We’re pleased to announce that audio, images and slides from OKCon 2008 are now available at the Post-Event Information page.

Most of the material can be obtained from the OKF subversion repository.

If you’ve blogged the event or have pictures or the like, please let us know and we’ll post a link from the Post-Event page. We are also able to host any further documentation in the repository.

Many thanks to all of you who came to speak, present and participate! We had a great day and very much enjoyed the talks, demos and conversations that took place throughout the day.

We’ve now set up a wiki page for local Open Knowledge groups - to arrange meetups, forums and other activities:

• http://okfn.org/wiki/LocalGroups/

In addition to the Cambridge group, which has been around for a few years, we are in the process of creating groups in London and Oxford. If you’d like to get involved in any of these, or you’d like to set up your own local group - don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Share This

Componentization on a large scale (such as in the Debian ‘apt’ packaging system) has allowed large software projects to be amazingly productive through their use of a decentralised, collaborative, incremental development process. Componentization works so well because it allows us to ‘divide and conquer’ the organizational and conceptual problems of highly complex systems. Given this, what are the possibilities (and problems) of this approach for knowledge generally? How do we best design “knowledge APIs”, discover and distribute existing resources, and recombine decentralised datasets? In this talk we’ll discuss the answers to (some of) these questions focusing particularly on the role the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network can play.

So, if you’re in the Oxford vicinity and interested in Open Knowledge and related matters (there’s a good line-up of other speakers including Denise Wilton of moo.com) why not drop in to the Jericho Tavern around 7.30pm tomorrow evening.

Share This

COMMUNIA coordinator Juan Carlos De Martin and Rishab Ghosh of MERIT, University of Maastricht gave opening talks. I was on a panel with Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons, Nathan Yergler of Creative Commons and Keith Jeffery of euroCRIS. My slides are available at:

• http://m.okfn.org/files/talks/communia_20080118/

Other talks directly related to open knowledge included:

• Xavier Serra (Music Technology Group, Pompeu Fabra University) - on automated metadata production for sound, and the freesound project (content is currently licensed under CC Sampling Plus, but there are plans to introduce other licensing options)
• Simone Brunozzi - on BeeSeek, a peer to peer open-source search engine
• Séverine Dusollier (FUNDP - Centre de recherche informatique et droit) - on setting up a positive legal definition and regime for the public domain

Seeing as though there look to be many areas of common interest between the OKF and the COMMUNIA network, I suggested in my talk and thoughout the day that:

• We should work together to create a set of ‘public domain calculators’ - or algorithms that can help to determine whether or not a given work is out of copyright in a given jurisdiction (such as we’ve been working on with Public Domain Works and the Open Library);
• We should work together to pool open metadata - whether this be bibliographic metadata, or metadata for databases or large collections of knowledge resources (such as are listed in CKAN).

This is a great opportunity to strengthen the community of individuals and organisations with an interest in open knowledge and the public domain across Europe. I look forward to seeing the launch of the Working Groups!

Share This

1. Introduction

One of the first printed texts of which we have record is a copy of the Buddhist Diamond sutra produced in China around 868AD. In it can be found the dedication: “for universal free distribution”. Clearly, the idea of open knowledge, that is knowledge you are free to use, reuse and redistribute, has been present since humanity first began to formally transmit and share ideas. It is also likely that the urge to keep ideas secret, particularly those that had ‘commercial’ value, is equally old.

With the development of trade and technology, particularly during the Renaissance in Europe, these parallel approaches of openness and secrecy continued to evolve but the tension between them also increased. With the introduction of formal monopoly rights such as patents and copyrights during the sixteenth and seventeenth century there was now a halfway house of sorts whereby the monopoly (and the associated profits) of secrecy was combined with openness in the form of the disclosure of the work.

These alternatives of openness, secrecy and state-sanctioned monopoly have stayed with us down to the present day; while most of our ideas, particularly cultural ones, are ‘public domain’, free for anyone to use and reuse, a significant portion of the intellectual works and products created by the economies of the world are protected either by some form of intellectual property rights or by secrecy — or by both, as is the case with most proprietary computer software for example.

However there have also been considerable changes. On the one hand there has been a large increase, particularly over the last thirty to forty years, in the scope and duration of intellectual property rights. On the other hand, and at the same time, especially in recent years, we have seen the rise of self-consciously open models of innovation, particularly in software where the ‘copyleft’ approach to knowledge licensing first arose in the 1980s.

However the most significant of all changes underlies these others, for it is the change in the role of knowledge in society and the economy. Terms such as the ‘information age’ or the ‘knowledge economy’ are now commonplace and hard statistics point to the fact that in most western economies the information-based service sector is now more important than manufacturing. These changes in turn result from, or at least depend upon, a revolution in communication and computer technologies that has greatly reduced the cost of production, distribution and manipulation of knowledge. Whole industries which neither existed nor were imagined fifty, and possibly even twenty, years ago have grown up which exploit these new-found possibilities.

These are vast changes and they have profound implications for the production and dissemination of knowledge, as well as for their regulation and support by government. However, clearly addressing all of these implications is impossible and so in this talk I’m going to focus on giving a brief overview of the main ways that open approaches to knowledge production and distribution can deliver benefit to society.

2. Access and Use

Free, unencumbered access to a piece of knowledge whether it be a film or a database, is the most obvious way that openness delivers benefits. Because it is cheaper and easier to get hold of open knowledge it may be much more widely used than it would otherwise. Each such extra user, who gains access because open knowledge is cheaper or easier to get hold of than ‘closed’ knowledge, derives a benefit that increase the well-being of society.

Let me give a few examples of how profound these effects may be.

The first two are taken from a recent book by William St Clair entitled the Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.

In 1817 the publisher Sherwood put on sale printed copies of the manuscript of Wat Tyler a verse drama written by Southey in the early 1790s when he was briefly a republican radical.

Southey applied for an injunction and damages for breach of copyright. However, while it was undoubted he was the owner of the work, as the Lord Chancellor Eldon declared it was uncertain whether he retained a copyright. For under English law at the time, if the book were ‘injurious’ its intellectual property could not be protected by the courts and its copyright would be, in effect, void. Unable to enforce his copyright and left only with the option of suing for seditious libel Southey retired from the scene leaving the field open for ‘pirates’. As St Clair points out this provides us with a wonderful natural experiment:

As a result Wat Tyler, which Southey later refused to have printed in his collected works, sold 2 to 3 times as many as all his other works combined. A similar tale surrounds Shelley’s Queen Mab and Byron’s Don Juan.

Turning to a rather different and more recent example we have the case of pharmaceuticals — one of the most hotly contested areas in the access to knowledge debate. In a paper which appeared in the American Economic Review just this year, Chaudhuri, Goldberg and Jia attempted to estimate the impact of introducing product patents into one segment of the Indian pharmaceutical markets. Their results are summarized in the following table.

There are two main points to note. First, the benefits of open access are very large. Specifically around $500 million dollars per year. Second it shows clearly that this is not a zero-sum game. When prices are raised (due to patents for examples) the losses to consumers are larger than the gains of producers. In this case the asymmetry is particularly pronounced with external producer gains (these will be the firms who actually own the patents) around a 45th of the consumer losses — $10 million versus $450 million.

3. Production

While the benefits of openness for users are obvious, by contrast, the benefits for production are much less so. After all, by removing the possibility of monopoly provided by secrecy or intellectual property, openness may eliminate one of the primary means by which producers finance their activities. Nevertheless there are a variety of ways in which openness can be beneficial (as well as several reasons why it may not be as harmful for revenues as one might think). Due to time limitations I’m going to be able to give a few examples but those who want to know more detail can look at the essay on the Value of the Public Domain as well as my more academic work available on my personal website.

The main point to make is that in industries which are cumulative, that is new ideas and inventions build upon old, proprietary rights mean having to ask ‘permission’ (and pay for it) — while openness does not. With openness it is easier for subsequent innovators and creators to produce new work while with proprietary rights one have increased transactions costs as well as a whole bunch of bargaining issues — most prominently the risk of ‘hold-up’. Particularly in cases where the initial creator today may be the reuser tomorrow the benefits of openness in freer and more rapid reuse and cumulative innovation may outweigh the losses from lower immediate revenues. To put some flesh on the bones of these theoretical considerations here are two examples.

3.1.1: AT&T

I start with a classic example of the problems of ‘closed’ systems in the form of AT&T and its attitude to ‘foreign devices’. As some of you no doubt know, AT&T for a long period had a rule restricting users from attaching anything other from AT&T equipment to their phone system:

No equipment, apparatus, circuit, or device not furnished by the telephone company shall be attached to or connected with the facilities furnished by the telephone company, physically, by induction or otherwise

Not surprisingly this greatly retarded both competition and innovation in the provision of telephones and associated equipment. Gradually starting with Hush-a-Phone in 1948 and culminating with Carterfone in 1968 a series of companies challenged AT&T and won the right for independent firms to produce devices to the phone system. This is change in regulatory atmosphere was crucial in relation to the second example I would like to highlight:

3.1.2: The Internet, the Web and Google

The Internet, and the World-Wide-Web that is built on top of it are two of the most obvious and important examples of the benefits of being open. All of the basic protocols and standards that went into these technologies were open, free for anyone to implement, use, modify and examine. As a result innovation of the Internet and the Web has been phenomenally rapid creating immense wealth and value for society. The centrality of openness here, and the importance of the absence of the need to seek permission is illustrated by the example of Google.

Google, the provider of the planet’s most popular online search engine, is perhaps the best known Internet company in the world. With a market valuation in the tens of billions of dollars it is also one of the most successful. It is therefore the largest and most commercially successful open content company in the world even though it does not, at least at present, own any content at all. For Google derives the vast bulk of its present revenue from advertising. The ‘attention’ that sells the advertising is itself generated from Google’s role as a web search engine, the gatekeeper and organizer of the immense store of information that is the Web. Without the Web, Google, and the business model that supports it simply would not exist.

Thus Google has only been possible because the information on the web is almost all semi-open and anyone may freely access (and copy for their own purposes) the information posted on websites. Imagine if right from the start the web had been ‘closed’, and each website had required payment as well as an agreement not to copy its contents[^37]. Search engines, at least in their present form, would not exist and we would have seen neither the benefits of the services they provide nor the revenues they generate.

3.2 The Dictator and the Anarchist

These examples also conveniently brings me to the second point I would like to make about he benefits of openness, which I have put under the slightly provocative heading of ‘The Dictator and the Anarchist’.

One of the things that often strikes me about general discussion of open knowledge development whether it be about free software or open content is an assumption that because the end result is open the project itself must also be liberally run, with participation open to all, with an ultra-liberal decision-making process that verges on the communitarian.

This could hardly be farther from the truth. While it is certainly easy to participate — after all who doesn’t want free labour — the basic social structure of many open knowledge projects more closely resembles a dictatorship, albeit a benevolent one, than any democracy. There is usually one person with ultimate control, and the group of committers — that is those individuals with the ability to actual make changes to the core code or database — limited to a select few.

Now there are various advantages to dictatorship compared to a democracy. First, its potential for more efficient and rapid decision-making — after all there are many fewer checks and balances. Second, in a democracy the quality of decision-making must tend to the average but in a dictatorship quality is constrained only by the dictator — and so can be much better than the average.

Needless to say there are also disadvantages, disadvantages that arise from the very same factors. For though true a dictator could be much much better than democracy it can also be much much worse. And I think it would be fair to say that there is nowadays a fair consensus that democracy is probably the better option at least when we are talking about human societies.

But here we are talking about the organization of knowledge development And it is here that the anarchy aspect kicks in. By anarchy we normally mean a situation where there is no ruler, no sovereign, who can compel us to act in a particular way. Here I would like to expand this to the situation where there is perfect outside option. That is should the sovereign act in a way you don’t like it is perfectly possible for you at zero (or very low cost) to up sticks and head over the nearest border and set up your own state. Consider then the behaviour of a sovereign in this ’state of anarchy’. While within his or her borders he or she may be a dictator the fact that any ’subject’ who becomes unhappy can easily and simply leave greatly limits their ability to abuse such power — note that it does not limit their ability to do good for then ’subjects’ will be happy to stay. In this case, we need have little to fear from dictatorship and by combining it with ‘anarchy’ we obtain the best of both worlds.

Of course in the political world such a combination is, in practice, impossible. The outside option is usually inferior to the current situation, and if not the dictator may well be able to take steps to limit my ability to avail myself of it.

But fortunately we are not talking of politics but of technology and the development of knowledge in the form of software, music, films, databases etc. And the wonderful, and special thing, about such goods in a digital world is that they are practically costless to reproduce. Hence, if you are working on a knowledge development project, as long as the knowledge is open — and so without any special legal restrictions on such reproduction such as copyright, patents etc — it really is possible to just leave. It truly is the case that should you become unhappy with the current ‘dictator’ that you can just take the code or the content or the database and start your own project.

This has profound implications. In particular it means that the most significant benefit of open knowledge for production may not be a direct one but instead arises from the organizational structures and the types of development process that open knowledge makes possible. Open knowledge allow us to obtain the best of both worlds, to simultaneously combine the anarchist and the dictator in such a way as to leave us with all their advantages and none of their faults.

4. Community and Sharing

Leaving production, and the organization of production behind, in the final part of this talk I want to consider a rather different way in which open approaches to knowledge can yield benefits.

Below is a table taken from the General Social Survey conducted regularly in the US over the last thirty years.

+-------------+--------------+---------------+
|  Income     |  Top Quarter | Bottom Quarter|
+-------------+--------------+-------+-------+
|   Year      |  1975 | 1998 |  1975 |  1998 |
+-------------+-------+------+-------+-------+
| Very happy  |   39  |  37  |   19  |   16  |
+-------------+-------+------+-------+-------+
|Pretty happy |   53  |  57  |   51  |   53  |
+-------------+-------+------+-------+-------+
|Not too happy|    8  |  6   |   30  |   31  |
+-------------+-------+------+-------+-------+
|  Total      |   100 |  100 |  100  |  100  |
+-------------+-------+------+-------+-------+

 Happiness in the US: By Income (Source: GSS)

The aim of this table is to remind us, if we needed reminding, that material wealth isn’t everything — or even in developed societies most things! In particular, there are a whole variety of non-market (and even non-exchange) activities from which, we as humans, derive great enjoyment and value. Things like interactions with friends, being creative, participating in a community. The role that being ‘open’ can play in this regard is best illustrated by an anecdote that was told to me by Joichi Ito, a well-known Japanese venture capitalist.

Ito is a big promoter of the ‘open’ Creative Commons license and he had a friend who was a serious professional photographer. Being a professional who depended on selling and licensing his photographs for a living this guy naturally looked rather askance at CC licenses. But as Ito pointed out to him there was no need to license all of his photos, in fact all he was suggested was to try out the experience of being ‘liberal’ with some of his work and sharing it with the community. Ito’s friend was still fairly reluctant but eventually he was persuaded to post a few of his photos up online (on Flickr I believe) under a CC attribution license. As a result people started using and reusing his photos in a whole bunch of ways — and sharing this work back. Furthermore, in large part because the work was open these people tended to be very appreciative and to show their appreciation by writing to him or leaving comments online. According to Ito this was a very different experience to the one he had when selling his work normally and the guy found it so rewarding that he has now put a few thousand photos up online under open licenses.

I found this a really interesting story and I think it makes an important point. The experience of sharing and creative community that comes from making work open can be an extremely valuable one, and one whose benefits are both distinct and complementary when compared to those discussed previously in relation to access and production. I would emphasize in particular this complementarity: it is not that the sharing economy is antagonistic to, or even a substitute for, the market economy but that they are complements, each providing things that the other cannot.

To close out this section I’ll leave you with a thought. Both the table I showed you at the start and a variety of other evidence suggests that above a certain level of income, say around 15-25k the gains in utility from extra income are fairly limited — essentially the utilty function (for material goods) is approximately flat. If this is so then this strongly suggests that as societies get materially better and better off the importance of the sharing economy vis a vis the market economy is going to grow larger and larger.

5. Conclusion

In the brief time available to me I have only been able to describe informally and in a brief way the benefits that open approaches knowledge can bring our society. I have intentionally omitted discussion of proprietary rights, and the complexities of how open and closed approaches interrelate, substitute and complement each other. Nevertheless I hope I have given you sufficient basis to appreciate both why open knowledge is important and why it is interesting. Thank you.

Share This

Being here for the week has been a great experience. With one of the four streams being dedicated to Open Data the conference has been a chance to see and chat with a whole bunch of other projects and people, some of which I knew about before, but many of which I did not (or had not met in person).

Coming out of this was a really good sense of convergence in understanding as to what we need to do: add licenses to data, get a consensus on what ‘openness’ is, find ways to add knowledge APIs so we can plug difference corpora together. It is also very heartening to see the growing maturity of many of the tools and resources — e.g. PubMed, the World Wide Molecular Matrix, time visualization tools, gene databases — though I would say we still find it very hard to plug different resources together — where that has been achieved it is usually thanks to a high degree of agreement in terminology and standards combined with a significant commitment to add the associated structures into the data.

Random Notes

Open Data BOF Tuesday

• hubmed.com
• value of unique identifiers
• css(3)
• zip archive including supplementary data
• rel=offline-resource
• able to extract data
• mythings.com
• thinglink.com

Discussion

• project prospect (Royal Society Chemistry)
• scopus (proprietary)
• sitebite (annotations)

Gavin Bell

• Mining personal connections out of semi-structured web data
• Focus on microformats

Jon Trowbridge: The 21st Century Sneakernet

• Organize the world’s information and make it universally available and useful.
• Take large scholarly datasets
  • Must be open/free
• NASA Hubble Archive: 120TB
• Archimedes Palimpset: 1TB
• PMM: 10TB
• What’s good about a sneakernet
  • commodity technologies
  • high throughput
  • trivially scalable
  • $1700 for 3TB
  • Rapidly getting cheaper
• The device
  • Sonet: Enclosure ($400)
  • 7TB with RAID

Talis: Open Data Licensing

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000833.html

• Excellent talk laying out the legal issues particularly in relation to DB right
• Database rights are a good thing because they allow open licensing
• Great to hear much of the stuff we have been saying coming from ‘Industry’

Talis: Value of Open Data

• Open data up and then make money from complementary services
• Use licenses as a tool
• Database rights are useful

Quakr

• Interesting point at end where they discussed use of google data
• Apparently getting a particular tile back for a particular place for you to use in something else is almost impossible
• What they are doing is probably not allowed by the Google License and they are looking to move to another data source

Stamen (Tom Carden, Michal Migurski)

Analyzing Time

• http://xtech07.stamen.com/
• Simile TimeLine project
• 1k project
• Mike’s Back Channel interface: http://backchannel.stamen.com/
• Flickr organizr
• measuremap: Flash date slider
• Google finance data
• Yahoo stock data: url meaningful
• New York Times: Casualties of War
• Folding: morit
• Abbleton live
• Stamen demos: Emergency call visualization
  • How many calls go to each center
  • …
• Stamen demos: Open Crime demos
  • e.g. prostitution arrests in oakland
  • mike.tecrno.com …
• Stamen demos: property analysis
  • year a property was built
  • costs of a property
  • animate this information by time

Share This

The event produced some really excellent discussion and was made all the better by taking place in the Playfair Library (a vast and beautifully decorated Georgian hall which used to house the University Library). After John Kay’s introduction we moved on after lunch to the ‘Copyright Owners’.

In this session, Bernard Horrocks of the National Portrait Gallery, explained how you could get a high resolution digital reproduction of one of their pictures for just 18 pounds — with these kind of stiff fees the result of the ever-increasing pressures on museums and galleries to make money wherever they can. Carol Tullo, the Queen’s Printer in Scotland, gave an interesting presentation on the efforts being made to facilitate greater reuse of public sector information. George Rosie talked about the difficulties of making a living as an artists (and the frequent appropriation of his ideas for TV programs) and Kevin Taylor discussed the CUP’s relationship with its academic authors.

But I was most struck by the points made by Professor Geoffrey Boulton in his summing up of the ‘Copyright Owners’ panel in which he voiced strong support for moves to open up information — as an anecdote he narrated how his own research group (which works on Climate Change) had ended up mainly collaborating with academics from the US in large part because it was so easy to get access to US geodata.

Lastly came the ‘Copyright Users’ — though most of us were, as we pointed out, were also ‘Copyright Producers’. Professor Simon Frith narrated some wonderful stories of just how difficult it could be to be a musicologist working on modern popular music in an era of aggressive copyright assertion. Andres Guadamuz gave a short introduction to Creative Commons, I talked about what I thought the real problems with Copyright were in the realm of Research and Dr Michael Jubb closed up with a comprehensive and balanced account of the opportunities and problems in transporting more open approaches to research (in particular open access) into the humanities and social sciences.

Share This

The conference is an all day event and takes place at the Playfair Library Hall, Old College, University of Edinburgh, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8. I’ll be travelling up to Edinburgh Thursday so if there is anyone based in the area who’d like to meet to talk about copyright, open knowledge or anything related please drop me a line on rufus [dot] pollock [at] okfn [dot] org.

According to the conference announcement (which has further details including the schedule and how to book a place):

The conference follows the Academy’s Review of Copyright and Research and its subsequent publication of a set of Guidelines by Professor Hector MacQueen of the AHRC Research Centre.

Recent developments in technology, legislation and practice have meant that the various copyright exemptions, which enable creative and scholarly work to advance, are not always achieving the intended purpose. A British Academy Review, Copyright and Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in September 2006, drew attention to the problems that were occurring and recommended ways in which they should be addressed. The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property (published December 2006) is a step in the right direction, as it seeks to strike a balance between copyright owners on the one hand, and copyright users (“follow-on innovators”) on the other hand. However, the main concerns raised by the Academy and others in the academic research community still need to be addressed. The conference aims to consider the findings and recommendations of the Academy Review, and place them in context post-Gowers. It will followed by a dinner to celebrate the Centre’s achievements.

Share This

We’ve had excellent feedback and in my opinion (though of course I may be biased!) the presentations and discussions were some of the best I’ve seen on these topics. As I said in my introduction to the event, we are currently at a very interesting juncture with so much that we can port from other areas (software primarily) into the open knowledge domain (everything from release schedules to version control) and I look forward to future ‘okcons’ to see how the nascent open knowledge revolution develops into maturity.

Finally I should express a big thank-you to everyone who helped make it happen — like WSFII this was a joint effort, not just of the core organizers, but also of all those who spoke or presented, helped setup, man the door, or even just made suggestions on the mailing list and irc.

Share This

It seems that OFCOM recently noticed the Internet and decided that some kind of public service intervention was necessary beyond BBC online’s existing offering. Projecting a budget of 100M, they embarked on a consultation process led by Andrew Chitty of ‘convergent media’ production company Illumina Ltd.

The room at OFCOM’s London Bridge offices was populated with execs from Yahoo, Google, and various Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as well as institutional players like the British Film Institute and the BBC. I think I was the only person there not representing a large corporation of some sort. I worked out what my civic duty was going to be when the ‘creative’ director at Wanadoo suggested that the PSP’s 100M budget should be given to the telcos and ISPs for their wonderful PSP-like job of carrying peer to peer network traffic, and nobody batted an eyelid. I spent the rest of the day desperately clawing the discussion back to what the ‘public service’ bit could mean.

While reading through the consultation website and skimming the full consultation document, I was pleasantly surprised to see that heavily watered-down mention was made of non-restrictive IP models:

“…it is unlikely that restrictive IP models will maximise public value in a way which is consistent with the overarching thesis of the paper, namely that new forms of public value can be found in the participatory media environment which are distinct from those in the traditional world of linear broadcasting.”

Whew! For the first few pages I really wasn’t sure we’d even get that far.

Reading through the wordy reiterations of the BBC and OFCOM’s mission statements in relation to one another and the Internet, I was also pleased to see a mention (however vague) of the Creative Commons concept.

Unfortunately, this is diluted in a load of projects bunched together in the ‘already-out-there’ section: . The strange groupings of web sites there set my alarm bells ringing, headlining narrowly UK-focused, mostly government-funded sites of dubious popularity and quality while relegating Wikipedia and Flickr to footnotes in the ‘other links’ section of the ‘User Generated Content’ category alongside (bizarrely) Ebay and the Human Genome Project.

In this blurry segue into a list of web sites, it became clear that the decision had already been made to turn the PSP into a funding agency that gives money to people to make British ‘new media projects’ - presumably with the overarching aims of ‘educating’ and ‘entertaining’ the ‘public’.

What I was really hoping for was a bit of strategic thinking: thinking that might actually recognise that the Net and the emerging universe of electronic devices that people use to communicate, create and use networks, and on which people build their own platforms is an infrastructure, not a fairground.

I was glad to see that one comment I’d made about these sites had made it into the report:

“What we see now are the equivalents of the 19th century end-of-the-pier zoetropes and nickelodeons, but somewhere in there is the new cinema”.

What a pity that it hadn’t been understood at all.

Deep breath.

‘Cinema’ is not a project. It is a complex and interlinked infrastructure, that was only allowed to develop because of the difficulty Edison Laboratories would have had in patenting the Kinetoscope in Europe. This was partly because Edison had borrowed from prior British inventions. In fact, it was two British inventors: Birt Acres and Robert Paul who extrapolated the Kinetoscope into the first 35mm camera - which they never managed to patent effectively. This didn’t stop a war raging over patents - led by the Pathe Freres company in Europe and Edison’s Motion Picture Patent Company (a.k.a. the ‘First Oligopoly’) in the US, patenting and controlling technological development, owning cinemas and developing monopolies throughout the industry. The judiciary of the US - through public interest patent-busting and anti-trust suits - finally broke the First Oligopoly in the early 1910’s, only for others to form, consolidating the power of the Film and global mass media industries in Hollywood as the Independent Studios and their star system emerged in the 30’s, leading to intense vertical integration of the whole film industry.

The British Government’s attempted intervention in this consolidation process was the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, which put a quota on British Films being shown in UK Cinemas - leading to overproduction of low-quality low budget ‘quota-quickies’ in the run up to WWII, which put the final nail in the coffin of the British Film Industry. It’s been interestingly pathetic since then.

So the question is not which of these ‘projects’ is the next cinema? The question is - what underlies these projects? Who are the Edison Labs and Pathé Frères, MGMs, Paramounts, Foxes, RGOs and Loews of the Net? Who is defining and owning and shaping how the Net is used, understood and extended?

These days, it looks like the search engines. The Googles, the Yahoos, the information associators who have a semantic stranglehold on the Web and increasingly on other parts of the Net. This is not to mention the infrastructure owners: the DNS demagogues, the backbone bonapartes, the people who can hit the ‘off’ switch or start metering access to their network territories.

But what could a Public Service Publisher do about this? Surely it’s in the public interest to address the fact that the infrastructure we’re all using to do business, publish, and socialise online is dangerously similar to Cinema’s vertically integrated Hollywood-centric oligopolies?

Clearly, the PSP is going to do absolutely nothing:

“A further key role for the PSP would be in ensuring that search mechanisms for its content - and conceivably for all public service media content - become as efficient as possible. This would never extend to the development of a search engine, but it would involve working with search engine specialists and the major global and local players in search to establish tagging and discovery mechanisms to facilitate this.”

It sounds like we’re going to help them tighten the stranglehold they already have.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that we should be developing some kind of national search engine like the disastrous French ‘Quaero’ project. As online publishing and metadata usage becomes more sophisticated and widespread, the roles of the search engines will change - their original role of keyword indexing and ’scoring’ websites will be made less necessary by the improved semantic coherence of data on the Net - a.k.a. the ‘Semantic Web’.

But that technical development won’t necessarily loosen their grip. Using their existing market positions the search engines are working hard to consolidate their indexes, page-association ranks, user profiles and acquiring as much high quality data (scanned books, geodata etc.) as they can to insure their long-term market centrality. In an industry where innovative companies could once become giant killers overnight, they know that their ownership of what you could call the ‘means of association’ will have to be complete and coherent if they are going to protect their advertising revenues.

My response to the PSP consultation, emailed to the organisers soon afterwards doesn’t yet appear on the empty ‘responses’ section of the site. For the record, this is what I thought the PSP could do about this at the time:

• Researching and advising on best practice in metadata, exchange and archiving standards.
• Researching and advising on best practice in legal preservation and maintenance of publically funded IPR.
• Producing and maintaining high quality free educational materials for groups and individuals in how to publish their video/audio/text online and archive it well enough for it not to contribute to the uncatalogued backlog.
• Investing in open source software and shared IPR projects that are consistent with and facilitate the above goals.
• Research and develop systems for traversing, searching and making inferences from data generated by the aggregation of all this published material, and make that data, and those queries available via open APIs.

The last point is the crucial one: public interest in maintaining a lively and innovative environment on the Net would be served best by helping to build less centralised search and discovery systems, and making the data underlying those systems, and the systems themselves available to all (irrespective of nationality) using Public Domain licenses.

This would not be a project the PSP would have to start from scratch. There is already an inspiring and powerful world-wide movement to which they could add welcome legitimation and support. This was the final plea I made to the consultation group:

“Please, please *please*, don’t lets reinvent any wheels. There are some great projects and initiatives out there, mostly organised along very ad-hoc and non-institutional lines. If this PSP idea can be kept human-scale at the edges, can be smart and careful in how it invests money and time in things, it could become part of an existing international ecology of open source publishing platforms, advisory organisations and citizen-publishing initiatives.”

However, I’m sorry to say it looks to me like the PSP outlined in the OFCOM report isn’t just going to reinvent the wheel, it’s going to be a tax-payer funded factory for reinvented wheels. What I didn’t understand until yesterday, 25th January 2007, was who would be running the factory.

After fuming over the newly published PSP report, I went to see a presentation by the author Andrew Chitty from Illumina Ltd. at an ‘InSync’ event called ‘Rights will make you Rich?’ organised by Frank Boyd at 01zero-one in Soho: the centre of the UK Film Industry, such as it is.

Andrew Chitty’s presentation was about how the recent Communications Act (2003), which grants IPR rights to independent TV production companies, rather than to the commissioning broadcasters could be mirrored in agreements he, as a Vice Chair of PACT (the UK’s media industry lobby group) is negotiating with the publically funded BBC.

He also talked about how if a similar arrangement could be made with the putative PSP, it’s 100M jackpot could be used to part-fund projects to which independent production companies like Illumina Ltd. would then own international IP rights.

The last thing I heard him say, nodding complicitly to his BBC comissioner in the front row was ‘maybe this one will land us all on that private Greek island’. Then the red mist came down and I vaguely remember lashing out verbally in the ensuing debate before leaving to spare myself total apoplexy.

It is hardly surprising that the PSP report would be so skewed to the interests of the media industry lobby groups. After all, with the UK advertising and media industry in a recession - that structural change and viewer-group fragmentation onto the US-dominated Internet may make permanent - the public purse must look increasingly tempting.

What is so infuriating about this stitch-up is that it completely misses the real commercial opportunities in public service models on the Net.

The infrastructure of the Net as an offshoot of US federally-funded and therefore Public Domain defence research became a common carrier on which millions of businesses, supported by the universe of Free and Open Source software have been built. The disproportionate reach that creative entrepreneurs could have using this common infrastructure gave birth to the Yahoos and the Googles that are now beginning to enclose parts of it.

Sadly, it seems the PSP outlined in Andrew Chitty’s document will be producing a remake of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, funding the struggling UK film and TV industry to produce a quota of parochial ‘new media projects’, the IPR to which they may then exploit world-wide.

The challenge for the PSP, totally missed by this consultation, lies in addressing the strategic concerns of the Net as a global and national infrastructure; exploring and protecting the educational, commercial and societal possibilities of what ‘public service publishing’ might mean in this new context.

Saul Albert 26/01/2007

The opinions expressed above are not necessarily representative of the OKFN.

Many thanks to Rufus Pollock, Paula le Dieu, Gordon Joly, Nick Fry and Becky Hogge for great feedback, corrections and suggestions on drafts of this response.

Share This

OSGeo is an Apache-inspired software foundation for free and open source geospatial tools - Geographic Information Systems, web mapping, tools for spatial applications. It was started when Autodesk decided for strategic reasons that the future of their web mapping software was in Open Source; they approached the Open Source GIS community, which had been thinking about starting a foundation for awhile, and offered the use of their formidable marketing machine. OSGeo has 8 projects in incubation, about another 8 circling around. As well as supporting software development projects, there are a couple of non-software committees (activity groups) within OSGeo - education, and geodata.

Why is a software foundation supporting open access to geodata activities? Partly because the domain demands data in order to do work - if you’re working on apache, you can just start writing HTML pages; if you’re working on openoffice, you can start creating a document - but it’s impossible to develop or to usably distribute Open Source GIS software without real world data to test against.

There’s a gaping disparity in different countries regarding geodata in the public domain. Most projects test and distribute with US-published data, because it’s not available to them where they physically are. Even if developers are hooked into local government data sharing agreements, they still have no freedom to redistribute those data sets with their packages.

As an independent free software developer with a bug in my head about open access to geodata, I had two potential strategies. I could run around talking to people with data holdings, and people working to gain access to those data holdings, figure out what legislation was holding them back, and try to raise awareness of the issues involved - thus OKFN Open Geodata efforts and PublicGeodata.org. Or I could run around with a GPS unit, share my tracks online and spend days painstakingly tracing and annotating free of copyright models of the world around me, contributing to OpenStreetmap.org.

Getting involved with OSGeo and the geodata group there has provided a set of “middle ways” which are much more pragmatic, and (I hope) have much more chance of a positive impact on the policy process through the medium of free software. Now it’s becoming possible to start talking with agencies who are actively looking to release more data on an open licensed basis (such as Canada’s GeoConnections) and with groups who are actively working towards open distribution platforms (such as Harlan Onsrud’s Geodata Commons group at the University of Maine). The software foundation can provide a ’safe space’ to bring a lot of projects together, as it’s already providing for software.

It’s also becoming possible to work on geodata distribution, archiving and reuse in a much more pragmatic, standards-driven context - working with people who’ve had a hand in the industry standards process - and with people who are converging on simple standards for redistribution that aren’t really being thought about yet within proprietary software, but that open source software is running into a lot of needs for. A bootstrap project like OSGeo’s Geodata Repository at telascience takes full advantage of the software in the foundation; should provide both a demo showcase for the software, and enable the building of more interesting and timely data packages for them. This effort faces some fun challenges, that I hope will be applicable to more than geodata, but that open data generally will start running into and need “spike solutions” for:

• Syndicated distribution
  We’re dealing with massive quantities of data needing a lot of bandwidth. Often people are intensely interested in data that’s spatially nearby them. Distributed caching, tiling and bittorrent like streaming schemes are on the wishlist/todolist. Industry standards don’t tend to look at this space, where a lot of people have a small amount of resource to share, rather than a lot of resources being published in one place.
• Pragmatic metadata
  People working on distribution need to know what they’ve got, for data-verifiability, certainty reasons, and potentially also for legal ones. The better metadata coverage is, the better prospects for easy re-use, and being able to find more things like the things you’ve already got. Standards tend to overfocus on production of metadata and underfocus on consumption and distribution of it.
• Easier discovery
  Discovery is the better part of access; open data to be really useful needs to be easily findable.

Open source, open standards and open data are in this worldview a kind of triad, mutually reinforcing; without really planning it, an open-source-like development process is growing around peoples’ needs for data standards, in particular. A couple of times in the last few weeks several different groups of people from different projects have appeared at our IRC meetings with similar needs, looking for a lowest common denominator implementation - in web map tile caching, in simple web-addressable geodata discovery services for the web. OSGeo’s geodata group is providing a “safe space” for developers to cooperate on needs driven - not standards exactly, but common behaviours with ongoing agreement. As common usage patterns get picked up in more places, they can be usefully formalised, even if just on a wiki page, and the wider the usage, the better the stability. I’m thinking of test specifications rather than standards - if your code+data pass a set of well documented tests, then you’re guaranteed common behaviour.

Finally a few words about open data licensing issues - different groups producing open geodata are using a smorgasbord of licenses - many use Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike, though it’s arguably not really appropriate for geodata - for any work which one can excerpt pieces of without having a “missing whole”. The Open Knowledge Definition is an effort to cut through licensing discussions - in the same way as stipulating ‘OSI approved’ or ‘complies with Free Software Definition principles’ can establish commonality for data licenses. (Freedom Defined is another nascent open data definition effort.) One important element of an “OKD-compliant” data license is that it must guarantee the potential for commercial re-use of the data - “open” data that comes with a “noncommercial” caveat is not truly open…

That was the braindump; there’s probably more I could add to it; but I should be writing more code and less words…

Share This