(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@panix.com To: fairuse-discuss@nyfairuse.org CC: Jay Sulzberger jays@panix.com
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 11:40:57 -0400 From: James Love james.love@cptech.org To: random-bits@lists.essential.org, ecommerce ecommerce@lists.essential.org Subject: [Random-bits] WIPO DG asked to convene meeting on open and collaborative projects to create public goods
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
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