Follow the AT investigators into the depth of government archives on the quest for reliable sources and research, and be as shocked as they are when they find almost nothing, except another example for the incredible effectiveness of the spin-machine. Which makes me wonder, why aren’t we able to spin the truth (yes, that’s a strange way of putting it) as effectively as these people spin their messages? How come some people still think global warming has nothing to do with driving huge fast cars, that Obama might be Muslim, or that not paying outrageous fees for things that should be free would destroy almost a million jobs, rather than create many more and make us all better of?

Hey – this is starting out as quite a radical day. And later we’ll be demonstrating against the South African Government’s unwillingness to fix the most basic infrastructure in the country’s schools. Here is another question: how is it possible, that SA can purchase arms for Billions, when the schools in townships have hundreds of broken windows, lack teachers, and educational materials? Equal Education is using the grassroots to spin their message up to Government today – and when a few thousand students and teachers demand the services they deserve, chances are someone will listen.

Equal Education is a community based movement advocating for educational quality and equality in South African schools. 200 students from every high school in Khayelitsha and members of Equal Education will be presenting a memorandum to the Western Cape Education Department in Cape Town, on 10th of October to ask for funds to fix the 500 broken windows in Luhlaza High School in Khayelitsha. We believe that in a democratic South Africa it is our right to attend schools with acceptable facilities, like fixed windows.

Date: 10 October
Time: 3 pm- 4:30 pm
Venue: Kaizegracht, Cape Town

Last year Gunner and Mark orchestrated us to innovate the way that tracks (now called labs) are run during the Summit, leading to almost mythical status of the Dubrovnik iSummit Open Education Track. So, I came to Sapporo with some doubts – was it going to be as exciting and inspiring? Would I meet new people, that would become friends, just as I had last time? Now, after three days of discussions, playing lots of idea ping-pong, and getting little sleep I can answer all of these questions with a resounding Yes.

The best place to look for all the work in progress and outcomes is the open education lab wiki. There were lots of ideas for projects, like a peer-review system for OERs, which could provide more formal incentives for academics to release their materials and there was enough enthusiasm in the room that I think we will see some of them become reality over the next 12 months. I spent some time discussing how to increase incentives for educators to share, and one participant raised the interesting question, how many educators do we actually need? If open education is similar to other open collaborative projects, like free/open source software or wikipedia, then maybe having a few (a few, can be a few thousand) very active people and institutions and very many people using and discussing and sending feedback. Hmmm …

One thing we did not discuss as much as I might have liked is the student / learner perspective, what Thomas from CC Brasil called “the demand side”. Delia, Neeru, Stian and myself had started working on the concept for a Peer 2 Peer University at the last Summit and we were able to identify a few more collaborators this time around – hooray! Max works with the for-profit Super Cool School and he and his colleagues are thinking about many of the same issues that we have been thinking about, and are designing interesting solutions to them. For example, there are differnet ways that participants could gain reputations (which they could signal to potential employers or friends and family) and one could be to only evaluate teaching, and encouraging students to start teaching what they have learned. Joel, who represented the Connexions project at the Summit, got involved a few weeks ago, but we finally had a little more face-to-face time for discussion.

Update: David Wiley offered to run a course on Music Theory, and Thomas Buckup from CC Brasil – whom I had just run into a week before at Wikimania – made a number of really useful comments about the concept. Thomas also came up with the interesting idea that at some point in the future we will look back at the 20th century as the period when knowledge was “strangely” locked up. Pre 20th century works are already in the public domain, and more and more recent work is shared nicely under CC licenses. There are a number of reservations why it won’t play out like this, but it’s a really neat idea!!!

So, in sum, and joining Mark Morrison, I will be humming for the rest of this day “The Return of the Track”:
(Return of the Track) it is
(Return of the Track) come on
(Return of the Track) oh my God
(You know that I’ll be back) here I am
(Return of the Track) once again
(Return of the Track) pump up the world
(Return of the Track) watch my flow
(You know that I’ll be back) here I go

Judging from the titles of the sessions, the workshop will provide some background on patents and innovation (not the same thing of course), and strategies for for “obtaining commercial returns from research”. I fully support efforts that will lead to “commercialisation” of research outputs – in cases where this is needed to turn the results of research into useful products and services, but I am skeptical that patents are always the best way to achieve this. It will be interesting to see how the speakers strike a balance between preserving the benefits of public access on one side, and enabling commercial returns through appropriation that might lead to prices that are out of reach for the majority of South Africans.

The sessions tomorrow include:

• “The PCT at the Center of the International Patent System, Including an Outline of the General Principles of the Patent System” – for researchers, students and postdocs in fields involving technology and science
• “Using Patents and the PCT to Obtain Commercial Returns from Research” – for academics and administration staff in institutions which have, or are developing, technology commercialization policies or programs”
• Further discussions on “Using Patents and the PCT to Obtain Commercial Returns from Research”

There seem to be a number of implicit assumptions, which are worth exploring in the literature before talking about the ways how university policies and strategies can promote patents as a prerequisite for commercialisation.

Are patents the same as innovation? Are patents effective tools to increase research, inventions and commercialisation of research outputs?

Patents are not driving innovation that meets important needs. While the exorbitant costs of brining new medicines onto the market are often cited as the key reason why we need strong patent, protection to ensure continuing development of new and better drugs – the net effects are sobering. Only 1-5 – 3% of drug sales is spent on research that eventually leads to treatments that are better than existing treatments because “only about 10% of drug sales go towards R&D on new products. Only about one-quarter of new drug approvals are rated by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to have therapeutic benefit over existing treatments” (Hubbard & Love, 2004). Where does all the rest of the money go? It is wasted in the inefficiencies enabled by a monopoly-driven business model.

Innovation in steam-engines makes an interesting example. As Nuvolari (2005) shows the “the practice of information sharing resulted in a marked acceleration in the rate of technical advance” after the patent had expired. Furthermore, it was the rights holders (Watt and his business partner Boulton who lobbied for an extension of patent protection during their monopoly, providing a blueprint for future corporate lobbying strategies in this field. (See Ghosh & Soete 2006)

In countries that have promoted university patenting, have the results met the expectations of increased returns to fund more research, and increased value to the economy as a whole?

University patenting in other countries have not had the desired results of higher returns (to fund more research). A recent study of university patenting in the US as a result of the Bayh-Dole Act, indicates that patents do not significantly increase knowledge flows from the university to the private sector, but that many other factors (inventor entrepreneurship, consulting with private sector, etc.) are equally or more important (Mowery et. al, 2001).

If patents are not useful, why are there more and more of them?

There are more and more of them, because for some organisations patents are good – however, that does not allow the conclusion that they are good for all organisations or all countries. In the U.S. Lerner and Jaffe (2004) show that two changes to the way patents were administered provide at least some explanation for the “patent explosion” from the mid 1980s: the establishment of a special court of appeals to deal with all IPR issues, and a change in the fee system of the patent office, which meant that it would only get paid for issued patents, not for review and decline of non-valid applications.

Secondly international patenting activities show increased patenting by developed country corporations in developing country patent offices. That is an indication that these corporations see profit opportunities from off-shore patenting, not that developing countries benefit from stronger IPR.

Are strong intellectual property regimes really good for countries at a lower level of a developmental trajectorys?

Using a historical approach, Ha-Joon Chang’s “Kicking away the ladder” shows that today’s developed countries (Examples include the UK and the US) needed access to knowledge in order to achieve their current developmental levels. Throughout their development, these countries frequently blocked, circumvented, broke, or simply ignored others IPR.

More recent evidence is inconclusive, but as cited in a recent WIPO report on Patents stronger patent protection “by itself do[es] not promptly stimulate domestic innovation”. However, “implementation of patent laws will stimulate innovation in countries with high level of economic development, education and economic freedom (Qian, 2007)”.

Theory aside – In terms of costs, is it feasible for an entrepreneur in South Africa to defend herself against a litigation by an international corporation; is it feasible for her to litigate against such a company that might be infringing her patent? The cost of litigation against an existing patent granted outside the scope of patentable subject matter (in other words, the patent should never have been granted) will require a budget of at least 1,000,000 ZAR. Very few small and medium sized companies in South Africa can take such a risk.

Strong international IPR allows pharmaceutical companies to target many of their products at a very small income band at the top of the economy, preventing access to life-saving and life-prolonging innovations for large parts of developing societies. Example: Thailand, South Africa, etc.

References

H. Chang. Kicking away the ladder. Anthem London, 2002.

R. Ghosh and L. Soete. Information and Intellectual Property: The Global Challenges. Industrial and Corporate Change, Vol. 15, Issue 6, pp. 919-935, 2006, 2006. Working paper available here

Hubbard T, Love J (2004) A New Trade Framework for Global Healthcare R&D. PLoS Biol 2(2): e52 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0020052

A. Jaffe and J. Lerner. Innovation and its Discontents (2004) Princeton. Princeton University Press.

David C. Mowery, Richard R. Nelson, Bhaven N. Sampat and Arvids A. Ziedonis, The growth of patenting and licensing by U.S. universities: an assessment of the effects of the Bayh-Dole act of 1980, Research Policy, Volume 30, Issue 1, January 2001, Pages 99-119.

Qian, Y. (2007), “Do national patent laws stimulate domestic innovation in a global patenting environment? a cross-country analysis of pharmaceutical patent protection, 1978–2002.”, Review of Economics and Statistics, 89(3), pp. 436-453.

WIPO, Report on the International Patent System, Standing Committee on the Law of Patents, Prepared for 12th Session, Geneva June 23 – 27 2008. Available here

What does it mean? South African bloggers have found a variety of ways to look at this process from different perspectives. Andrew Rens argues positively that in fact most of the world rejects OOXML since India, China, South Africa and Brasil all voted NO; and Brian Bakker points out that Microsoft Corrupted the ISO Process, which will increasingly be a problem as corporations are looking for ISO approval of their solutions, to fulfill government’s request technology that supports open standards.

This is great, because one would think it meant that the paper can be used in a class without having to worry about copyright clearance and fees. Unfortunately, copyright law and regulation in South Africa is murky on the issue of electronic distribution since it was drafted in 1978 when electronic information was not a huge issue yet (I find it particularly ironic that South African law refuses to acknowledge that some things have changed in the world since 1978). Andrew, who navigated me through a lot more legal detail than I am providing here, says the issue is clear as mud.

As a result there is uncertainty if a lecturer would be allowed to act as an “agent” on behalf of the students and make copies for all of them, or if the students would need to make individual copies themselves to avoid infringement. Andrew recommended that from the point of view of an institution, it is safer and advised to ask students to make their own copies.

Of course, this is a bit silly. First, it means that the students have to pay for the copies individually, which is likely to increase the per page cost (and the cost of education) since bulk discounts are not possible. Secondly, the end-result is exactly the same, all students have a printed copy of the paper to work with.

I increasingly feel that the law and regulation of copyright is so complicated and often runs counter to common sense, that we should seriously consider not only reforms, but maybe a clean slate approach to replace it with an alternative. Speaking to academics, students and librarians, I realise that the burden (not just cost, but also time and effort, and the significant concern that they might be doing something wrong) is too high.

In the field of patents and pharmaceutical inventions a recent bold proposal to create the Medical Innovation Prize Fund was recently introduced as a draft law by US Senator Sander. If accepted, at least in part, it would create a great precedent to  show that a radical and necessary change to the way we govern the results of intellectual activity is in fact possible.

Technorati Tags: copyright, open education, OER, south africa

However, after reading the first paragraph I was surprised by some of the statements, which I copied (and comment on) below. Further down in the draft chapter it talks about software licenses, and makes some statements about the history of the GPL and the use of open licenses (or free licenses) that go too deep into the legal details for me to fully analyse. However, I always thought the GPL was legally bullet proof and some of the statements in the chapter would make me wonder about the legal (and negative) implications of using it … I think it would be great if some of the legal experts who are part of this community could have a look at the text and send some friendly and constructive comments to Paul West (pwest at col dot org) if they feel there is room for improvement.

Examples from the first paragraph:

“Some, disliking the business practices of commercial software suppliers and publishing houses, want to replace copyright with open licences.”

This statement implies that those supporting open licenses are not commercial software suppliers. The cases of IBM, Red Hat, Jam Warehouse, and Canonical show that open source software and commercial activity are not exclusive. It also makes the “some” sound like they don’t understand the relationship between copyright and open licenses; a look around the open source developer mailing list will quickly show that this community has built up incredible expertise on copyright issues over the years, and understands that open licenses use copyright.

“Some want to allow anyone to profit from the work of others without even telling them they are doing this.”

This makes the public domain sound like some crazy revolutionary idea, rather than a source of cultural development. In the context of the developmental needs of large parts of the world, a more important question might be, why are “some” pushing for restriction to use an author’s materials 70 years after his death?

It is probably not intended, but the whole paragraph is written as if the open licenses community needed to do some research and thinking. After participation in a number of workshops and conferences on IPR (patents mostly), it is my impression that the strong IPR community is the one that largely looks past existing economic research on the detrimental effects of their policies on socio-economic development.

It’s here on youtube and (hopefully) here as well:

From the original article:

“I don’t know of any other newspaper or any MSM site for that matter, publishing under CC,” said Howard Owens, director of digital publishing for Gatehouse, in a comment on the TAB’s blog. “It’s really not a big change from how a lot of newspaper sites handle content — free non-commercial use, but generally only if you ask. This removes the middle man of asking, because now it’s explicitly stated that free non-commercial use is permitted.”

Full article is here: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/12/15/newspaper_chain.html

The new proposed US legislation on patents has removed the romantic idea of “novelty” all together.

Now “invention” is an even more formalised proses of running off to the patent office everytime you have an idea and then patenting it first .

from http://www.abanet.org/journal/redesign/01fcle.html :

“That’s one reason why the proposed Patent Reform Act contains a new definition of prior art. The bill would narrow the definition of prior art to include only inventions that are “reasonably and effectively accessible” to those skilled in the field. The new definition would exclude inventions that are relatively unpublicized and products such as software that are marketed to the public but whose workings are kept hidden from experts in the field because the products cannot readily be disassembled to see how they work.
Software companies are worried that their rights would be undercut by the proposed redefinition of prior art. Others are concerned that the definition is so vague that it would spawn a huge amount of litigation.

“There would end up being many litigations and many hearings about whether a piece of proposed prior art is reasonably and effectively accessible,” says Kelly Hunsaker, a patent litigator in Redwood City, Calif.”