At a seminar organised by the South Centre in Geneva on June 30, UNU-MERIT researcher Rishab Ghosh participated in an expert panel on intellectual monopoly powers and standards.

IP-Watch reports:

Standards can be of two kinds: de facto standards created by market forces, and de jure standards created by standards-setting organisations. In both cases, the standards can include intellectual property rights.

In the de facto scenario, “the value is in the standard, not in the technology itself,” said Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, senior researcher at the United Nations University (UNU-Merit) in the Netherlands. The value comes from the fact that everybody is going to use the same technology, he said.

After Stiglitz and Sulston last week, now the Wall Street Journal has an article about the problem that the patent system has become. It’s US-focused, but it pretty neatly outlines how the debate on a mild patent reform there sets the pharmaceutical industry against technology companies:

Yet the fault line over patent reform signals the deeper problems. Many pharmaceutical companies lobbied against the proposals, fearful of reduced value in their key intellectual property. In contrast, most technology firms supported the reforms, worried more about uncertainty in the law than about the value of their patents.

Both sides may be right. New empirical research by Boston University law professors James Bessen and Michael Meurer, reported in their book, “Patent Failure,” found that the value of pharmaceutical patents outweighed the costs of pharmaceutical-patent litigation. But for all other industries combined, they estimate that since the mid-1990s, the cost of U.S. patent litigation to alleged infringers ($12 billion in legal and business costs in 1999) is greater than the global profits that companies earn from patents (less than $4 billion in 1999). Since the 1980s, patent litigation has tripled and the probability that a particular patent is litigated within four years has more than doubled. Small inventors feel the brunt of the uncertainty costs, since bigger companies only pay for rights they think the system will protect.

Link

Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz (Economics, 2001) and John Sulston (Physiology/Medicine, 2002) argue that the patent regime, along with other forms of intellectual monopoly powers, locks down access to knowledge rather than allowing its dissemination.

Both were speaking at the launch of Manchester University’s new Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation:

Patent monopolies are believed to drive innovation but they actually impede the pace of science and innovation, Stiglitz said. The current “patent thicket,” in which anyone who writes a successful software programme is sued for alleged patent infringement, highlights the current IP system’s failure to encourage innovation, he said.

Sulston made the privatisation of science his topic:

Reversing the trend toward privatisation of science is critical, Sulston said. The world should concentrate on the survival and thriving of humanity, and exploration of the universe, he said. The outcome, he added, depends to a great extent on “who owns science.”

via IP-Watch

How can society ensure that knowledge goods, which are both costly to create and potentially non-rival in use, can be shared freely?

There is little doubt that the current approach to rewarding the development of new medicines or diagnostic devices has severe deficiencies. Patent enforced monopolies often lead to high
prices. Critics also say that this system often fails to stimulate investment in areas of public interest and priority.

The prize system provides an appealing solution by encouraging new approaches to this thorny issue. If the incentive for innovation can be divorced from the product’s consumer price, then knowledge
goods — including the R&D for a new medicine — can be placed in the public domain immediately, so that competition among suppliersleads to low prices and greater access to new medical inventions.

Prizes can be implemented in many different ways. For donors and governments in particular, prizes might offer an alternative to marketing monopolies as the reward for successful investments in R&D.

Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and UNU-MERIT are calling for papers on the use of monetary prizes as an alternative mechanism to stimulate private investments in R&D.

Participation is open to anyone. Winners will be selected by a jury of high-profile experts. The deadline for contributions is February 15, 2008. Papers should be between four and 20 pages, and must be submitted under a licence allowing unlimited distribution, such as an appropriate Creative Commons licence.

Awards:

• Winning paper: EUR 1500.
• Two runners-up: EUR 500.-
• The three top-ranked papers will be published in the Knowledge Ecology Studies journal.

Successful papers will deal with one or more of the following questions:

1. Relation to exclusive rights of a patent: Should prizes beconsidered as a voluntary or non-voluntary alternative to the exclusive rights now associated with the patent system, or as acomplementary reward?

2. Valuation: How does one determine the size of prizes?

3. Push vs. pull: Where to use research grants (”push”), where to prefer prizes (”pull”) to finance drug development?

4. Sustainable financing: Where should the prize money come from, and will the prospect of prizes be credible?

5. Follow-on innovation: How will prizes deal with the need for incentives for follow-on innovation?

6. Transition: How can the transition from the current monopoly-based system be organized?

For questions and submissions, please send email to Malini Aisola and Karsten Gerloff <prizeprize@merit.unu.edu>. More information will soon be available at ccp.merit.unu.edu/prizeprize.

KEI and UNU-MERIT are looking forward to your contributions.

What happens to your data if your experiment fails? If the results turn out different than you thought? If there’s nothing to publish?

Don’t throw it away. Your dead end might be another person’s missing link.

Wired Magazine has an essay by Thomas Goetz on this “dark data”.

He says that while storing huge amounts of data can be an issue, the real problem is the culture of science:

More and more, research is funded by commercial entities, which deem any results proprietary. And even among fair-minded academics, the pressures of time, tender, and tenure can make openness an afterthought. If their research is successful, many academics guard their data like Gollum, wringing all the publication opportunities they can out of it over years. If the research doesn’t pan out, there’s a strong incentive to move on, ASAP, and a disincentive to linger in eddies that may not advance one’s job prospects.

But Goetz says that the dark data phenomenon isn’t limited to science:

Getting science comfortable with exposing its dark data is really just the beginning. Once you start looking for it, dark data is everywhere: It’s locked away in out-of-print books and orphaned art, the stuff that Creative Commons and Google Book Search have been bringing to light. Speaking of which: Hey, Google! Know all those research projects your employees do that the company will never green-light? How about letting the rest of the world take a crack at them?

The challenge is to find a way to share the data. How about the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network I blogged earlier?

Karsten Gerloff and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh participated at the TACD conference, “The Reform of WIPO: Implementing the Development Agenda,” on 17 September in Geneva. The meeting followed a successful three year campaign to reorient the technical assistance programme of WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) to serve the interests of developing countries. In his presentation Rishab Aiyer Ghosh showed how Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) has successfully built an ecosystem that relies on sharing knowledge, not on monopolizing ideas. Supported by extensive quantitative and qualitative evidence he argued that WIPO will need to take alternative models of knowledge management into account if it does not want to become obsolete.

Rishab’s presentation on why it’s rational to collaborate in the production of immaterial goods is available here (pdf). IP Watch reports on the conference here.

Rufus Pollock must have had a busy week. A few days after the Open Knowledge Foundation he’s involved in launched the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, Rufus (who is a PhD candidate at Cambridge) has published a paper. From an economist’s perspective, he is looking at the optimal term for copyright:

Abstract
The optimal level for copyright has been a matter for extensive debate over the last decade. This paper contributes several new results on this issue divided into two parts. In the first, a parsimonious theoretical model is used to prove several novel propositions about the optimal level of protection. Specifically, we demonstrate that (a) optimal copyright falls as the costs of production go down (for example as a result of digitization) and that (b) the optimal level of copyright will, in general, fall over time. The second part of the paper focuses on the specific case of copyright term. Using a simple model we characterise optimal term as a function of a few key parameters. We estimate this function using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books and find an optimal term of around fourteen years. This is substantially shorter than any current copyright term and implies that existing copyright terms are too long.

This sounds very interesting. Go get the paper here (pdf), read it, pick holes in it, and see if it holds up!

via BoingBoing, netzpolitik.org

Today, the UK-based Open Knowledge Foundation has launched the “Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network” (CKAN). What this is?

CKAN is a registry of open knowledge packages and projects — be that a set of Shakespeare’s works, a global population density database, the voting records of MPs, or 30 years of US patents.

CKAN is the place to search for open knowledge resources as well as register your own. Those familiar with freshmeat (a registry of open source software), CPAN (Perl) or PyPI (python package index) can think of CKAN as providing an analogous service for open knowledge.

[...]

we are looking for people to register ‘packages’ that is collections with some kind of structure rather than individual items. So a substantial set of photos, a datasets of all kinds, the writings of Shakespeare but not an individual blog, or your flickr photo collection (unless it is really big!).

“Open” meaning here that anyone is free to use, enhance, modify and distribute the things in this archive, similar to Free Software. The data and information contained in this archive network either has to be in the public domain (not subject to copyright), or distributed under a free licence (e.g. Wikipedia articles, which use the GNU Free Documentation Licence, or works under a free Creative Commons licence).

The discussion on how to organise knowledge best is far from ended, so this is just a basic infrastructure. Yet it already contains a few things of value:

Shakespeare’s works, a global population density database, the voting records of MPs, or 30 years of US patents.

I’m really looking forward to how this will develop. Like any self-respecting Internet innovation these days, it is a public beta, to be improved over time. But looking at how valuable similar archive networks have become as a resource – for example, the Comprehensive Tex Archive Network (CTAN) for the TeX typesetting system -, this could become really, really good.

Knowledge Ecology International (formerly CPTech), a Washington DC-based NGO that is a real hub in the debate on Access to Knowledge, is doing the right thing and putting out a journal, Knowledge Ecology Studies. Sounds promising:

KE Studies is an online publication that focuses on the creation, dissemination and access to knowledge goods. It is a multidisciplinary journal that draws on a number of specialties: sciences, technologies, public policies, the laws of intellectual property, business, free speech and privacy, telecommunications and other related knowledge disciplines.KE Studies strives to be a publication in the classic sense of the word, but with new opportunities for authors and readers. The papers and other forms of published materials examine new developments, alternatives and social implications. We also review policy proposals as well as books, articles, media, and any other type of knowledge good.

Unlike traditional journals, which focus primarily on lengthy scholarly articles on specific fields, KE Studies focuses on pieces of different format –articles, short research papers, commentaries written by experts in various fields about production, dissemination and access to knowledge goods broadly defined including medical innovation policies, legal issues, educational issues among others.

In addition, KE Studies strives to be a publication with a fast turn around and inclusive to non-published authors from all over the world. We publish pieces on unscheduled timing with an end of the year compilation volume.

Sisule Musungu finally has a blog; about time, too. His first post is on the WIPO Development Agenda. Though it’s a bit on the long side, it’s definitely worth a read.

He has accompanied the Development Agenda struggle at WIPO from the beginning, from his former position at the South Centre, and there are very few people on this earth who know more about it than him. He’s certainly more qualified than me when it comes to judging the process, so I’m glad we’re roughly on the same page.
Sisule recounts the beginnings of the Development Agenda process in 2004, when the initiative was received with some hostility by a WIPO that was dedicated to, in the words of Jamie Love, “mindless expansions of intellectual property rights”. He summarises the results, and ponders whether the Development Agenda is really more than hot air. Luckily, he thinks that the answer to that is no:

From the very beginning of this process, however, sceptics have argued that the proposal for the establishment of a development agenda amounted to nothing more than hot air, ideology and empty rhetoric. So far the sceptics have been proven wrong. The range of reforms and new frameworks envisaged under the now established development agenda are anything but hot air, ideology and empty rhetoric. Although like everything else implementation might entail significant challenges and failure could visit the agenda, as the dust settles, it is becoming clear that the development agenda for WIPO has the potential to significantly transform the organisation in major ways resulting in not only improvements in the attention paid to development issues and the composition of its staff but also to deliver the organisation into the 21st Century. For this reason, the development agenda is already a success. The challenge that remains is to build on this success and ensure that the opportunity is not squandered in implementation.