I went to an interesting conference last week. It was called Unlocking IP and it was looking at different models of managing “Intellectual Property”. I spoke about one of the best examples in the world of sharing knowledge productively, Open Source, as well as some of the Free Knowledge projects that are springing up around the place. I have an interest in trying to get some sort of Free Knowledge project off the ground, where people can post and collaborate on various works, and it is freely accessible. Imagine if every person in the world wrote just one paper on something they know well (astrophysics, 12-yr old math, how to plough a field, painting, etc) and everyone had access to this. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be able to make money from their creations, however what seems to have happened is that as a species, we have locked up our knowledge and further divided up society into those who can afford and those who can’t. My argument is that by doing this, we have put a price tag on our own evolution, and are only allowing the more wealthy, and minority of people at that, to advance.
To be honest I got quite disillusioned by some of what I heard. People saying “so we love Open Content and Open Standards, we believe in a better future, better opportunities for all, blah blah blah, and by the way this is only achievable with our product”. I started to get a little angry with some of the strange interpretations of free and open, so I put together a list.
Open Knowledge is NOT!:
I also got a little sick of people continually saying they were just protecting the “innovators” or “copyright holders”. One of the problems as I see it is that the innovators are not being protected. We are kind of lucky with the GPL in software because there are copyright protections that stop large players from being able to monopolise Open Source software. We still have the patents problem, and usually it isn’t the innovators who own the patents to their works in software, it is the company they work for. Therefore big companies are acquiring and then enforcing patents. The patents game seems almost to be a numbers game, (IANAL) in that they with the most win. If you manage to afford the incredible cost to lodge a patent to protect some incredible invention you’ve come up with, the fact is to practically implement that invention in a program you will alsolutely step on many trivial patents owned by larger companies who have the money and lawyers to throw at this that the rest of us can’t afford. Therefore if they like your idea, they can potentially muscle it out of you with their own portfolio as a threat. Already we’ve seen several projects that would be of huge benefit to the ICT industry and the Australia people, such as rproxy, that are locked up by companies who own patents that will never implement them except to extract $$$ from someone else who usefully implements the idea in code.
The Unlocking IP conference was more about content than code, and the problem extends way beyond the software industry. The music and film industry is no better, often the copyright holder is the large company such as the MPA, who have been running around trying to jump people for copyright infringment. This wouldn’t be so bad if 1) they weren’t using word searches on FTP repositories without human interaction, as they did with LA, and 2) that the proceedings were going back to the musicians and actors. I don’t pretend to be an expert in this area, but you so often hear about the bad contracts musicians particularly get, and the hoops they have to run through, getting a pittance (comparatively) for their work. As the large companies effectively become the copyright holders, you can bet the musicians are getting next to nothing out of copyright infringment cases.
Rusty Russell has written several rants on patents, copyright, lawyers, and more. I highly recommend checking out his blog. As a software developer who is both personall affected, and who knows many people affected by these kinds of issues he has a lot to say on the subject. Lawyers to watch are Kim Weatherall, Brendon Scott, Jeremy Malcolm and Ian Oi. Also check out Groklaw for more legal foo.
PS – One of the lawyers there, a Special Counsel to the Australian Government no less made the adsurd comment that “those Free Software people don’t believe in Copyright”. I pulled him up in the question time as soon as I had the chance, explaining that given the existing copyright system, Free and Open Source people rely on copyright, in fact without it Linux and other Open Source software projects wouldn’t have been nearly as successful as they have. It acts to protect the people, the integrity of the code, it stops a company monopolising the code, amongst many other good things. He had got this assumption from an RMS talk a little while ago, and while I don’t doubt that he misinterpreted somewhat, I also saw RMS talk in Sydney and he certainly left a lot of people confused. We need to ensure that the messages are extremely clear to stop these kinds of misleading comments being made.
RMS was certainly interesting when he spoke here, he recommended I change the name of Linux Australia to GNU/Linux Australia (no surprises there), he suggested to an ICT advisor to simply not speak to her clients rather than giving her tools to introduce FOSS to clients (such as business case reasons), he said we all need to stop using the term “Intellectual Property” (which I can kind of understand, but we can’t just bury our heads indefinitely). After the talk, when most people had left he decided to yell at me. I’ve never seen someone so adamant about picking a fight, especially when I was actually saying thankyou for the talk. Certainly not making any friends there RMS, and certainly not “saintly” behaviour as he likes to see himself.