Open Access News

Remember that comments on the EU green paper, Copyright in the Knowledge Economy, are due on November 30.  One of the questions raised in the paper has a strong OA connection.

Here are two recent submissions to the EU:

From Knowledge Ecology International:

In general, KEI's position on copyright limitation and exceptions to exclusive rights are as follows:...

[4] The world that is connected to the Internet is experiencing a new era of access, and a proliferation of new approaches to authorizing and using creative works and data. As dramatic as the changes have been, there will be more.

[5] Among the most important features of the new environment are the empowering experience of much more equal access to creative works and data, and an acceleration of the creation, transformation dissemination and re-purposing of information.

[6] The new information technologies have greatly expanded the opportunities to create and use information resources, enabling new actors, new business models and an immense role for non-commercial and user generated publishing.

[7] A legal framework that focuses on protecting commercial rights under the older publishing technologies is inferior to one that recognizes, appreciates and focuses on the value of the new opportunities to create and use information....

Given the growing interest in access to older works that can be digitalized, including but not limited to the many works that have been orphaned by authors or publishers, there is great value now wasted because the European Union (and other countries) provide decades of extra years of exclusive rights, even when the owners of the works don't bother to exploit the works commercially. Solutions to these issues are examined in Part 3 of the attached Draft Treaty on Access to Knowledge. From the point of view of users, there is no reason to extend exclusive rights to owners that are not even willing to register works for sale. While registration of works is not a condition for copyright protection during the minimum Berne/Rome/TRIPS mandatory terms, registration can be required for the extended terms, by converting the extended terms to sui generis regimes with different conditions (not dissimilar to supplementary protection regimes used to extend exclusivity for patented medicines in some countries). The right owners that have valuable assets to protect can easily do so, without laying waste to an enormously valuable body of knowledge....

Question 19: Should the scientific and research community enter into licensing schemes with publishers in order to increase access to works for teaching or research purposes? Are there examples of successful licensing schemes enabling online use of works for teaching or research purposes?

The scientific and research community already enters into many such licensing schemes, with mixed results. As one might expect, there are examples where licenses work well, and examples where licenses are excessively priced and too restrictive. The progress of scientific and research efforts is too important to be solely determined by these licensing negotiations, particularly given the excessive concentration of ownership among publishers of journals, and the widespread evidence of excessive pricing for journals and textbooks. Such licenses also often lack the flexibility to allow works to be distributed across borders, inhibiting the development of distance education services....

From Glyn Moody:

...[T]oday's copyright is around 300 years old; little wonder, then, if it is in need of updating.

Although traditional copyright has been adapted over the years to encompass new technologies such as sound recordings and films, we are currently going through a technological transition that is fundamentally [different] from all those that have gone before. Where sound recordings and film are essentially analogue (physical) objects – wax cylinders or vinyl LPs for early sound recordings, celluloid strips for films – just like books, today's content is fast becoming an immaterial, *digital* artefact.

This is not a change of degree, but of kind. The most dramatic manifestation of that can be seen in the marginal cost of production: the cost of making a digital copy is small, and becoming smaller all the time as technology advances, even for large digital objects like films. Potentially, then, we can contemplate universal access to most if not all digital knowledge, for effectively zero cost. Again, this is a radical departure from the past, where the physical nature of knowledge – books, recordings etc. - and its costs necessarily imposed limits on how widely it could be distributed.

Today, then, the question is not: “How much can we afford to spend on making knowledge widely available?”, but: “How much should we limit the free, universal access to all digital knowledge because of historical constraints like copyright?” ...

Of course, this implies major changes within the world of content creation. But just as manufacturers of horse carriages had to reach accommodations with motor car technology when it appeared, so I believe the content industries must face up to the reality of a digital world....

To those who say it is not possible to operate in a world where digital content is made more freely available, I would draw their attention to the success of open source software, which has been variously estimated to be worth tens of billions of pounds in terms of the value of the lines of code that have been created. Thousands of companies now thrive in the open source ecosystem – from IBM and Google downwards – making money by providing goods and services that use and build on the vast pool of freely-available software.

And so it will be in a world where knowledge is made more freely available. There will be huge opportunities for publishers to make money by providing services around the content, rather than directly by selling that content. In a world where digital knowledge is inherently abundant – because it can be copied endlessly for near-zero cost – it does not make economic sense trying to mandate artificial scarcities that existed when content was analogue....

Against this background I would therefore urge the European Commission to have the courage to move on from old-style thinking regarding content, and to seek to seize the initiative by embracing the extraordinary possibilities of digital knowledge that can be freely shared to create more knowledge, and with it more wealth – and happiness. This means lowering the unduly high barriers imposed by copyright, not enshrining them further in future legislation.

Unfortunately, many of the questions posed explicitly in the current Green Paper are framed in terms that make little sense in this world of digital abundance, couched as they are purely in terms of “exceptions” to current legislation....