Open Innovation & Intellectual Property

There will be what looks to be a great event taking place in London in a few weeks time. I’ll be in sunny Italy (tough life) but if I wasn’t I’d definitely be there.

The event is called Open Innovation and Intellectual Property and takes place on Friday15th May at NESTA offices in the City from 1pm.

The description from NESTA is as follows:

“NESTA, The Wellcome Trust and the Creative Commons is jointly hosting a conference to explore how Commons tools can unlock innovation by making it easier for artists, scientists, researchers and businesses to share, collaborate and build on the work of others. Much innovation today is hampered by a lack of access to existing data, content and facilities. In sectors such as biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, a lack of openness leads to duplication of existing research activities and significant effort down blind allies. In the creative industries, the absence of simple, standardised licensing arrangements which establish usage rights is holding back innovative online business models. Yet it is sectors such as biotechnology and the creative industries which are otherwise best placed to lead the UK out of recession.

One solution is the adoption of the ‘Commons’ model of intellectual property. The commercial and wider social benefits of using the Commons model to address the barriers to sharing are potentially huge. It is estimated, for example, that there are already 130 million Creative Commons licensed works in the world, an over six-fold increase since 2005. And large numbers of service providers are appearing with new business models to "lubricate" the Commons marketplace for knowledge, services and resources.

NESTA’s conference will explore the impact of the Creative Commons to date, and debate its strengths and weaknesses as a model for supporting innovation. In science, the case of the health sector may be particularly compelling: under traditional drug development models, a well-funded research group starting today has a slim chance at getting a drug to market by 2025. Can a Health Commons speeden up drug discovery? In the creative industries, film, games and music businesses point to the way intellectual property rights are managed as a barrier to innovation. Can more widespread adoption of Creative Commons licenses support new business models for the sector?”

Speakers include:

• James Boyle (Creative Commons)
• John Wilbanks (Science Commons)
• David Lammy (IP Minister)
• Sir John Sulston (Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation)
• Tony Wood (Pfizer)
• Iain Wilcocks (Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property)
• Richard Mollet (British Phonographic Industry)

If you go, please do let me know anything interesting that comes up! :-)

DCC Legal Watch Paper on Science Commons

Hello all,

Long time no speak. I’ve not been around for a while and in my absence have neglected to tell you that the DCC Science Commons Legal Watch Paper I mentioned was published back at the beginning of March.

If you’re interested, you can take a read here.

Feedback always welcome!

Making FOI requests easy (plus people power!)

Some time ago I mentioned the development by mysociety.org of a new site to help people make Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from different parts of government.

Well its called WhatDoTheyKnow? …and here it is!

mysociety.org is doing the internet rounds today because their site TheyWorkForYou was instrumental in the cancellation of the vote on exempting details of MP’s expenses from the FOI Act.

So if making FOI queries is something you’re interested in, this site will make it very easy for you.

The site also archives the responses on the web for others to use. A good example of data curation!

...and a Happy New Year!

I'd like to wish a happy, healthy and peaceful 2009 to everyone out there. Make it a good one!

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nebarnix/854348966/in/set-72157594248654650/ BY-NC-ND

Radical sharing - Science Commons

A bit slow off the mark with this one but thanks for conference contributions also go to John Wilbanks for a fascinating talk on ‘radical sharing’.

Chris Rusbridge has already given a good overview of the talk on the Digital Curation Blog, so I will just mention a few highlights for me. A couple of the really helpful bits were the analogies he used when describing the operation of copyright in the digital world.

The first was a container and its contents. You can think of copyright as protecting the container but not the contents of the container. This is how copyright has long operated (it doesn’t protect ideas but the expression of those ideas). However, some of the licences users are forced to agree to lock that container. So although the copyright still operates in the same way access to the contents is reduced (in this case by contract). Open Access solves the legal problem but not the container problem.

The second analogy was helpful in explaining the differences in the way journals/books can be used now when they are (often) electronic as opposed to paper based. He compared this to the difference between buying and renting a house.

When you buy a paper based copy it is a hard copy and it is your hard copy. You are free to do what you like with it. This is like owning a house. Now that many publications are electronic it’s more similar to the renting/lease model. You can still read the publication (live in the house) but as with renting you are regulated by a contract which will add further conditions/limitations.

A further useful point that he highlighted is that using copyleft or sharealike in the data world actually hinders freedom. If two datasets with two different licences both based on copyleft or share alike (i.e requiring resulting works to be distributed under same terms) are used, when someone integrates that data and wants to put a licence on the resulting data they would be stuck because both licences insist the resulting data be made available under a particular licence. Thus, they can’t distribute that data without breaking the terms of one of the licences. Copyleft may work within communities where there is consensus on licensing terms but if the aim is to make it available outside that community it presents difficulties.

An example he gave of this was WikiPathways who just changed their licence terms from containing a share-alike condition to CC-BY. They’ve given up their right to sue but have given info to the world. They reward people who follow their intention with use of a trademark and ignore the people who don’t. The opposite way round from what we have come to expect.

John talked more about the approach of the Science Commons project to data sharing. I’m not going to go into this further here as it will be covered in the DCC Science Commons Legal Watch Paper in the New Year. I will however mention two of his other comments.

Firstly, that people are reluctant to share their data because they are worried someone else might muck it up. But it may not have occurred to them that someone else might do something brilliant with it. Something different from their emphasis, that they would not have done.

Secondly, looking back through history it can be seen that it is not unnatural to be in the position these advocates of openness find themselves in. Dislodging entrenched processes is hard work and stable systems are resistant to change on multiple levels. If this is to be the way ahead it will take some great effort to make it work and require voluntary action on the part of many.

One final thought - it occurred to me how often it is a contractual issue rather than a strict IP issue causing difficulty here. Although it is often the case (and correct me if you feel I’m wrong) that the contracts are made to seem more reasonable (and therefore more readily agreed to) through a misunderstanding/overstatement of the IP rights that actually exist.

Slides now available in relation to previous 'Healthy Consent' post

Just a quickie to say the slides for the very interesting keynote at the 4th International Digital Curation Conference given by Professor David Porteous are now available on the DCC website.

Experiences of data sharing in the CARMEN project

Thanks also to Alistair Knowles for his presentation about data sharing in the CARMEN project.

He talked about the difficulties of citation of data in cases of protracted ‘ownership’ and also cases of unknown ‘ownership’ (the inverted commas are mine).

His experience is that scientists are much more comfortable with informal agreements and are able to sort matters of ownership and citation amongst themselves. But when asked to formalise arrangements they got nervous and more reluctant to act.

He argued that the solution is not a legal one but a social one (agreement within the community), a conclusion also reached by myself and some others in the Legal and Policy Issues session of the Research Data theme at the JISC Innovation Forum in July of this year. For more details see my earlier post. Do you agree?