Open Access News

In the last several days there have been several stories in the news that highlight the increasing tension between ownership of intellectual property rights (IPR) and the opportunities that become available when broader, free access to those rights is made available.  The three articles that struck me as best proving this point were the announcement by Sun Microsystems that it had released the design for its new UltraSPARC processor under the GNU GPL, a speech by Tim Berners-Lee to an Oxford University audience in which he challenged the British government to make Ordinance Survey mapping data available at no cost for Web use, and reports that a Dutch court had upheld the validity of the Creative Commons license.  Each of these stories demonstrates a breach in traditional thinking about the balance of value to an IPR owner between licensing those rights for profit, or making those same rights freely and publicly available.

In the case of the Sun announcement, that breach is expansion of the open source methodology form software to silicon - a genetic leap, if you will, from one species of technology to another. Tim Berners-Lee’s challenge, on the other hand, is an example of the increasingly popular concept that "data wants to be free," and that the greatest societal benefit may result from allowing it to be so. And the Creative Commons victory demonstrates that traditional legal concepts can be adapted to successfully accommodate such new realities....

What this demonstrates is that the broad concept of open source is extensible into many types of situations, and may be managed in multiple ways. In the first case, the approach has moved from software to chip designs, and the initiative is organized on an open source software project model. In the second case, raw data is involved, and the delivery mechanism is through public (the Ordinance Survey example) or private (the Google example) means, for two entirely different motivations. In the third case, it is works of authorship of all types (literary, music, art, etc.) released by the individual author/owner, who may set the boundaries of that access through the simple means of referring to a specific variation of a publicly available license.

What this shows me is that the envelope of free use and public availability of IPR will continue to be pushed in more and more directions, and managed in more and more novel and situationally appropriate ways.  Crucial to this process will be the accumulating evidence in more and more domains that the owners of IPR may gain (indirectly) more by giving than selling (directly).  This is not as novel as might first be imagined.  IPR has always been a means to an end, rather than an end in itself....As more and more examples accumulate in increasingly diverse areas where IPR owners demonstrably gain by giving, it can be assumed that the owners of IPR in other areas will give thought to how the technique may be adapted to their own IPR assets and situations.  At some point, the inevitable tipping point will be reached, where an IPR owner will automatically consider which world she wishes her work to live in - open or closed, or in both, depending upon the specific use or user obtaining rights to use the IPR.  Is this inevitable?  Personally, I think it is.  This is one of those examples where the Internet really has "changed everything."...I strongly doubt that the open source concept will be applied to every area of endeavor, or that it will predominate in every area where it is applied.  But I also believe that we may be surprised at some of the areas not yet imagined where it springs up next....

Updegrove's article has spawned a Slashdot thread.