Discussion July 2003

discussion@lists.fsfe.org

15 participants
12 discussions

WSIS media lab, fwd: [alien8@riseup.net: [Imc-europe] Proposal: Polymedia Lab]
by Chris Croome 31 Jul '03

31 Jul '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi Mark Ray suggested that I should forward the following proposal for a Polymedia Lab at the WSIS to these two lists. The email that follows can be found on the web, together with an RTF version, at this address: http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-europe/2003-July/001309.html I think that there is some overlap with the ideas of the FSF and this proposal and I'm sure that the people organising this would welcome input for the FSF. Chris PS sorry to join this list and then just forward stuff from elsewhere -- I'll now do some lurking :-) - ----- Forwarded message from alien8 <alien8(a)riseup.net> ----- From: alien8 <alien8(a)riseup.net> Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:25:21 +0200 To: imc-europe(a)lists.indymedia.org List-Id: For organising a European IMC meetings and co-ordination <imc-europe.lists.indymedia.org> Subject: [Imc-europe] Proposal: Polymedia Lab Media Lab 2/03: Polymedia Lab at WSIS 8-13 December 2003 - Geneva - WSIS Information increasingly represents the ground on which authority is based and on which struggles are being fought out. Intellectual Property is becoming a major means of control, and the media-led battles for the thoughts and the consent of people are playing a central role in global politics - once again proven by the tales on weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war. As an intervention into the reorganisation of power, communication and information, we propose a media lab during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The WSIS - Background In December 2003 the United Nations will hold the first part of a global conference on information and communication: The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). WSIS will be the first in the recent series of global summits to deal with information issues. Just as the Rio summit in 1992 structured the politics of sustainable development, the WSIS may set the framework for how issues around information and communication will be perceived and dealt with in the future. Because of the dominant role of Northern governments and corporations, we can expect further moves towards neoliberalisation, the privatisation of knowledge, and repressive cybersecurity regimes, while development concerns will be swept aside by the spread of western technology. Polymedia Lab at the WSIS We are proposing to hold a media and communication laboratory as a counter-event to the WSIS. Based on the experiences of the Hub in Florence in November 2002, and organised in close cooperation with the proposed media lab for the next European Social Forum in Paris, Polymedia Lab will be a temporary space of experimentation and confrontation for alternative and grassroots communication projects. It will serve as a platform to develop and experiment with horizontal communication, to share experiences and knowledge, to create networks of alternative communication projects, and present an alternative vision of information society. Polymedia Lab will focus on horizontality, emancipation, openness, creativity and freedom, where WSIS will be about hierarchy, exclusion, and control. It will present practical projects by those who actually develop information society on a grassroots level. While WSIS will be busy presenting dry documents by those who use, exploit and repress the work of others, we will engage in an act of communications insurgency. What would we envision? What could take place at Polymedia Lab? - - a big open Indymedia Centre with public access terminals - - pirate TV and pirate radio (local) - - video and radio streams (global, multidirectional, and in interaction with streams being produced elsewhere) - - presentations on issues around the information society: media concentration, intellectual property rights, infowar, ISP and media laws, etc. - - skill-sharing workshops on technological aspects of communication: Linux, pgp, WiFi, satellite transmission, hacking, streaming, etc. - - permanent workshops on non-technical aspects of communication: horizontal, non-hierarchical ways of communicating - - network meetings of groups and individuals involved with free TV, free radio, Indymedia, video, etc. to develop and facilitate cooperation Who are we talking to? In addition to being platforms for exchange, experiment and networking, media labs aim to reach out to other communities and to publicise horizontal grassroots approaches. At the WSIS, Polymedia Lab will try to interact with "Civil Society" (as defined by the UN). Hundreds of NGOs and civil society groups are involved in the summit preparation process, around 700 members of civil society participated in the last preparatory conference alone. We will strengthen links and exchange with some of the more progressive civil society organisations, while at the same time questioning and criticising the role of NGOs in the UN process, the corporate takeover of the UN, and Corporatised Global Governance. We will demonstrate other ways to raise our voices than lobbying and gratefully participating in a global summit. At the same time, Polymedia Lab will spread news and analysis about the WSIS to other parts of the world through polymedia reporting and multidirectional video and radio streaming, providing an interface for remote participation and for interactive workshops with those who cannot come to Geneva. - From media lab part 1 to part 2 The WSIS media lab should become the climax of a month-long concerted alternative information society campaign, to be started at the ESF media lab in Paris in November. During that month we will educate ourselves and others about the WSIS and its possible impacts, counteract the summit agenda, and show the value of information and communication systems based on freedom, horizontality and cooperation. Let's get started... As a next step we will need to form an organising group. Polymedia Lab will only happen if many people and groups join the effort. Please tell us if you would like to participate by sending an email to "wsis at nadir.org". That address has also been set up as a mailing list for organising the lab. In addition, we hope that many groups and individuals will prepare workshops, radio programmes, actions, etc. If you are one of them, please let us know via the same address. Polymedia Lab was first proposed at a meeting on counter-events to the WSIS in April 2003. It will be part of a whole series of counter-events which also include the World Communication Rights Forum and a Make-World conference. Polymedia Lab Initiative Group (individuals from European IMCs) _______________________________________________ Imc-europe mailing list Imc-europe(a)lists.indymedia.org http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-europe - ----- End forwarded message ----- - -- http://chris.croome.net/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE/KQz9IQYsxIuy3pERAjk4AKCkrsDMhNxAHKx20+b3sIzELOatYQCgkOeP Iz+ACYzdo+pJRKtx3jSzGdM= =8HzK -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Free Software Usage Studies
by João Miguel Neves 29 Jul '03

29 Jul '03

Anyone knows of a site that has references to studies of usage of Free Software (even if they mistakenly call it opensource) ? If not, I'll create a webpage somewhere with links (I have a couple of references somewhere in my e-mail). If you know of any such studies, please tell me. -- João Miguel Neves <joao(a)silvaneves.org>

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EU CS WSIS Coordination List
by Georg C. F. Greve 28 Jul '03

28 Jul '03

Hi all, since Karen told me to simply go ahead and create the list on our server, I just set up the wsis-euc(a)fsfeurope.org list for EU coordination of the CS regarding the WSIS and the aforementioned interfacing with the European Union governments. I also invited those to the list who either sent mail or who wrote their name onto the paper list and whose email address I was able to read. If you are interested, you can also subscribe yourself at http://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/wsis-euc Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve <greve(a)fsfeurope.org> Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) GNU Business Network (http://mailman.gnubiz.org) Brave GNU World (http://brave-gnu-world.org)

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Enquiry from an outsider
by Frank Pennycook 24 Jul '03

24 Jul '03

Hello to the FSF discussion list I am enquiring whether any of you know of organisations or individuals who are lobbying the WTO (World Trade Organisation) in the interests of users or authors of Free Software. As you will know the WTO through its TRIPs agreement has legal power over intellectual property issues including those relating to software. For more info see http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/trips_e.htm My organisation, Friends of the Earth, is an international network which campaigns for environmentally and socially just solutions to global problems. One of our major campaigns in recent years has been for an equitable world trade system, although we have not specifically worked on software-related intellectual property injustice as yet. http://www.foei.org/trade/index.html http://www.tjm.org.uk Thank you in advance for any information you can provide. Frank Pennycook Policy and Research Unit Friends of the Earth (England Wales and Northen Ireland)

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WSIS Intersessional Meeting
by Georg C. F. Greve 24 Jul '03

24 Jul '03

Hi all, everyone who's interested in the World Summit on the Information Society might take interest in the debriefing for the intersessional meeting that took place last week in Paris and which is available on the FSF Europe page at http://fsfeurope.org/projects/wsis/debriefing-paris.html now. Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve <greve(a)fsfeurope.org> Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) GNU Business Network (http://mailman.gnubiz.org) Brave GNU World (http://brave-gnu-world.org)

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Nature: WIPO to Address Free Public Goods
by Seth Johnson 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

(Forwarded from CNI Copyright list) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: James Love To: CNI-COPYRIGHT -- Copyright & Intellectual Property Sent: 7/10/03 7:03 PM Subject: Nature: Drive for patent-free innovation gathers pace - Kamil Idris is being asked to assess the merits of an open approach to intellectual property Nature reports that WIPO has agreed to organize the meeting on open development models... jamie * Francis Gurry, an assistant director-general at the WIPO, said that the organization welcomed the idea.The use of open and collaborative development models for research and innovation is a very important and interesting development, he said in a statement. The director-general looks forward with enthusiasm to taking up the invitation to organize a conference to explore the scope and application of these models. in html > http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v424/n6945/… or in pdf > http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v424/n6945/… 118 NATURE|VOL 424 | 10 JULY 2003 |www.nature.com/nature *** Drive for patent-free innovation gathers pace Kamil Idris is being asked to assess the merits of an open approach to intellectual property. Declan Butler,Paris A group of top scientists and economists are asking the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva to promote open models of innovation that don't rely on patents. The group believes that innovation based on freely available knowledge can be effective not just in areas where it has established a foothold -- such as genome sequence data -- but also in sectors where patent protection is entirely dominant, such as drug development (see Nature 424, 1011; 2003). In a 7 July letter to Kamil Idris, director general of the WIPO, 59 scientists and economists call attention to the "explosion of open and collaborative projects to create public goods" in recent years, including the Human Genome Project, the open-source software movement, and Internet standards. Such projects show that "one can achieve a high level of innovation in some areas of the modern economy without intellectual property protection," says the letter, arguing that "excessive, unbalanced or poorly designed intellectual property protections may be counterproductive." It calls on the WIPO to hold a major conference on these models during 2004. The signatories include Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University in New York, who received the 2001 Nobel prize for economics; John Sulston of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, UK, winner of the 2002 Nobel prize for medicine; James Orbinski, former president of Médecins Sans Frontières; and Richard Stallman, a computer scientist regarded by many as the "father" of the open-source software movement. Francis Gurry, an assistant director-general at the WIPO, said that the organization welcomed the idea. "The use of open and collaborative development models for research and innovation is a very important and interesting development," he said in a statement. "The director-general looks forward with enthusiasm to taking up the invitation to organize a conference to explore the scope and application of these models.' Advocates of open-source innovation want the WIPO and other public agencies to rethink how innovation works, says James Love, director of the Washington-based Consumer Project on Technology and a signatory to the letter. Open research for drug development is one of the initiatives main targets, he says. Some of the authors are also pursuing the idea of an international treaty to encourage governments to fund drug research and put the results directly into the public domain. Love argues that research results should ultimately become a freely available commodity, with drug companies competing to market generics of any drugs developed. The current system, in which drug research and development is carried out by drug companies that keep patent rights for up to 20 years, is grossly inefficient and results in excessive prices so that those who need the drugs most cannot afford them, argues Love. Yet to be fleshed out are details of how such a model would work, and how competitive forces could be maintained within it.But in May, the general assembly of the World Health Organization instructed agency officials to draft terms of reference during 2004 for a new evaluation of intellectual property, innovation and public health. Consideration of open-science models is expected to be part of this exercise. "The success of the Internet and of open-source software has driven home just how far open and collaborative projects can go," says Hal Varian, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has also signed the 7 July letter. Another signatory, Paul David, an economist at Stanford University, argues that systems such as free and open-source software are not at odds with intellectual property rights protection, but rather a choice by creators and society as to the benefits they want to obtain. 118 NATURE|VOL 424 | 10 JULY 2003 |www.nature.com/nature Kamil Idris is being asked to assess the merits of an open approach to intellectual property. -- James Love, Director, Consumer Project on Technology http://www.cptech.org, mailto:james.love@cptech.org tel. +1.202.387.8030, mobile +1.202.361.3040 *** -- DRM is Theft! We are the Stakeholders! New Yorkers for Fair Use http://www.nyfairuse.org [CC] Counter-copyright: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc/cc.html I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or distribution of this incidentally recorded communication. Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but only so far as such an expectation might hold for usual practice in ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of exclusive rights.

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Founding GNU-Usergroups
by sreumann＠community-org.de 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

Hi, I´m in the process of founding a GNU Usergroup in Hamburg and helping to found other groups in other parts of germany. At the time beeing there exists a very spartanic website www.gnu-forum.de and a mailinglist. In the near future I´ll make a "real" site with zope. In Hamburg we have allready a location and some people to start with. I think we can have the first "official" meeting in the middle of august. Georg Greve has allready promised to mention the group in the Brave-GNU-World. If somebody wants to found a group in his or hers vicinity I´ll be delighted to help in any way I can. Their are people of almost all parts of germany on the mailinglist. Kind regards Sven

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Founding GNU-Usergroups
by sreumann＠community-org.de 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

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Founding GNU-Usergroups
by sreumann＠community-org.de 17 Jul '03

17 Jul '03

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Call for WIPO DG on Open and Collaborative Public Goods
by Seth Johnson 07 Jul '03

07 Jul '03

(Looks like we're about to call WIPO out on the carpet. Information is the one indisputable public good, whatever its form of organization. Please see the APPENDIX below for an overview of categories of public goods being suggested. -- Seth) -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Random-bits] WIPO DG asked to convene meeting on open and collaborativeprojects to create public goods Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 11:51:21 -0400 (EDT) From: Jay Sulzberger <jays(a)panix.com> To: fairuse-discuss(a)nyfairuse.org CC: Jay Sulzberger <jays(a)panix.com> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 11:40:57 -0400 From: James Love <james.love(a)cptech.org> To: random-bits(a)lists.essential.org, ecommerce <ecommerce(a)lists.essential.org> Subject: [Random-bits] WIPO DG asked to convene meeting on open and collaborative projects to create public goods > http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/kamil-idris-7july2003.pdf 7 July 2003 Director General Dr. Kamil Idris, Director General World Intellectual Property Organization Geneva, Switzerland Dear Dr. Idris: In recent years there has been an explosion of open and collaborative projects to create public goods. These projects are extremely important, and they raise profound questions regarding appropriate intellectual property policies. They also provide evidence that one can achieve a high level of innovation in some areas of the modern economy without intellectual property protection, and indeed excessive, unbalanced, or poorly designed intellectual property protections may be counter-productive. We ask that the World Intellectual Property Organization convene a meeting in calendar year 2004 to examine these new open collaborative development models, and to discuss their relevance for public policy. (See Appendix following signatures for examples of open collaborative projects to create public goods). Sincerely, (in alphabetical order) Alan Asher Consumers Association London, UK Dr. K. Balasubramaniam Co-ordinator of Health Action International, Asia Pacific Columbo, Sri Lanka Konrad Becker, Director Institute for New Culture Technologies /t0 Vienna, Austria Yochai Benkler Professor of Law Yale Law School New Haven, CT USA Jonathan Berger Law and Treatment Access Unit AIDS Law Project University of the Witwatersrand South Africa James Boyle Professor of Law Duke Law School Durham, NC USA Diane Cabell Director, Clinical Programs, Berkman Center for Internet & Society Harvard Law School Cambridge, MA, USA Darius Cuplinskas Director, Information Program Open Society Institute Budapest, Hungary Marie de Cenival Chargée de mission ETAPSUD Agence Nationale de Recherches sur le Sida (A.N.R.S.) INSERM 379 "Epidémiologie et Sciences Sociales appliquées à l'innovation médicale" Marseille, France Felix Cohen CEO, Consumentenbond The Hague, the Netherlands Benjamin Coriat Professor of Economics, University of Paris 13 Director of CEPN-IIDE, CNRS Paris, France Carlos Correa Center for Interdisciplinary Studies on Industrial Property and Economics University of Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, Argentina Paul A. David Professor of Economics, Stanford University & Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Stanford, California, USA Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford & Senior Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute Oxford, UK Kristin Dawkins Vice President for International Programs Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Minneapolis, MN USA Peter T. DiMauro Center for Technology Assessment Washington, DC USA Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss Pauline Newman Professor of Law New York University School of Law NY, NY USA Peter Eckersley, Department of Computer Science, and IP Research Institute of Australia, The University of Melbourne Australia Michael B. Eisen Public Library of Science San Francisco, CA, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Berkeley, CA USA Nathan Geffen Treatment Action Campaign Cape Town, South Africa Gwen Hinze Staff Lawyer Electronic Frontier Foundation San Francisco, CA USA Ellen F.M. 't Hoen LL.M. Medecins sans Frontieres Access to Essential Medicines Campaign Paris, France Jeanette Hofmann Nexus & Social Science Research Center Berlin, Germany Aidan Hollis Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Calgary, and TD MacDonald Chair in Industrial Economics Competition Bureau, Industry Canada Gatineau, Quebec Canada Dr Tim Hubbard Head of Human Genome Analysis Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Cambridge, UK Nobuo Ikeda Senior Fellow, Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry Tokyo, Japan Professor Wilmot James Chair, Africa Genome Initiative Social Cohesion & Integration Research Programme Human Sciences Research Council Cape Town, South Africa Niyada Kiatying-Angsulee, Ph.D. Drug Study Group Thailand Philippa Lawson Senior Counsel, Public Interest Advocacy Centre Ottawa, Canada Lawrence Lessig Professor at Law and Executive Director of the Center for Internet and Society Stanford Law School Stanford, CA USA James A. Lewis Director, Technology and Public Policy Program Center for Strategic and International Studies Washington, DC USA Jiraporn Limpananont, Ph.D. Pharmaceutical Patent Project, Social Pharmacy Research Unit (SPR), Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences Chulalongkorn University Bangkok, Thailand. James Love Director, Consumer Project on Technology Co-Chair, Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) Committee on Intellectual Property Washington, DC USA Jason M. Mahler Vice President and General Counsel Computer and Communications Industry Association Washington, DC USA Eric S. Maskin A.O. Hirschman Professor of Social Science Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, NJ USA Professor Keith Maskus Chair, Department of Economics University of Colorado at Boulder. Boulder, CO USA Ken McEldowney Executive Director Consumer Action California USA William McGreevey Director, Development Economics Futures Group Washington, DC USA Professor Jon Merz Center for Bioethics University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA USA Jean Paul Moatti Director, INSERM 379 Faculté de Sciences Economiques Université de la Méditerranée Marseille, France Eben Moglen Professor of Law & Legal History Columbia University General Counsel, Free Software Foundation NY, NY USA Ralph Nader Consumer Advocate Washington, DC USA Hee-Seob Nam, Patent Attorney Intellectual Property Left Korea Progressive Network JINBONET Korea James Orbinski MD Associate Professor Centre for International Health University of Toronto, Canada Bruce Perens Director, Software in the Public Interest Inc. Co-Founder, Open Source Initiative, Linux Standard Base USA Greg Pomerantz, Fellow, Information Law Institute, New York University New York, NY USA Laurie Racine President, Center for the Public Domain Durham, NC USA Eric S. Raymond President, Open Source Initiative USA Juan Rovira Senior Health Economist The World Bank Frederic M. Scherer Emeritus, John F. Kennedy School, Harvard University Cambridge, MA USA Mark Silbergeld Consumer Federation of America Washington, DC USA Richard Stallman Launched the development of the GNU operating system, whose GNU/Linux variant is the principal competitor for Microsoft Windows. Cambridge, MA USA Anthony Stanco Center of Open Source & Government George Washington University Washington, DC USA Joseph Stiglitz Professor of Economics and Finance Columbia University Former Chief Economist World Bank Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 1997 Received Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 New York, NY USA Peter Suber Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge Senior Researcher, SPARC Brooksville, ME, USA Sir John Sulton Winner of 2002 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine Former Director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Cambridge, UK Harsha Thirumurthy Yale University, CT USA Alexander C. Tsai, MD Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH USA Pia Valota ACU Associazione Consumatori Utenti ONLUS AEC Association of European Consumers socially and environmentally aware Milano, Italy Professor Hal Varian Dean, School of Information and Management Systems University of California at Berkeley. Berkeley, CA USA Machiel van der Velde Co-Chair, Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) Committee on intellectual property The Hague, the Netherlands Victoria Villamar le Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs/ European Consumers' Organisation Brussels, Belgium Robert Weissman Essential Action Washington, DC USA Professor Jonathan Zittrain Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society Harvard Law School Cambridge MA USA APPENDIX Open collaborative projects to create public goods These are some of the projects that could be discussed: 1. The IETF and Open Network Protocols. The Internet Engineering Task Force has worked for years to develop the public domain protocols that are essential for the operation of the Internet, an open network that has replaced a number of proprietary alternatives. It is important that WIPO acknowledge the success and importance of the Internet, and appreciate and understand the way the IETF functions. The IETF is currently struggling with problems setting open standards. When the IETF seeks to adopt a standard, there is uncertainty if anyone will later claim the standard infringes a patent. One suggestion to address this problem is to create a system whereby a standards organization could announce an intention to adopt a standard, and after a reasonable period for disclosure, prevent parties from later enforcing non-disclosed infringement claims. 2. Development of Free and Open Software This movement is highly decentralized, competitive, entrepreneurial, heterogeneous, and devoted to the publishing of software that is freely distributed and open. It includes projects that embrace the GNU General Public License (GPL), which uses copyright licenses to require that modified versions also be free software, and projects such as FreeBSD, which use minimal licensing restrictions and permit anyone to make non-free modified versions, as well as projects such as MySQL, which release the code under the GNU GPL but sell licenses to make non-free modified versions, as well as many other approaches. The new Apple operating system runs on top of FreeBSD, and big corporate players like Oracle and IBM run databases and server software on the mostly-GPL'd GNU/Linux operating system. Apache is the leading web page server software. WIPO provides frequent forums where firms that embrace closed and proprietary development models express their views, but very little is heard from those who have embraced open and collaborative development models for free software. The astonishing success of this movement should be recognized by WIPO, and policy development should be open to new ways of thinking. These various actors have a variety of values and objectives. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation says "the freedom to change and redistribute software is a human right." Others see this is as primarily an issue of how to most efficiently develop and distribute software. The proponents of open collaborative free software projects note that there are powerful reasons why software code should be open and freely copied. Not only is it efficient to copy existing code in new programs, but the transparency of the code allows a large community to find flaws and suggest improvements (Linus Torvalds' observation, popularized by Eric Raymond's, that "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"). The free software movement is very important to the success and the future of the Internet, and it is also quite important in countering Microsoft's massive monopoly power, particularly given the number of commercial competitors to Microsoft that have disappeared. In recent years many governments have began to embrace open collaborative free software projects. Free software developers are concerned about a number of policies that WIPO is involved in, including whether to allow patents on computational ideas, the future development of digital rights management schemes, and the enforceability of "shrink wrapped" or click-on contracts that contain anticompetitive provisions. 3. The World Wide Web. If measured by the rate at which it has transformed the world, the World Wide Web is the most important publishing success ever. The web was built on public domain protocols, and on documents that were from the beginning, transparent and open at the level of source code. Long before anyone even knew how copyright would apply to the Internet, millions of documents were being created for free distribution on the Internet. Governments are now routinely publishing documents and data on the web so it can be freely available, as do multilateral institutions like WIPO. The entire future of the Web will depend upon the extent to which new digital copyright regimes permit such practices as hypertext linking, the use of materials in search engines such as Google, and liberal views toward fair use. 4. The Human Genome Project (HGP). In an April 14, 2003 state, the heads of state for the France, the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and China issued a statement, which noted that: "Scientists from six countries have completed the essential sequence of three billion base pairs of DNA of the human genome, the molecular instruction book of human life. . . This information is now freely available to the world without constraints via public databases on the World Wide Web." If Presidents Jacques Chirac and George Bush, Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Junichiro Koizumi, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Premier WEN Jiabao can collaborate on a statement to herald efforts to create a public domain database, free from intellectual property claims, it is time for the World Intellectual Property Organization to better appreciate why these governments did not want the Human Genome patented. 5. The SNP Consortium A different example of a project to create a public domain database involves single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are thought to have great significance in biomedical research. In 1999, the SNP Consortium was organized as a non-profit foundation to provide public data on SNPs. The SNP Consortium is composed of the Wellcome Trust and 11 pharmaceutical and technological companies including Amersham Biosciences, AstraZeneca, Aventis, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Hoffmann-LaRoche, GSK, IBM, Motorola, Novartis, Pfizer and Searle. The work was preformed by the Stanford Human Genome Centerm, Washington University School of Medicine (St. Louis), the Sanger Centre and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. The mission of the SNP consortium was to develop up to 300,000 SNPs distributed evenly throughout the human genome and to make the information related to these SNPs available to the public without intellectual property restrictions. By 2001 it had exceeded expectations, and more than 1.5 million SNPs were discovered and made available to researchers worldwide. The SNPs consortium, the HGP and other similar projects represent different notions regarding the intellectual property rules for databases, and more information about these projects would be useful in evaluating assumptions and informing debates in the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright as it considers current proposals to convene a diplomatic conference to adopt a treaty on new sui generis intellectual property rules for databases. 6. Open Academic and Scientific Journals The development of the Internet and the World Wide Web has fueled interest in new models for publishing academic and scientific journals. The prices for traditional journals have been sharply rising for years, worsening the gap between those who can afford access to information and those who cannot. In the past several years there has been a proliferation of projects to create open academic and scientific journals. The Public Library of Science was founded by Nobel Prize winner Dr. Harold Varmus and fellow researchers Patrick Brown and Michael Eisen. The Free Online Scholarship (FOS) movement, the creation of the widely read (for profit) BioMed Central to provide "immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research," the Budapest Open Access Initiative (which has been endorsed by 210 organizations), and other similar projects seek to promote new business models for publishing that allow academic and scientific information to be more widely available to the research community. Other efforts to provide reduced price or free access to researchers in developing countries include the Health InterNetwork, which was introduced by the United Nations' Secretary General Kofi Annan at the UN Millennium Summit in the year 2000, a number of projects sponsored by the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, eIFL.Net (Electronic Information for Libraries), a foundation that "strives to lead, negotiate, support and advocate for the wide availability of electronic resources by library users in transition and developing countries," and a new effort by the Creative Commons to create a license for free access to copyrighted materials in developing countries. Recently US Congressman Martin Sabo introduced legislation to require all US funded research to enter the public domain, and others are calling for international cooperation to similarly enhance the scientific commons. 7. The Global Positioning System. This is not an example of collaborative development model, but it does illustrate the benefits of providing a free information good, in terms of stimulating the development of an entire generation of new applications. If lighthouses are considered a textbook example of a public good, the modern equivalent might be the Global Positioning System (GPS), which provides the entire world highly accurate positioning and timing data via satellites. GPS signals are used for air, road, rail, and marine navigation, precision agriculture and mining, oil exploration, environmental research and management, telecommunications, electronic data transfer, construction, recreation and emergency response. There are an estimated 4 million GPS users worldwide. The services are offered without charge. Following the Korean Airline disaster, President Reagan offered GPS free to promote increased safety for civil aviation, and more recently President Clinton eliminated the intentional degrading of the system for civilian use. NASA reports that "many years ago we evaluated charging for the civil signal. The more we looked at it, the more convinced we became that by providing the signal free of direct user fees we would encourage technological development and industrial growth. The benefits from that, the new jobs created, and the increased safety and efficiency for services more than outweighed the money we would get from charging especially when you consider the additional bureaucracy that would be needed to manage cost recovery. We think that judgement has proven valid, as the world-wide market for GPS applications and services now exceeds $8 billion annually." -- James Love, Director, Consumer Project on Technology http://www.cptech.org, mailto:james.love@cptech.org tel. +1.202.387.8030, mobile +1.202.361.3040 _______________________________________________ Random-bits mailing list Random-bits(a)lists.essential.org http://lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/random-bits

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Discussion July 2003