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Information As A Global Public Good
Danny Yee writes: "The struggle for free software is part of a broader struggle for
free information and communications. Those who will be hurt
most by commodification and appropriation of information are
the poorest men and women around the world - so
we are trying to interest aid and development
agencies in intellectual property issues. Read
Information as a Global Public Good - a proposal for an Oxfam International advocacy campaign."
Actually, one of the important information locii listed in the report is biotechnology and genomic information, which is very relevant to starving people. A Green Revolution that doesn't require farmers to sell their souls to Monsanto is possibly the fastest way to make food prices drop and better health and nutrition available to the masses. Once there's a greater surplus per laborer, you can have more time for education, infrastructural development, and all the lovely uses for free information that were previously "not much use to the starving."
Of course, this assumes that the corporation in whose sweat shop the non-agrarian masses are working doesn't just lower wages again. That's why people in the developed world need information access (and interest), so that when something like that happens we can financially castrate them.
- Michael Cohn
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
The question is: is information a "market good" or a "public good". The authors of the article clearly wish it to be treated as the latter while the "powers that be" are just as clearly increasingly treating it as the former. AC alludes to that when (s)he wrote "Since information will become a commodity...". The commodification of information is treated as a given.
There are differences between market goods and public goods and the differences are not just different labels. One example of such a difference, is that market goods tend to be "zero sum" (the more you give away the less you have yourself) while public goods are not. Public goods are said to have the characteristic "indivisibility". Any individual that belongs to the relevant group can acquire the same amount of the public good already made available to the other members of the group at no extra cost. Thus street lamps are considered public good items. If I take advantage of the light cast, it doesn't diminish the availability of light for others. Public roads fit into the same category (though it may not seem that way during rush hour!). On the other hand, items like money, desks, chairs are clearly not indivisible.
Another characteristic of public goods is "non-excludability". What you give to one member of the group, you must give to all. Again street lamps meet this criteria (as does national defense). A third characteristic is "non-rejectability". Similar to non-excludability, this implies that a good cannot be rejected by a member of the group. Someone can decide not to pay for national defense, but he or she cannot reject the benefit (such as it is) of national defense.
Information is a mixed breed. It contains some of the properties of public goods (e.g., indivisibility - which is why libraries work) and some of the characteristics of market goods (e.g., excludability - which is how copyright works).
I was expecting, based on the title of the item, that it would discuss the characteristics of a public good shared by information and argue that since it acts like a public good, it makes sense to treat it as one. I was hoping that reading the article might refresh my memory of the various characteristics of public and market goods (as you can see above, I can only remember three of them). Oh, well.
It may be worth noting that, even as information is increasingly commodified in our "information economy", with the advent of the Internet, gnutella, etc. it increasingly losing its market good characteristic of excludability. Others may counter by pointing to PGP and other modern encryption technologies and say that exludability is as present as ever.
So what do you think: is information a public good (by characteristics) or a market good?
Respectfully, David Tallan
>Since information will become a commodity it will be governed by the laws of supply and demand in much the same way as any other product.
This will be true only if we insist on treating it as a good. If nstead we mandadted free information this clearly would not be so.
>information will always cost something to create, and those that put their resources into it should be the ones to profit from it.
I agree, however, it does not follow from this principle that they *own* the product of their labour only that they need some compensation. Unlike physical goods where the maker of the good should be able to set his price (if you take a good away from him he no longer has it) no such philosophical justification exists here to say that the compensation he deserves is what the market will bear. In the case of information often some people are compensated far beyond the effort they put in or the amount of money necessery to encourage creation of the product.
My claim is that the traditional item based model for intellectual property is a poor model for compensation. Instead we need to compensate these people directly from tax money based on some sort of usage/value census.
>Countries and organisations that have spent their resources on an information infrastructure should feel no need to help others to join it.
It seems to be a fairly standard moral principle that you should help others. If your friend comes beging for a loan do you say too bad should have worked harder. Of course not you help him out. So what if these countries problems are the result of internal strife...this doesn't make people in those countries any less human or any less deserving of aid. The nationalistic distinction is necesserily a fallacious one. I would rather help a motivated but uneducated and poor farmer in africa than local trailer trash. There is no difference between a ethiopian and a american except where they happen to be born so their should be no moral justification to saying we need to help one but not the other.
Moreover, intellectual property costs us nothing to offer to these people. I think everyone but the most rabid Ayn Randians will agree with me when I say if you can help someone at no cost to yourself you should indeed help them.
Now your final argument is that freeing IP won't necesserily help them.
>just look at all the trouble caused when Britain gave them an Industrial age infrastructure during the days of their Empire.
Yes, but this also involved britain forcing this infrastructure on them. If we meerly free up information for their use we never need to do anything to them. In fact as it is freely availible for everyone to use we meerly put them at the same place as everyone else.
While you are correct that to some extent they need to develop their own infrastructure this does not mean they need to reinvent the wheel. Japan has managed to prosper not because we told them to go back and rework all of our science and research but because things the western world had already solved were made availible to them. As a result we are both better off (they have a higher standard of living and we exchange goods allowing them to be made more efficently).
This is one of the largest problems with IP is that it forces a huge waste of human capital as companies and countries recreate the same things over and over again. How often do you think people in the corporate world recode the same functions again and again. This is the secret to open source success...not that our coders are better or work more but that we can reuse the code that has been previously written.
Furthermore the economic discrimination about IP is not just country to country but alsso intra-country. I don;t suppose you would argue that the poor in the US should have to build their own infrastructure to reap the benifits of our modern world.
We live in an age of gross usrplus it is time to find something better to do than amass more for personal gain.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Where is the Greater Theft? Is it in making a copy, in my mind or speech, or is it in denying my right to do so?
The notion of Property makes no sense where there is no scarcity. Society's right to limit what I say or do ends when saying-or-doing ceases to become harmful. All that is left for "Intellectual Property Rights" to protect is a residual right (Intellectual Rent) that is leftover from a former state of affairs
I think you have it all wrong......When a programmer releases a piece of software, and is charging money, you are paying for the hours and hours that went into the product.(this also goes for music and movies). Art,programs,etc. are not Free Speech. If that was the case, hacking someone's website and putting up a political message would be free speech, because "Internet Files aren't considered property".
Most linux users MUST use Microsoft products daily, otherwise their breakup wouldn't matter. Remember..."linux/open-source is better than any microsoft product". If that were the case, linux wouldn't need help from the government for popularity.
How is Forcing me to open my source Free speech? it's not. Free speech is allowing both sides of the argument([ie] open/closed/free/paid programs). It's not biased in any way.
---- Freedom isn't a one-way Street
I approve and appreciate the sentiment behind this proposal, although in the end it's a bit like approving of Mom, the flag and apple pie.
The devil is in the details, and this Oxfam document is sparse on those. Some of them are simply parts of existing activist programmes: a hostility towards WIPO and WTO that is partially, but not wholly, merited, encouraging Open Sourse ideas and use, a demand for patent reform particularly with regard to biotechnology. Citing this new French legal proposal to require governments to favour open source and computing standards in contracting is novel, and a good thing.
However, intellectual property reform is a very painful issue. It is one thing to say that the existing system is dysfunctional, it's quite another to propose alternatives. The initial intent of patents was to insure that inventions would eventually enter the public domain by offering that the inventor a monopoly on its use for a fixed time. For all the grousing, I've seen few real plans for a new IP scheme. The only thing I've seen that seems realistic to me is to reduce the length of patent and copyright protections, and possibly to give different kinds of patents different lengths and abolishing some kinds of patents and ownership rights with regard to biology and software. Before lending my support the cause of patent reform, I need to see a real programme.
Copyright globally corresponds to the life of the author, plus a few more years, or 70-90 years for works-for-hire. Shortening those protections very much is a lost battle, those norms have been in place in most of the world for a very long time. Acting to make sure they aren't extended any further is a better platform. (Disney basically bought an extra 20 years of ownership of Mickey Mouse by paying off Congressmen in the '98 elections.) The expansion of fair-use and enshrining some sort of educational and library exemption is another viable goal. Beyond that, I'm not sure how much can genuinely be done about copyrights.
Open disclosure of WIPO and WTO processes is probably a good thing, within limits. Part of what the WTO exists to protect is the ability of members to come to an agreement before taking trade issues to arbitration. That can be useful and important.
Before lighting in too hard on the WTO, take a look at the treaty itself. It enshrines quite a few exemptions for the third world. A winable fight might be to get some of those exemptions expanded rather than trying to undermine the organisation completely.
The importance of industrial standards is a good cause to rally around, even if it isn't a very romantic one. Their function is to ensure that open, easily obtainable standards apply to products and services, favouring third world industries in the same way that open Internet and computing standards favour small, non-Microsoft vendors. One of the functions of the WTO is to ensure that standards enacted by governments are open and available, so that countries can't create barriers to entry of exactly the kind Microsoft makes.
A good look at the global standards process would be a good education for a activist with this kind of agenda.
Reforms of this type will take place in an international arena in the future. Abolishing the WIPO and WTO just moves the problem to some new international organisation. Hijacking the existing institutions has often proved more effective for revolutionaires.
The Left has always had cosmopolitanism on its side, and it bothers me to see new nationalisms and isolationisms become causes with activist support. Global entitiies have played an important role in the liberal causes of the past, and they can again in the future.
Is growing inequality a problem? Seems everybody assume that some group of people controlling more resources than others is a bad bad thing. Is it?
Even we would like the world to be more equal, sometimes you give the poor country the right to access informations does not neccessary help. Without a well established legal, political, economical system, only those with more resources can really benefitted from information. I don't see, without proper property right definition under legal system, how can a farmer in a poor Africa country benefitted by having the information of the most advanced biotechnology Americans? It isn't feasible for them to apply the information, and there's no way they can sell the information.
No matter how you hate the western society, we take it for granted for the invisible infrastructure we are living in.
A sig is redundant.
1. Development isn't just about handing out food.
In humanitarian emergencies aid/development agencies often just provide water, food, medicines, and so forth. Information matters here, but perhaps not so much.
But development agencies also do work to try and address the longer-term causes of poverty. In this work, handouts are avoided - the idea is to provide tools, education, skills, connections, and knowledge that will still be useful when the aid agency disappears after a year's funding. There's a famous saying along the lines of "give someone a fish and you feed him for a day; give them a net and you give them a tool they can use for a year; teach them a new fishing method and they have something they can use for life - or until a multinational steals or poisons their fishing grounds or fishes out the area...." In this kind of work, information is absolutely critical - and if you're trying to avoid creating dependencies, a central core of public free information is really important.
2. Even if broader information (and computers) are only of minimal use to (say) illiterate women organising in an Indian village, such things would be of great benefit to the local organisations trying to help them.
For example, I visited one project in India where an organisation called SWAPNA was setting up micro-credit saving circles in Indian villages in southern Maharashtra. They were organising women would organise in groups of twenty and each try to save 20 rupee -- maybe 50c -- a month, which would then be pooled to give them a resource to draw on in medical emergencies, ceremonies, etc. (Based on the idea pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.) The organised saving circles were also used as a way of providing sanitation and health information.
Now computers might be useless to the individual women, but SWAPNA, the organisation running the project, could really have used one. Given that their budget was maybe US$6000/year (to employ a dozen staff working in maybe fifty villages, with maybe 1500 women), old hardware running DOS or Linux and doing UUCP to connect to the Net and to other such organisations... that has real potential.
A write up of my trip to India (with some notes on IT possibilities).
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
This issue is one that will become increasingly important in the future as we are currently in the last throes of the Industrial Age and we're now moving into the so-called "Information Age", in which information will become the most valuable commodity of them all. However we should look at this issue clearly, without resorting to dogmatic arguments from Industrial Age philosophies that won't count in this "new era".
Since information will become a commodity it will be governed by the laws of supply and demand in much the same way as any other product. However there are important differences, in that the supply is potentially infinite once the act of creation has occured. This is what is the cause of the current bitter fighting between Napster advocates and the RIAA - the fact that this important difference has not truly been accepted by the RIAA (and MPAA as well) yet.
However despite the infinite supply, information still has to come from somewhere, and it takes time, effort and resources to produce. This is what the Napster crowd do not seem to realise - information will always cost something to create, and those that put their resources into it should be the ones to profit from it.
Another key difference between the Industrial and Information ages is the cost in resources of creating a commodity. Information is far cheaper to create than a physical product, and so it requires little infrastructure to produce.
The whole point of this campaign is that poorer countries are falling behind in the information "revolution". Of course they are, because they are hampered by religious, social and political problems, not because they don't have the resources to generate information. If they could get themselves sorted out then they could join the First World Web whenever they wanted to.
Countries and organisations that have spent their resources on an information infrastructure should feel no need to help others to join it. The poorer countries of the world are already far too dependent upon handouts from the West, and should be encouraged to sort out their problems on their own before joining the rest of us in the Information Age. If we try and force them they will resist - just look at all the trouble caused when Britain gave them an Industrial age infrastructure during the days of their Empire.
No, I think that any global moves towards increasing the information infrastructure are both premature and unwarranted. It seems a harsh thing to say, but better for these things to happen for themselves in their own time.
Kudos to Danny for proposing this. But the quarter of the worlds population who earn less yearly than MS Word's monetary cost are not going to care about the internet or access to information when their children are starving while they assemble sports equipment.
However, the part about protecting indigenous people's pre-existing rights to information is very important. Often a company will quite literally steal a technology (often bio) that rightly belongs to a native people.
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
Yet again I am forced to slap my bald pate and say 'Doh! It was so obvious'.
As obvious as advcating free software as a means to prevent descrimination against the third world in the development of computer skills. We were just looking at the issue from too narrow a viewpoint.
Why can third world countries produce world class scientists? Because the information, which is the fundamental resource, is free to varying extents. (Even when you can't afford the journal, you can always send a postcard to the author of a paper asking for a reprint).
If more information is made available, then there is the potential for third world developer to produce world-class innovations in technology, engineering, and all sorts of other fields. In the long term hopefully correcting the wealth imbalence. Everyone benefits.
OK, that is a naive oversimplification, but the principle is there.
Riiiight. And all those scientists out there doing basic research are in it for the money. And all those avaricious free-software developers. And anyhow, we know that the best works of art are always the most commercially successful, and are always created to be sold. And it's right and proper that an idea should be owned exclusively, despite the fact that there's no principle of scarcity at work.
You're starting with a set of assumptions that not everyone shares; personally, I think it's pretty clear that those in power seek to retain and extend their power by control over ideas; at every turn, those who have done so have stifled the progress of humanity as a whole, by locking knowledge away, for the exclusive use of the privileged class.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
It's a matter of balance.
On one side, information wants to be free!!!!
And we can all live in David Brin's Transparent society. And you can all have no privacy. And nobody gets rewarded for intellectual property they produce, because it's a lot easier to just make a copy. And nobody spends their time making music anymore, because they can't afford to. And nobody spends their time writing books anymore, because they can't afford to. And I can spy on you making out with your girlfriend because "hey, it's just information in digital form."
How far do we go?
How far down this road do you want to go
My Journal
I can't claim copyright on what a piece of software DOES, but on how it is implemented.
But you can buy a patent from the USPTO.
I can't own an object-oriented language; I can, however, own a compiler.
You can also claim copyright on an MP3 compi^H^H^H^H^Hencoder, but Fraunhofer has a patent on the MP3 language.
Will I retire or break 10K?