I am posting the full comment by Jamie Love on the US – South Korea FTA, because is not up on the cptech website yet. It argues for “a new way of thinking about the topics” and makes suggestions to avoid an overly restrictive intellectual property rights (IPR) regime. I found it a bit surprising that the first few paragraphs contain two references to the US President’s Economic Report 2006, and that the recommendations are often framed around existing policy and implementation in the US — usually, those making a case for more flexible IPR regimes, do not use the US as their model. Or is he referring to the Korean President’s Economic Report? For those interested in a historical account of IPR and development, “Kicking away the ladder” (written by the Korean academic Ha-Joon Chang and including examples from Korea) could be interesting.

United States-Republic of Korea Free Trade Agreement – CPTech comments
27 March 20006
James Love, CPTech

CPTech provides the following comments regarding the proposal for a US Korea Free Trade Agreement (US/Kr/FTA).

Our comments address the parts of the agreement that concern knowledge goods. In particular, we present a new way of thinking about the topics that have been addressed in previous US/FTAs under chapters on intellectual property rights, as well as provisions concerning pricing of pharmaceutical drugs.

As noted in the 2006 Economic Report of the President, intellectual property rights can play an important role in creating incentives and rewards for investments in inventive and creative works. However, intellectual property rights can also be implemented in ways that are
overreaching, anticompetitive, and protectionist, harming both economic growth and the interests of consumers.

Increasingly, economists, political scientists, business leaders and consumers are recognizing that intellectual property rights are forms of government regulation that have both costs and benefits, and which are also subject to regulatory capture by special interests.

Knowledge is the fuel of the modern economy, and trillions of dollars are spent on education and the creation and dissemination of information. We want businesses, consumers and other stakeholders to be informed, and take advantage of the best technologies and to manage knowledge resources wisely.

The freedom to use and share knowledge can be seen as the normal case (the general rule), and intellectual property rights as a limited exception (the exception to the rule). As noted in the February 2006 Economic Report of the President, it is difficult to find the right
balance between intellectual property rights on the one hand and the freedom to use and share knowledge on the other hand.

Some level of intellectual property right protection is clearly necessary to create the incentives and rewards we need to support and reward creative and inventive individuals and communities. But we also very much need systems for creating and disseminating information resources that are not owned or controlled by anyone. The knowledge economy is a complex ecosystem. To support the discovery and development of new medicines, we rely upon a plethora of patent and sui generis methods of intellectual property protection to create incentives to invest in new medicines, but we also spend approximately $30 billion per year through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on government funded research, much of which freely enters the global knowledge commons. The US government vigorously promotes the patent system globally, but it also provides more global public goods for medical research than any other country. The Human Genome Project, the HapMap Project, Medline, and other public goods are as important to the drug discovery system as are patents and high prices on new medicines. (more…)

The register calls the original Nature comparison of the free/open encyclopedia wikipedia with the encyclopedia brittanica a nice “mash-up, but bad science.” The original article “Internet encyclopedias go head to head” caused quite a stir in December when it argued that the quality of wikipedia entries came close in accuracy for science entries to the Brittanica. Now Brittanica fires back and says the argument was based on bad reporting, rather than scientific analysis … regardless of the outcome, I am a big fan of wikipedia and there is no doubt that it provides a very useful resource to millions of people who can’t afford access to the proprietary encyclopedias. If the quality of some of its entries are not “up to par” yet, then let’s change that!

Britannica hits back at junk science

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Thursday 23rd March 2006 03:33 GMT

Nature magazine has some tough questions to answer after it let its Wikipedia fetish get the better of its responsibilities to reporting science. The Encyclopedia Britannica has published a devastating response to Nature’s December comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica, and accuses the journal of misrepresenting its own evidence.

Where the evidence didn’t fit, says Britannica, Nature’s news team just made it up. Britannica has called on the journal to repudiate the report, which was put together by its news team.

Independent experts were sent 50 unattributed articles from both Wikipedia and Britannica, and the journal claimed that Britannica turned up 123 “errors” to Wikipedia’s 162.

But Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children’s version and Britannica’s “book of the year” to others, and in one case, simply stitched together bits from different articles and inserted its own material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry.

Nice “Mash-Up” – but bad science. Full article is here (http://www.theregister.com/2006/03/23/britannica_wikipedia_nature_study/)

Technorati Tags: nature, wikipedia

Scary stories of intellectual property out of control. The concept of intellectual property tries to deal with the particular characteristics of information in a way that provides sufficient incentive for people to produce more of it. In doing so it always has to strike a careful balance between the social benefit a society as a whole derives from availability of the information, and individual benefit the “owner” of a piece of information can expect by restricting access to it. Developed countries (trying to compensate their lack of natural resources and cheap labor?) are locking down information and knowledge by proposing increasingly stronger (and internationally harmonized) IPR regimes. Besides the serious consequences this can have for developing countries (Ha-Joon Chang has written a book referring to this process as “Kicking away the ladder“) it also produces some funny-it-it-wasnt-so-sad consequences, some of which are listed in this Intellectual Property Run Amok post on the Mother Jones site. A few favorites from the list:

PATENT LAWSUITS have more than doubled since 1992.
AMONG THE 16,000 people thus far sued for sharing music files was a 65-year-old woman who, though she didn’t own downloading software, was accused of sharing 2,000 songs, including Trick Daddy’s “I’m a Thug.” She was sued for up to $150,000 per song.
NEARLY 20% of the 23,688 known human genes are patented in the United States. Private companies hold 63% of those patents.
FOR INCLUDING a 60-second piece of silence on their album, the Planets were threatened with a lawsuit by the estate of composer John Cage, which said they’d ripped off his silent work 4’33”. The Planets countered that the estate failed to specify which 60 of the 273 seconds in Cage’s piece had been pilfered.

This weeks print edition of The Economist, has a long article on open-source business models moving into other areas of the economy besides software development. The title mentions that “limitations are becoming apparent”, but does not really speak much about these limitations. The article is fairly general and has some poor reporting (see Groklaw’s dissection and corrections here), but raises some interesting points in the context of innovation. They are found towards the end of the text and cover both strengths as well as possible limitations. I picked out two:

(1) Open-source models expand your knowledge network

Innovation strives on a diet of combined knowledge from different fields and areas. Open-source projects invite anyone to join, and, as a result, receive contributions that could not have come from within a group of common collaborators. In Network theory, this is called the strength of weak links (Mark Granovetter). If we only talk to our friends, we will never discover the things that our friends don’t know.

“As it works now, you choose the labs you work with and basically know what you are going to get before you start because you know the people,” says Dr Jefferson. “The power of distributed innovation is to be surprised, and hopefully pleasantly surprised.”

(2) The question of sustained innovation in open-source models

The Economist argues that many of the best known open-source projects are more efficient and effective at doing things that have already been done, implying that they lack innovation. It mentions Linux and Wikipedia as two examples, and says they are based on “already-known knowledge.” While this is largely true, it underestimates the economic importance of (a) incremental innovation, and (b) user-centric innovation, which is a powerful way of driving incremental innovation, enabled by the “open” model. Only when users can tinker with technology, will they try to design new and better products and provide innovation feedback to the original producer.
What do you think?

UNESCO opens online platform for planning multi-stakeholder implementation of WSIS Plan of Action. Most relevant in the context of this blog is Action Line Item C3: Access to information and knowledge. “ICTs allow people, anywhere in the world, to access information and knowledge almost instantaneously. Individuals, organizations and communities should benefit from access to knowledge and information.” More detailed implementation guidelines are here. A number of people have already commented, but so far most contributions remain very general. Item C3 has a strong policy and research focus, and I hope that academics working in the field will take the opportunity to provide input to this process.

UNESCO has now opened an online platform to facilitate initial contacts among stakeholders and to launch activities under the Action Lines of the Geneva Plan of Action that are in the area of competence of the Organization.

This includes the following action lines:

C3: Access to information and knowledge
C7: E-learning and E-science
C8: Cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and local content
C9: Media
C10: Ethical dimensions of the Information Society
Link to online platform

There is a lot of skepticism and uncertainty among the traditional media regarding “new” open content licenses, like Creative Commons. And many wonder if they will hold up in court, and some seem to take their chances using them without respecting the license terms. So it’s good to see that at least in the Dutch District Court of Amsterdam they do hold up. Downloading photographs from an online photo sharing site and using them in a way that is in conflict with the photographs’ license is not permitted. However, the judge ordered a mere EUR 1000 fine in case the magazine uses the pictures again. I don’t know if EUR 1000 is a typical fine for this kind of case, but it seems hardly sufficient to discourage widespread CC license infringement in the future.

The owner of the photos is Adam Curry, who writes about the court decision on his weblog (lots of interesting comments in the blogsphere as well).

Scott McQuade, the head of UNU Press, points out that we have a long way to go before traditional media fully understand these licenses, but that current and future students of media and law will be better informed. Scott is currently developing the guidelines for use of CC licenses by UNU Press. As a first step, the recent policy brief on Open Source and Open Standards: A New Frontier for Economic Development? is licensed under a CC license.

A recent press release by our partner institute UNU-IIST in Macao highlights the importance for developing countries to participate in the global free/open source software movement. The lack of software engineers from developing countries that are able (and willing) to contribute to FOSS development is a crucial issue — and has been a topic of substantive discussion on many mailing lists over the last years. Without sincere awareness raising and capacity building there is a danger that developing countries will remain consumers of foreign developed FOSS and not realise its potential for adaptation to local needs.

UNU is organising two events in the near future that are relevant in this context:

• 16 March 2006, e-Governance & Open Source
• 13 April 2006, Challenging Intellectual Property: Access to Knowledge Issues in Medicine & Open Source

Both discussions are open to the public and free, but you need to register here in order to attend.

From UNU-IIST’s press release:

UNU experts and others widely believe that Linux and open source solutions will find their biggest markets in developing countries, particularly China, East Asia, India and South America. While the use of open source software continues to grow in developing countries, there remains a problem of very few open source programmers in these same developing countries.

“Should this situation persist, developing nations will simply remain consumers of open source products rather than participants in the larger open source market,” says Dr. Reed.

“Being a ‘passive consumer’ rather than an ‘active participant’ is not in the best interests of a developing nation’s government or business sectors. Technological self-determination in developing countries is key to their future prosperity and is contingent on harnessing the power of this high-tech phenomenon,” says Dr. Reed.

UNU-MERIT Director Luc Soete participates in the upcoming TACD workshop. See the announcement below:

—

The Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) is hosting a 2 day workshop in Brussels on March 20-21. The subject is:

THE POLITICS AND IDEOLOGY OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND THE KNOWLEDGE COMMONS

The event is open to the public. Pre-registration is required, but free. For more information about event, contact Ben Wallis (bwallis@consint.org), in the TACD Secretariat.

The program agenda and the list of speakers and panel chairs follows:

Date: March 20-21, 2006
Venue: Hotel Renaissance, Rue du Parnasse 19, Brussels

Speakers and Panel Chairs:
Benjamin Coriat, University of Paris
Bruce Lehman, Akin Gump, Strauss Hauer & Feld
Cornelia Kutterer, BEUC
David Hammerstein, Member of the European Parliament
David Lawsky, Reuters
Declan McCullagh, CNET
Ed Mierzwinski, PIRG
Emma Bonino, Member of the European Parliament (TBC)
Eva Lichtenberger, Member of the European Parliament
Felix Cohen, Consumentenbon
Florian Müller, No Software Patents
Hugh Hansen, Fordham University
James Love, The Knowledge Ecology Project
Jim Murrary, BEUC (TBC)
Joelle Roge, WIPO
John Howkins, Adelphi Charter (TBC)
Jonathan Berger, South Africa AIDS Law Project
Jonathan Zuck, Association for Competitive Technology
Kenneth Cukier, The Economist
Luc Soete, United Nations University
Manon Ress, CPTech
Marc Cooper, CFA
Marco Pierani
Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation of America
Michelle Childs, CPTech-UK
Michiel Van der Velde Consumentenbon
Mohamed Ben Ahmed, University of La Manouba, Tunisia
Nicoletta Dentico, DNDi
Peter Drahos, Australian National University
Philippe Aigrain, TRANSVERSALES
Rufus Pollock, FFII (TBC)
Sangeeta Shashikant, Third World Network (TWN)
Sisule Musungu, South Centre
Susan Sell, George Washington University
Tilman Luder, EC (TBC)
Tom Faunce, Australian National University
Tony Taubman; WIPO

The 1st European Conference on Publishing in Biomedicine and Medicine on Researchers & Open Access: the new scientific publishing environment is to be held in Lund, Sweden, 21-22nd April 2006.

http://www.ecspbiomed.net/default.aspx?Id=1

As the publishing environment encounters new challenges in the Open Access model, researchers are faced with gaining an understanding of the opportunities as well as threats offered by this novel paradigm.

The conference will gather the most authoritative opinions on these issues and offers you the opportunity to participate in lectures and educational workshops in various areas related to authors publishing.

The principal aim of the conference is to broaden researchers understanding and knowledge of the rapid changes in the scientific communication and publishing area and its possible implications on the research community.

UNU-MERIT is setting-up an Access To Knowledge (A2K) Hub to throw open the doors to research that we undertake at the institute and invite the world to join the discussion. It encourages comment and participation to address the challenge that today’s rapid pace of innovation and change presents for research of new technologies.

The A2K Hub provides a central access point to UNU-MERIT’s work in areas like free/open source software, intellectual property, biotechnology and access to medicine. It publishes regular updates on the research in progress and links to available publications and outputs. It also frames UNU-MERIT’s activities in a wider global context, by reporting on events and projects happening in other UNU institutes and elsewhere.

However, the A2K hub is more than a new way to share information and research findings. It implements a “bazaar-style” collaboration model by allowing others to share their opinions and comment on the work UNU-MERIT is doing. It provides a space to continue conversations that start at conferences and workshops and it frees discussions from the confines of the email inbox.