miscellaneous factZ – The online home of Rufus Pollock

For anyone with an interest in copyright issues, particularly in the online environment, there is an excellent event on today at the LSE organized by Ian Brown of the OII and at which I’ll be speaking (briefly) on the subject of “How can we maximise copyright’s return to society?” More details below.

Musicians, fans and online copyright

Wednesday 19 March 2008 14:00 – 17:00

• John Kennedy, CEO of IFPI
• Paul Sanders, Director of Strategy at Playlouder
• Becky Hogge, Open Rights Group
• Adrian Brazier, DBERR
• Lilian Edwards, Southampton University
• Rufus Pollock, Cambridge University
• Michelle Childs, Knowledge Ecology International
• Wendy Grossman, musician / freelance journalist

Location: Old Theatre, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom.

This Wednesday afternoon we have a great selection of speakers for our free OII/LSE event on music and copyright. Come along to find out what the government, music industry, publishers and independent experts are thinking about ideas like 3-strikes-and-you’re-disconnected; scanning ISP traffic for copyright works; and notice and takedown regimes.

Full programme at: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/details.cfm?id=186

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.

Courtesy or a kind invitation from Richard Cave, tomorrow I’ll be heading over to Warwick University to present in their IO Seminar. The talk will be focused on my main ‘IP papers’: Cumulative Innovation, Sampling and the Hold-Up Problem and Imitation and Innovation with and without IP, but if there’s time I might also get the chance to discuss another paper of mine on the Control of Porting in Two-Sided Markets.

I authored the following in my capacity as Director of FFII-UK as the FFII statement at WIPO IIM on the Development Agenda.

Submission of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, WIPO IIM 11th to 13th April 2005

First, at the outset Mr Chairman we would like to congratulate you, as well as the distinguished Vice-Chair, on your election. We would also like to thank the WIPO secretariat and its member states for this opportunity to present our views to you today.

Mr Chairman, distinguished delegates, and others, the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is a non-profit association registered in several European countries, which is dedicated to the spread of data processing literacy. FFII supports the development of public information goods based on copyright, free competition, and open standards. More than 500 members, 1,200 companies and 75,000 supporters have entrusted the FFII to act as their voice in public policy questions concerning exclusion rights (intellectual property) in data processing.

We wish to be brief in our submission and will only emphasize a single point, and one already clearly raised in the submission by the Friends of Development to this meeting in which they stated:

“[para 37] … Norm-setting at the international level has been dominated by a paradigm that regards intellectual property rights as the only and unequivocally beneficial instrument to promote creative intellectual activity. Increased scope and levels for intellectual property protection thus often become ends in themselves in international negotiations, which have failed to take into account the need to promote and enhance access to knowledge and the results of innovation ….

These are views we strongly endorse. To us the approach of WIPO often brings to mind the maxim that for those who possess a hammer everything is a nail. While IP in the right circumstances can be beneficial, conversely in the wrong ones it is undoubtedly harmful.

For our constituents this is not just an abstract possibility but a concrete one. A primary purpose of our organization over the last several years has been to protect the European software industry from the threat of software patents. For we believe that patents on software hinder rather than help innovation as well as fundamentally undermining the creation of the free and open standards necessary to sustain our information infrastructures into the 21st century. Our view is not simply opinion but is backed by a large body of evidence, to give one example among many, Deustche bank wrote in a report of June last year that: ‘Stronger IP protection is not always better. Chances are that patents on software, common practice in the US and on the brink of being legalised in Europe, in fact stifle innovation.’

Yet without any basis in either theory or fact a variety of WIPO documents have uncritically endorsed more and stronger IP as beneficial for the software industry. For example WIPO’s publication ‘Intellectual Property: A Power Tool for Economic Growth’ uncompromisingly states in its preface: ‘This publication is written from a definite perspective — that IP is good.’ In our view this is simply not the case: IP is neither good nor bad but only a tool — in some cases the benefits of IP outweigh the costs and in other cases they will not, how could it be otherwise? Such pronouncements only serve to encourage the view that, for WIPO, increased IP rights become ends in themselves, even when such rights harm the public interest, reducing access to knowledge, limiting innovation, obstructing competition and imposing large costs that fall most heavily on countries least able to bear them.

We believe that a refocusing of WIPO’s mission towards greater balance in the use of IP as well as the use of alternative methods of fostering creativity and innovation can only enhance the prestige of this body. Moreover it will also, more importantly, vastly increase the benefits and reduce the costs for its members of the agreements reached here. Thank you for your attention.

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.