An extension of the UK copyright term from 50 to 95 years became a whole lot less likely yesterday. The BBC reported last night that the soon-to-be-published “Gowers Review of Intellectual Property” will recommend maintaining the current term.

This comes despite lobbying by popstars such as Mick Hucknall (of Simply Red infamy) and Cliff Richard for an extension of the term.

Nascent UK digital rights organisation the Open Rights Group campaigned against extension, asserting it would mostly benefit the four major labels. Influential liberal-leaning thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research said in its recent report on copyright: “We have not seen any evidence to suggest that current protections provided in law are insufficient. We feel that to extend terms any further than their current length is economically illogical and anti-competitive.”

Though the question of term extension is a very hot one in many countries today, it basically runs along the lines of some rather old arguments. Thomas Babington Macaulay dissected the debate in a parliamentary speech in 1841, and little seems to have changed since. For easier reading, I’ve prepared a very basic PDF (thanks, LaTeX!)

via The Register 

I would like to comment on the interesting take that Andy Updegrove presented and Philippe Schmidt’s view on this perspective.

First, let’s deal with the never ending story of Wikipedia vs. Brittanica. Perhaps we should re-phrase this story and ask ourselves whether Wikipedia should use the –pedia suffix. Is Wikepedia an encyclopedia? An encyclopedia contains historical and/or current factual information. Factual information is absolute. You can interpret it according to your own views, but a good encyclopedia presents its facts in an unbiased way; objective, factual! It is clear that Wikipedia is lacking in this respect. Recently it has tried to remedy this problem by locking the information down and monitoring what goes in.

Here I come to Andy Updegrove’s perception, and I agree. It is a mistake to lock the information down in an effort to emulate reference works. Wikipedia transcends the utilitarian scope of an encyclopedia. It gives us a chance to indeed look at ourselves and at other peoples’ interpretation of the facts which we look at in one way, as others might see them in a wholly different light. And it is this other way of looking at factual information that is increasingly important in today’s world. Proof of this is in all the factual information presented on the news…

However I do not agree completely with the culture part. Wikipedia at this point doesn’t have anything to do with popular culture or whatever culture. It misses the coherence that belongs to the structure of culture. This is were Philippe Schmidt’s comment comes in, in which he rightly says that only a minority uses Wikipedia, which then subsequently makes it a representation of a sub-culture at the most. For a, virtual, community to display culture it needs to have (virtual) social relationships, rules and norms and an identity. These rules and norms are of high importance as they make clear which common ground can be found between different (sub-)communities. Wikipedia is not that sort of a community at the moment (although the Community Portal displays similar characteritics, these are much more technical and superficial). Wikipedia is not a simple forum either as it has evolved way beyond the concept of forum.

It could however be seen as, or evolve further into a “platform”, a global “virtual arena” or global virtual learning locale (learner’s community) where people can learn from each other and each other’s view of the (factual) information presented on Wikipedia. For this to happen, deeper social relationships within Wikipedia will need to be created or at least it should be able to display shared values and norms (beyond the technical) to which people can adhere while interacting which each other and which will then give in-depth meaning to the different views presented.

kottke writes that Flickr has filed a patent on “interestingness”. The patent filing describes this as follows:

1. An apparatus for determining an interestingness rank for at least one media object, comprising: logic for accepting at least one metadatum concerning the at least one media object from at least one user; and logic for ranking the at least one media object based at least in part on the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the at least one media object.

Let me take this as an occasion to deliver a short discourse on patents.

Patents used to be pretty straightforward. You invented something that was a) new (no one has invented the same thing before), b) inventive (i.e. non-trivial), and useful (industrially applicable). Submit a description of your invention to your national patent office, and they’ll judge your invention on the above criteria. If they’re satisfied, you get a limited monopoly on making, offering, selling and using the invention in question. (The monopoly is limited both in time, usually to twenty years; and in reach, since some uses are allowed without having to request permission from the patent holder.) In return for this limited monopoly awarded to you by society, you have to disclose how the invention works.
This is an ideal description, as many things are currently going wrong with the patent system. One big issue is that patents are granted for things that aren’t new, or that are trivial. Why is this a problem? In economic terms, a patent turns a public good (the idea in question) into a private one, substracting from the common pool of knowledge that society can make use of. This can be useful to give an incentive to inventors. But it can also be abused for other purposes, such as keeping rivals out of a certain market.

That’s most likely what Yahoo!, Flickr’s owner, has in mind with this filing. As the Economist reported some weeks ago, the company is ailing in most of its business areas. It’s looking to turn itself into the market leader in social networking and related things (please don’t make me say ‘Web 2.0′). Besides Flickr, it has also bought del.icio.us, a site that allows users to “tag” links. Other users can then use those tags as categories for their searches.

As Yahoo! hasn’t quite managed to distinguish itself from rivals through the quality of its services, it’s now trying to push them out of the market by patenting tags (perhaps with a little ranking mechanism thrown in), one of the more basic concepts of modern web use.

This fits in with the patent philosophy that is currently behind the U.S. patent system: Allow patenting of anything and everything, since it’s going to be good for… um… patent lawyers. Nobody else really, in the long run. Think that’s silly? I agree. The only thing standing between such harmful patent claims on basic methods and the EU is that the latter still does not admit patents on mere ideas, such as software.

via BoingBoing 

People called it a “cool story” (via Lessig’s blog via Veni Markowski’s blog) when the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry announced it will start using a Creative Commons 2.5 license for all of its publications. Creative Commons licenses allow authors to determine which rights they want to share and which they would rather reserve – in a more fine-grained and sensible way than the default copyright that is attached to everything we write.
What is a bit curious is that we file the decision by a public body to make its resources available to the public, under “cool story” rather than “boring mundane expected”. Maybe one day nobody will raise a mouse-finger …

Wikipedia has received a lot of attention during the last year or so. It is often mentioned as “the other” great example of commons based peer-production besides free/open source software. And Nature Magazines’s comparison of Wikipedia and Encyplopedia Brittanica has provided endless food for debate, not only on this very blog (here, here and here)
However, Andy Updegrove, adds a new perspective (full article) when he describes it as the most complete existing record of how humanity understands itself that we have ever had. He goes on to announce the death of archeology as we know it (or as Andy describes it, a rather futile attempt at piecing together information embedded in poorly preserved artefacts from the past). He writes:

But, you may ask next, is the Wikipedia accurate enough? After all, there is an ongoing controversy over whether its accuracy is the equal of a traditional encyclopedia.

That question, I think, entirely misses the point. Why? Because I believe that the real significance of the Wikipedia is not its status as a compendium of information, but rather its ability to provide a record of how we see ourselves, our heritage, our current events and our culture in real-time as those perceptions evolve. And that significance clearly transcends the utility of the static, shelf-bound reference works traditionally described as encyclopedias. …

Does all of this [information on wikipedia] add up to simple collection of disconnected trivia? Perhaps. But in the anthropological sense, another name for a “simple collection of disconnected trivia” is “culture”.

While I share Andy’s enthusiasm for wikipedia, I feel that one point deserves attention. Despite wikipedia’s success of branching out into other (non-English) sub-projects, it still reflects only the perspectives of a very limited sector of society: relatively wealthy, relatively well-connected, relatively well-educated. Maybe that was never different (it was not the peasants who were writing on stone tablets in 3000 BC), but it is an important limitation nevertheless, when we speak of wikipedia as a record of how “humanity” sees itself.
The article is discussed on slashdot (with the usual wealth of nerdy jokes and the occasional gem of insight).

Yesterday at the Internet Governance Forum in Athens, the “Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards” was officially announced. Encompassing business, civil society and academia, it is formed by SUN, CPTech, the library of Alexandria, W3C, IP-Justice, the Yale Information Society Project, and the Free Software Foundation Europe.

These groups will work together to bring the importance of open standards to the attention of policymakers. As The Register reports, Sun’s Susy Struble highlighted the relevance for competition policy and beyond:

“A truly open standard provides for the highest level of competition,” she said. “It provides more equitable access, and wider, global interaction.”

Read more about it at OffzRoad and Computer Business Review.

Those working on bringing forward a Treaty on Access to Knowledge and Technology scored an important point at the IGF yesterday. As Thiru reports:

In the discussion session on “Openness” at the Athens Internet Governance Forum moderated by Nik Gowing of BBC World, the representative from the Republic of South Africa posited that the Internet Governance Forum could consider an elaboration on a Treaty on Access to Knowledge as a tangible way forward to find the balance between the rights and obligations conferred by intellectual property and the public interest. James Love (CPTech) called upon his fellow panelists (see list below) to endorse the elaboration on a Treaty on Acces to Knowledge first proposed by the Friends of Development in 2004 at WIPO. Hanne Sophie Greve, former judge at the European Court of Human Rights, endorsed the Treaty on the spot.

A first outline of the topics such a treaty might touch upon can be found in a draft (really, very draft) document from May 2005. It represents a consensus paper of a large number of NGOs working in the field. It’s especially instructive if read next to the TRIPS agreement (.pdf). (Warning: Dont do this if you are allergic to legalese.)

Update: IP Watch has a very good related artice. It also talks about the changed role of copyright in an environment shaped by digital communication networks:

“Just about every aspect of the free flow of information is now hampered” by technologies, laws and other reasons, said Joichi Ito of Creative Commons. “Suddenly the sphere of copyright is everywhere.”