miscellaneous factZ

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).

From the header file of a standard Project Gutenberg etext (in this case that of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam (tr. Edward Fitzgerald):

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. This projected audience is one hundred million readers. If our value per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $4 million dollars per hour this year as we release some eight text files per month: thus upping our productivity from $2 million.

I was pointed at this post about making a first edition of the OED freely available online. This is a wonderful idea but here I just wanted to talk about what the value of doing this would be.

In his email Kragen Sitaker guesstimates a social value of $293 billion for the project_[1]. While clearly done with his tongue firmly in his cheek I think such calculations are important enough to be worth debating and in this case think this amount is much too high for several reasons.

First and most important what is the value of gaining access to the OED. The figure of $295 per year for access he provides is for individual subscription. But the majority of people do not access the OED this way but rather through an institutional subscription. Thus this is not the average price of a user’s access but is the highest price point used by a price-discriminating monopolist. For an institution the price tag is probably in the thousands and this license covers all access by members (for example the recent edition of the Dictionary of National Biography costs around 3000 pounds per year at its most expensive). Given that most institutions have thousands or tens of thousands of members this puts the price per year at under half a pound (~$1) or even lower.

Secondly, if we wish to calculate the social value of access for the the whole world we cannot simply extrapolate the valuation of current users to every man, woman and child on the planet. Under basic demand theory, all things being equal, the current buyers are those with the highest willingness to pay for the good. The willingness to pay of the remaining consumers will be lower, and likely a lot, lot lower, than that of these original users. Picking a number out of thin air we might estimate that the total social value of all of the remaining potential users of the OED is approximately Y times the current level of sales where Y is less than 10.

Repeating the above calculations with these new figures yield:

30 million x $1 x (1/12) x Y x (1/0.1) =~ 3Y million

Setting Y to 1 yields around $30 million which is still a very large amount but a lot less than the $293 billion floating around in the original calculation.

[1] The original calculation

Here are some thoughts on monetary estimates of the value of this
project.

Online access to the current edition costs US$295 per year and is
currently available to about 30 million people, for a total value of
$8.8 billion per year. [snip]

If we discount the $295 per year by a yearly factor of 1.1, which is
extremely generous, we get a total of $3059 for the next 30 years.
Adding it up to infinity, we get $3245.  If we use a more reasonable
(i.e. closer to unity) discount rate, we get a larger value.

Suppose we estimate the value of having access to the public-domain
part of the OED by reference to the version that Oxford has for sale,
discounted by:
- a factor of 6 to account for the fact that the people who have
  bothered to buy access at $295 per year are those who are unusually
  devoted to words;
- a factor of 3 to account for its incompleteness;
- a factor of 2 to account of it being out-of-date;
- a factor of 2 to account for getting page images instead of ASCII
  text.

This brings the total value of the public-domain portion down to $45
per person, or $4.09 per year per person.  Approximately 99.55% of the
world's population, or about 6.5 billion people, currently doesn't
have access to the OED.

This values the public-domain version at $26.6 billion per year, or
$293 billion overall.  (If you pick a lower discount rate, the $293
billion number becomes much larger.)  That means that every page I
scan, out of the fifteen thousand or so, produces about $19.5 million
of value for the world; that's about $9.8 billion an hour.  My hourly
wages have usually been less.

Here’s another call from data sharing which appears, almost as an aside, in the summary of Morck, Wolfenzon, and Yeung Corporate Governance, Journal of Economic Literature vol. 43, no. 3 (p. 713)

Assembling either cross country and historical data for formal econometric analysis can be labor intensive. One way of mitigating this problem is for researchers to share their data. Some plausibly important variables also measure concepts more commonly associated with anthropology, sociology, political science, or other social sciences than with economics and finance. Borrowing data from other fields might thus help build a deeper understanding of institutions, and of the extent to which they really are creatures of economics. …

Open knowledge drives out closed (in the long run).

(After Gresham’s Bad money drives out good though with opposite sense). I tentatively dub this Pollock’s law :).

Open knowledge here is taken as given by the open knowledge definition and, in its essentials, means freely accessible, reusable and redistributable. Closed by contrast means knowledge for which access and reuse are restricted in some manner, for example by charging for access, or by prohibiting reuse. The restrictions are made possible by a variety of mechanisms including: exclusion rights such as copyright or patents, contractual obligations or simply secrecy.

The idea behind this analogy is that there is a feedback for open knowledge just as there is with bad money (though obviously by a different mechanism). In the case of bad money the feedback is that people use the bad currency and hoard the good one because the former has lower intrinsic value. In the case of open knowledge the feedback comes from the fact that under viral licensing each user of the knowledge pool becomes a contributor back to the pool. As the pool grows it is ever more attractive to new users so they use (and contribute) to it rather than to any competing closed set of knowledge. This results in a strong positive feedback mechanism. Of course, such a feedback mechanism also exists for closed knowledge: payments for access can be used to fund further investment resulting in a knowledge pool that is more valuable which attracts more users etc. However because closed knowledge has higher costs of access (monetary or otherwise), as long as the open knowledge pool is past a critical value threshold, it will always have the advantage in attracting new users.

Coining an aphorism: We are moving towards a world in which all information is software and all software is information

This is the text of a brief presentation I gave as a member of the panel on Intellectual Property and the Public Space at the Westminster Media Forum 2004-12-09. I was presenting in my capacity as Director of Friends of the Creative Domain

Text

First a quick word about who we are. Friends of the Creative Domain is an open community set up to promote the intellectual and artistic commons in our culture. Given the similarity of names it is worth stating for the record that while we are strong supporters of the Creative Commons project we are not formally associated in any way.

I am here today to talk about IP and the public space. I think we can all agree that the public space is essential to our culture. I think that we also agree that rights in intellectual works, IP, is important in remunerating creators and intermediaries. Unfortunately, however, the two are in tension - IP can often threaten this public space in our culture. For ideas, or creative works are not like normal property.

As Jefferson stated two centuries ago: He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. This means the public space of ideas is quite different of that for normal property. When we protect works we reduce access, we reduce the ability to light the new taper, and that impact, that impact on the public space must be acknowledged.

Now what is this ‘public space’? Most simply this public space is a commons, that is a community where the norms of sharing and collaboration predominate. Why are these three aspects important? Sharing because it gives others the freedom to access and reuse a work without the need to seek permission. Collaboration because this allows for greater and easier reuse and remixing in the creation of new works. And community because these norms are shared by the participants in the space.

Now the spectrum of such sharing can be quite broad, from simply allowing non-commerical uses of a work to placing it in its entirety into the public domain. But behind all of these possibilities lie those core principles of fostering sharing and collaboration. What kind of works then might enter this space, whose creators or owners would welcome greater dissemination and reuse, even if it means surrendering some of their rights under traditional copyright?

To take just a few initial examples: advertising works; the many newspapers, magazines, newsletters etc produced by not-for-profit organizations or for not-for-profits purposes; much academic work be it in the sciences or the humanities; all kinds of ‘amateur’ artistic work from music to film; sections of the back catalogue of the BBC which will enter a Creative Archive; … and the list goes on.

Much of our culture is being needlessly locked up. Copyright places large burdens on those who wish to remix, disseminate or access creative works. In some cases this burden may be a necessary part of ensuring the remuneration of creators and owners. But in many other situations these burdens are without benefit. Estimates suggest that a majority of even prime commercial work such as albums produced at the major labels are simply not available commercially. That means the artist is getting no revenue and the public is not getting access to these works. And this is even more crazy when we think of the vast part of our culture that is not produced for commercial ends in the first place.

At present everything you or I produce for whatever purpose is copyrighted by default - not even a copyright symbol is needed. We want to provide the option of a different default. You have just heard about the Creative Commons project. I applaud this project and its provision of tools to support the creative domain, the commons of our culture. But I don’t think it is enough. I think we need to be working even more actively to foster this creative domain, this ‘public space’ in our society, as a valuable complement and alternative to the traditional copyright regime and copyrighted culture.

Thank you.