one person with ultimate control, and the group of committers — that is those individuals with the ability to actual make changes to the core code or database — limited to a select few.

Now there are various advantages to dictatorship compared to a democracy. First, its potential for more efficient and rapid decision-making — after all there are many fewer checks and balances. Second, in a democracy the quality of decision-making must tend to the average but in a dictatorship quality is constrained only by the dictator — and so can be much better than the average.

Needless to say there are also disadvantages, disadvantages that arise from the very same factors. For though true a dictator could be much much better than democracy it can also be much much worse. And I think it would be fair to say that there is nowadays a fair consensus that democracy is probably the better option at least when we are talking about human societies.

But here we are talking about the organization of knowledge development And it is here that the anarchy aspect kicks in. By anarchy we normally mean a situation where there is no ruler, no sovereign, who can compel us to act in a particular way. Here I would like to expand this to the situation where there is perfect outside option. That is should the sovereign act in a way you don’t like it is perfectly possible for you at zero (or very low cost) to up sticks and head over the nearest border and set up your own state. Consider then the behaviour of a sovereign in this ’state of anarchy’. While within his or her borders he or she may be a dictator the fact that any ’subject’ who becomes unhappy can easily and simply leave greatly limits their ability to abuse such power — note that it does not limit their ability to do good for then ’subjects’ will be happy to stay. In this case, we need have little to fear from dictatorship and by combining it with ‘anarchy’ we obtain the best of both worlds.

Of course in the political world such a combination is, in practice, impossible. The outside option is usually inferior to the current situation, and if not the dictator may well be able to take steps to limit my ability to avail myself of it.

But fortunately we are not talking of politics but of technology and the development of knowledge in the form of software, music, films, databases etc. And the wonderful, and special thing, about such goods in a digital world is that they are practically costless to reproduce. Hence, if you are working on a knowledge development project, as long as the knowledge is open — and so without any special legal restrictions on such reproduction such as copyright, patents etc — it really is possible to just leave. It truly is the case that should you become unhappy with the current ‘dictator’ that you can just take the code or the content or the database and start your own project.

This has profound implications. In particular it means that the most significant benefit of open knowledge for production may not be a direct one but instead arises from the organizational structures and the types of development process that open knowledge makes possible. Open knowledge allow us to obtain the best of both worlds, to simultaneously combine the anarchist and the dictator in such a way as to leave us with all their advantages and none of their faults.

4. Community and Sharing

Leaving production, and the organization of production behind, in the final part of this talk I want to consider a rather different way in which open approaches to knowledge can yield benefits.

Below is a table taken from the General Social Survey conducted regularly in the US over the last thirty years.

+-------------+--------------+---------------+
|  Income     |  Top Quarter | Bottom Quarter|
+-------------+--------------+-------+-------+
|   Year      |  1975 | 1998 |  1975 |  1998 |
+-------------+-------+------+-------+-------+
| Very happy  |   39  |  37  |   19  |   16  |
+-------------+-------+------+-------+-------+
|Pretty happy |   53  |  57  |   51  |   53  |
+-------------+-------+------+-------+-------+
|Not too happy|    8  |  6   |   30  |   31  |
+-------------+-------+------+-------+-------+
|  Total      |   100 |  100 |  100  |  100  |
+-------------+-------+------+-------+-------+

 Happiness in the US: By Income (Source: GSS)

The aim of this table is to remind us, if we needed reminding, that material wealth isn’t everything — or even in developed societies most things! In particular, there are a whole variety of non-market (and even non-exchange) activities from which, we as humans, derive great enjoyment and value. Things like interactions with friends, being creative, participating in a community. The role that being ‘open’ can play in this regard is best illustrated by an anecdote that was told to me by Joichi Ito, a well-known Japanese venture capitalist.

Ito is a big promoter of the ‘open’ Creative Commons license and he had a friend who was a serious professional photographer. Being a professional who depended on selling and licensing his photographs for a living this guy naturally looked rather askance at CC licenses. But as Ito pointed out to him there was no need to license all of his photos, in fact all he was suggested was to try out the experience of being ‘liberal’ with some of his work and sharing it with the community. Ito’s friend was still fairly reluctant but eventually he was persuaded to post a few of his photos up online (on Flickr I believe) under a CC attribution license. As a result people started using and reusing his photos in a whole bunch of ways — and sharing this work back. Furthermore, in large part because the work was open these people tended to be very appreciative and to show their appreciation by writing to him or leaving comments online. According to Ito this was a very different experience to the one he had when selling his work normally and the guy found it so rewarding that he has now put a few thousand photos up online under open licenses.

I found this a really interesting story and I think it makes an important point. The experience of sharing and creative community that comes from making work open can be an extremely valuable one, and one whose benefits are both distinct and complementary when compared to those discussed previously in relation to access and production. I would emphasize in particular this complementarity: it is not that the sharing economy is antagonistic to, or even a substitute for, the market economy but that they are complements, each providing things that the other cannot.

To close out this section I’ll leave you with a thought. Both the table I showed you at the start and a variety of other evidence suggests that above a certain level of income, say around 15-25k the gains in utility from extra income are fairly limited — essentially the utilty function (for material goods) is approximately flat. If this is so then this strongly suggests that as societies get materially better and better off the importance of the sharing economy vis a vis the market economy is going to grow larger and larger.

5. Conclusion

In the brief time available to me I have only been able to describe informally and in a brief way the benefits that open approaches knowledge can bring our society. I have intentionally omitted discussion of proprietary rights, and the complexities of how open and closed approaches interrelate, substitute and complement each other. Nevertheless I hope I have given you sufficient basis to appreciate both why open knowledge is important and why it is interesting. Thank you.

I’m now at iCommons conference in Dubrovnik and the first keynote (a joint presentation by Jonathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig) has just finished. Herewith is an (extremely) condensed summary of the session with editorial comments.

Jonathan Zittrain

Zittrain delivers his usual, brilliant, witty, sparkling talk. I worry a little that the brilliance papers over some of the cracks in the anecdotes (see ed comments below).

The argument seems to go like this:

1. We have succeeded in killing 2 bad witches
   1. Restrictive platforms (from the wordprocesser to the general purpose PC)
   2. Restrictive networks (TCP/IP)
2. This is great because openness is good for platform innovation
   • [ed]: no discussion of investment incentives. Everyone agrees that open platform is better for innovation on the platform once the platform exists but the quality of the platform is not given (it is endogenous) and the platform may not exist at all without some rents (most of these open platforms were built by the government directly or indirectly)
3. But openness comes at a cost
   1. Applications/networks are unreliable and easily attacked
      1. Viruses, malware etc etc
   2. Systems can be censored (?)
   3. Can lead to privacy violation
4. So how do we solve this?
   1. Keep updating stuff (fast cycles)
   2. New community norms
   3. Distributed systems that combat this using complex software and analysis (hirdirt)
   4. [ed] Basically there is an evolutionary arms race and not clear what his anecdotes tell us about who will win and what the trade-off is (not telling us much then: of course there is a trade-off — the key question is who will win and what trade-off of open vs. closedness is)
5. [ed] what’s the trade-off? Do we want openness or closedness?

Lawrence Lessig

1. We need to get some respect for what we achieved (shouts and whoops from the audience)
2. Two types of economy
   1. commercial (money-based)
   2. sharing (not money-based)
3. Both are valuable
4. by/by-sa: sharing economy
5. But should we only have this
6. Solomon Linda example of Disney ’stealing’ a music from a very poor South African artist
7. More complex example where someone reused a flickr photo in autoweek
   • Not prevented by sa as not a derivative work
   • Prevented by nc [ed: this only occurs because sa does not apply to ‘collections’ so could fix fairly easily perhaps]
8. Example of beatpick: making it easy to license the commercial part
   • [ed]: but why not back to copyright? (Ok d/w losses on general use are much higher)
   • [ed]: (more serious) what happens with complex reuse (who gets what part of the pie …: back with serious transaction cost issues)
9. We (as a movement) harm ourselves by acquiesing in being labelled as pirates etc etc
10. We need to defend our movement more (gives example of Orlowski)
11. What we are doing is right and success is possible
12. People say nasty things about that are inaccurate (e.g. that CC is anti-copyright)
    • [ed]: i totally agree this is bad but Lessig must surely know how unfair the media (and politics is). But the point is taken: efforts are not purposeless but do gradually rebalance things.
13. Problem is political economy of IP
    • [ed]: concentrated interests etc etc see http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/defaults_for_ip_policy.html
14. Have spent 10y working on all of this and now plan to step aside
15. This is your movement, take it, demand the respect, earn that respect

Yesterday I went along to hear Tim Hubbard speak at the Cambridge University Pugwash Society on New economic models for biomedical R&D to address the worldwide problem of access to medicines. Tim’s an excellent presenter and this talk did a great job of explaining a complex issue to an unfamiliar audience (I remember my own talk over a year ago there on similar topics ago. Tim mainly focused on explaining the benefits of something like the Medical Innovation Convention — a global treaty for medical R&D that was developed by Tim and Jamie Love and is now part of the wider access to knowledge (a2k) agenda.

A Few Random Notes from Tim’s Talk

• prices for drugs: NICE (UK), PBS (Australia)
• WHAT: IGWG (Dec 2006)
• LSE study on neglected diseases:
  • drugs in 25 years 1975-2000: 21 (all by pharma)
  • drugs since 2000: 63
    • non-industry: DNDI 6/MMV 22/GATB 7/TDR/11
    • industry: 14

We intend to add annotation/commentarysupport to the open shakespeare web demo either in this release or next. As a first step I’ve been looking to see what (open-source) web-based annotation systems are already out there. Below is a list of what I’ve been able to find so far (if you know of more please post a comment). After examining several of these in some detail the one we’re going to try our properly is marginalia (if you’re interested our current efforts to do this including writing a python wsgi annotation service backend can be found here in the subversion repository).

1. stet: javascript annotation system used for gpl v3 comments system

   • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stet_(software)
   • Bit of a hack at present and did not seem designed for external reuse (when I last looked the README was fairly emphatic that this was very alpha with little documentation)

2. commentary: javascript based wsgi middleware developed by ian bicking

   • http://pythonpaste.org/commentary/
   • Rather hacked together (apparently he coded it in a week). Had problems getting it working locally and no documentation to help in adaptation. Seems to be unmaintained (demo site is currently down) which is perhaps not surprising given how many other projects Ian has on the go.
   • One nice feature is that you don’t seem to have to mess with the underlying web pages you want to add comments to (this only works if you are sitting on top of another wsgi application)

3. marginalia: javascript library and spec for adding web annotation to pages

   • http://www.geof.net/code/annotation/
   • javascript code seems well factored and understandable and docs are good

4. annotea: W3C project based on RDF

   • http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/
   • Been around a long time and now seems to be inactive
   • Server and client support rather lacking. No simple interface based on, e.g., javascript — you have to write a special client yourself — which is a major drawback
   • That said the protocol is well-documented and so writing a client (or a server) shouldn’t be that hard (other than having to mess around with rdf in javascript …)
   • The Schema seems reasonable
   • xpointer based which according to the marginalia site is a problem

Back in July the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) published, as part of the their series on IP and the Public Sphere, my paper entitled The Value of the Public Domain. This essay was’t intended to be original research but rather to provide an overview of the social and commercial benefits to be derived from open (public-domain) approaches to knowledge production.

Since publication, the paper has managed to travel fairly widely (helped I hope by its open licence) including a recent appearance on Lessig’s blog so its appropriate that I’ve now, finally, got around to adding it to the listing on my economics papers page. I’ve also put up an html version though not the plaintext (markdown-formatted) source (email me at comments at rufus dot pollock dot org if you want this version).