Consumer Group Points Out That IP Laws Are Often Anti-Consumer And Need To Be Fixed

from the people-are-realizing... dept

While most people still don't pay much attention to the harm caused by out of control intellectual property law, it does appear that recognition of this issue is growing daily. We often hear the refrain that "intellectual property laws will never change, so why bother pointing out their problems," which is an incredibly defeatist attitude. Slowly but surely, the evidence is mounting, and as we see more cases of situations like Russia's abuse of copyright laws to suppress dissent, people will begin to realize how far gone these laws have become.

The latest case of a group recognizing the issue is Consumers International, who have begun a new campaign to point out how intellectual property is quite frequently used in anti-consumer ways, well beyond its stated intention. According to IP-Watch:

Copyright and patent laws "are often misused" for reasons that have "more to do with limiting competition and preventing consumers from making innovative uses of their products" than they do with stopping piracy, global consumer advocacy group Consumers International plans to tell a UN internet meeting today....

Consumers International is asking for an amendment of the UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection [pdf], which was first adopted 25 years ago, the group said in a press release. Jeremy Malcolm, the Consumers International project director for IP and communications, said that IP rights and human rights have "for too long" been framed as having similar status, when misuse of IP interferes with "freedom of expression, education and participation in cultural life."

It's unlikely that this will have much impact initially, but it's hard to deny that more and more people are recognizing the problems of an out of control intellectual property system that has been the result of decades upon decades of regulatory capture.

Filed Under: consumers, intellectual property
Companies: consumers international

Director Jean-Luc Godard Says 'There's No Such Thing As Intellectual Property,' Donates To MP3 Downloader's Defense

from the good-for-him dept

Robert Ring was the first of a bunch of you to send in this BoingBoing post highlighting how famed movie director Jean-Luc Godard doesn't believe in the concept of "intellectual property," and has also contributed 1,000 euros to a French citizen who has been sued for unauthorized sharing of over 13,000 MP3s. The key quote from Godard in highlighting why he's supporting this guy:

I am against Hadopi [the French internet-copyright law, or its attendant agency], of course. There is no such thing as intellectual property. I'm against the inheritance [of works], for example. An artist's children could benefit from the copyright of their parents' works, say, until they reach the age of majority... But afterward, it's not clear to me why Ravel's children should get any income from Bolero...

It's always nice when successful content creators, who could just suck up to the monopoly privileges the government grants them, recognize that such things may create greater problems for society and culture, and are willing to speak out about it -- or, even better, to put their money behind their beliefs.

Filed Under: intellectual property, jean-luc godard

If There Were No IP Restrictions, What Kind Of Mobile Devices Could You Build?

from the mashing-up-innovation dept

I'll have a post forthcoming sometime soon about a very interesting book on the value of companies being able to imitate and build on the work of others, but there are times when you can see it in action. Jack Everitt points us to a short, but fascinating blog post by a guy working with contract manufacturers in China. While there, he went around looking at some of the gray-to-black market products built in China with no regards for intellectual property laws and found some unique, but interesting combinations:

Walk around the electronics markets in Shenzhen and you'll see these devices. I saw a great iRobot-branded iPad knock-off with the Android character on it, which was a pretty excellent combination of three brands.

But here's one I really liked: the G1-on-the-outside + iPhone-on-the-inside smartphone.

Of course, the traditionalists will be horrified at this sort of blatant "copying," but these kinds of "mashups," while certainly not legal, are actually an interesting way to experiment and potentially innovate, by not being hindered and held back by artificial rules that block such interesting combinations. As the blogger notes:

It's easy to dismiss these products as the work of cheats and counterfeiters, but that is only half the story. A lot of innovation is occurring in the Pearl River Delta, unencumbered by law and protocol. As an entrepreneur here in the USA, it is fascinating to observe this kind of hardscrabble creativity playing out in different ways in different places.

I think this even undersells the importance of understanding what's going on here. China is an increasingly important player in the technology space -- and, yes, much of the work they do today is imitation and copying, but it certainly isn't always that way, and it won't be in the future. Because these firms are able to experiment and innovate, where firms in other countries are blocked, just watch and see how future generations of innovation from China will come out ahead. They have the opportunity to experiment and increment and (most importantly) learn from what happens when you do that -- while those of us elsewhere are held back for no good reason at all.

Filed Under: china, hardware, intellectual property, mashups

Bartenders Looking For Greater Intellectual Property Protection For Drinks

from the are-you-serious? dept

Copycense points us to yet another story about another person in another industry whining about not getting enough monopoly privileges from the government. This time, believe it or not, it's bartenders wanting to protect mixed drink recipes. Seriously. Unfortunately, the writeup at the Atlantic, by food writer Chantal Martineau seems to get an awful lot of points about intellectual property totally mixed up. The article slips back and forth between trademark law and copyright law (which are extremely different) and then has this whopper:

The publication of a recipe can be legally protected, but the "expression of an idea," as the lawyers in the seminar explained, cannot. It's the reason musicians can't be sued for covering another band's song in a live show.

So many things wrong in two short sentences. First of all, no, the publication of a recipe cannot be protected. Straight from the US Copyright Office: "Mere listings of ingredients as in recipes, formulas, compounds, or prescriptions are not subject to copyright protection." That said, if there is "substantial literary expression" in, say, the description of how to prepare the recipe that part (and that part alone) could be covered by copyright, but that should have little impact on bartenders making similar mixed drinks. Also, copyright is, in fact, supposed to protect the expression, contrary to the statement above. This is the whole basis of the idea-expression dichotomy, which Martineau seems to get backwards. As for why musicians can't be sued for covering another band's song in a live show, that's got nothing to do with the difference between an expression and an idea, and everything to do with performance rights licenses from venues to PROs like ASCAP and BMI that (in theory) are supposed to cover the copyright (yes, there is one) on the composition.

As for the meat of the actual article, there's a lot that's very troubling in there, though Martineau doesn't seem to challenge any of the claims made (given the confusion on the topic, perhaps that's why). It starts off with a story about a trademark violation, when a new Manhattan lounge called Painkiller was threatened with a cease-and-desist from the distillery Pusser's, who had apparently trademarked a drink called Painkiller back in 1989. But the only issue there is the name (which is trademarked), not the recipe. So it's odd that this is used as a lead in to a discussion about copyright.

The actual story focuses around an apparently angry bartender, Eben Freeman, who seems to be upset that he doesn't get enough credit for inventing certain drinks:

After the seminar, I spoke to Freeman, who admitted he came up with the idea for the talk after becoming fed up with other bartenders and establishments taking credit for and profiting from his recipes and techniques. (Fat washing, for example, the process by which a spirit can be infused with, say, bacon, was pioneered in part by Freeman, yet is often attributed to others.) "Someone needs to get sued ... to set a precedent," he told me.

"In no other creative business can you so easily identify money attached to your creative property," Freeman went on. "There is an implied commerce to our intellectual property. Yet we have less protection than anyone else."

Of course, Freeman is exaggerating the claim that bartenders "have less protection than anyone else." He has just as many protections, it's just that you can't copyright a recipe. If it's true that he really did come up with a novel and non-obvious process for "fat washing" (I really don't want to know), then he could have applied for a patent on it, but in an article confused about trademarks and copyright law, no one even mentions patents. Perhaps Freeman should have done some research first.

From there the article goes off on a totally random tangent about how big liquor companies have been hiring young bartenders to become "brand ambassadors" where they're expected to come up with a signature drink using the specific brands in question. But, the accusation is, these bartenders "don't have the experience" to do so, and instead just copy someone else's recipe and tweak it. Of course, that's not illegal. At all. And it's not a problem. It's how innovation happens. You build on the ideas of others, and you tweak it to try to make it better. There's nothing wrong with that at all. In fact, it should be celebrated. In fact, we've seen how the very same lack of copyright protection over recipes has helped food and restaurant trends grow and spread in valuable ways. Instead, this just seems like a complaint about someone who doesn't like young bartenders and the way they work. But that's not an intellectual property issue.

Over at the Washington Post, Ezra Klein does a nice job pointing out that, just as with fashion copyright, there's no evidence for a need for a "drink copyright,":

As is always the case with granting individuals legalized monopolies over intellectual property, we should start by asking whether consumers are suffering because bartenders don't have enough financial incentive to innovate interesting new drinks. Given that the past few years have seen an incredible explosion in creative mixology, that's a hard case to make. The status quo seems perfectly good at encouraging innovation -- so much so that the drinks have gotten increasingly comical.

And it's not just that there's no evidence that consumers are being harmed by the current arrangement. There's clear evidence that they're benefiting from it. I live in Washington. But a lot of really good cocktails are thought up in San Francisco. Happily, I can drink a lot of those cocktails, as the most successful recipes quickly proliferate.

But, of course, the reason that Freeman's complaint and Martineau's article don't ask those rather basic questions, is that it appears both don't realize that intellectual property is supposed to be about incentives, rather than protectionism and making sure that some guy who created something "gets his proper credit." Freeman's complaint comes off more as someone who just doesn't feel he's received enough recognition for his work as a grumpy old bartender. But that's got absolutely nothing to do with intellectual property law -- patents, trademarks or copyrights -- and should have no bearing on whether or not he likes young bartenders coming up with derivative drinks.

Filed Under: bartenders, copyright, drinks, eben freeman, intellectual property, patents, trademark

Can Antitrust Law Stop Abuses Of Intellectual Property And Free Access To Knowledge?

from the it-would-be-a-start... dept

A year ago, at the Congressional Internet Caucus' State of the Net West event, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Rep. Zoe Lofgren make the suggestion that an area that antitrust regulators should really be looking at is how copyright law is abused for anti-competitive reasons. Now, Glyn Moody points us to a new paper from Sean Flynn (who's been active in trying to get ACTA negotiators to answer questions) about how antitrust laws could be useful in stopping abuses of intellectual property law and improving access to knowledge. I'm not convinced this will actually work, but it's an interesting area that seems worth exploring.

Filed Under: antitrust, intellectual property

ACTA Negotiators Don't Seem To Know Or Care About What They're Negotiating

from the that-is-downright-scary dept

With the latest round of ACTA negotiations going on this week in Washington DC, following pressure from various public interest groups, a hasty lunch was organized that was apparently quite informal. Attendees from the event have been posting their notes, and there are a few interesting tidbits. James Love notes that US negotiators don't seem to realize or care that ACTA goes against US law, as they note that the US will just ignore the parts that don't mesh with current law. Other countries are probably out of luck though:

The U.S. negotiators at the ACTA meeting have, over the past year or so, been remarkably indifferent to the fact that the US positon in the negotiation runs counter to about a dozen U.S. statutes where remedicies are now limited by statute, contrary to the plain language of the ACTA text advanced by the U.S. government.

At the lunch meeting the U.S. negotiators explained the reason for this -- they said it was obvious that regardless of what the ACTA provisions say, the U.S. can ignore the provisions in cases where there are statutory exceptions. "It is not necessary to say that in the ACTA text" I was told. "It's obvious."

At the lunch there was discussion among the Australian, Japan, US and Singapore negotiators over this issue. Some delegates pointed out that the U.S. had spent a lot of time talking about the fact that this was an executive agreement, and therefore "could not" change U.S. law. Therefore, they argued, it was understood that ACTA would grandfather in any inconsistency between U.S. law and ACTA. People were not so sure how this worked for other countries in the negotiations -- including those where the ACTA provisions would clearly require changes in national laws, if taken seriously. Some delegates indicated that it was hard to understand what ACTA meant, at this point, given the many brackets in the text, and a lack of understanding about how the "general" and "high level" provisions of the ACTA would apply to a country's actual laws. Other delegates said the issue of exceptions to ACTA obligations, while important, had not really been addressed in the negotiations.

Yes, it appears we're negotiating an agreement where the US isn't too concerned with the fact that it goes against key points in US law because we'll just ignore the parts we don't like. But, you can bet that we'll put massive pressure on any other country that tries to do the same. And, when there's any discussion of improving US law, we'll be told we can't, because of our "international obligations" under ACTA.

As for that last point about how "it's hard to understand what ACTA meant" at this point, Michael Palmedo from American University sent over his notes from the meeting, which I've published below with permission. The key scary point in his notes was that the top European negotiator, Luc Devigne, doesn't seem to realize or care that this is supposed to be an "anti-counterfeiting" agreement, but insists it's an "intellectual property agreement." Perhaps they should rename it, then. Here was the key part:

Luc Devigne (Head EU Negotiator) is gung ho that patents will be in. He thinks that medicines have been addressed and therefore medicines are not an issue. He asked more than once how you could have an 'IP Enforcement' treaty and not include patents - and dismissed suggestions that ACTA was specifically an 'Anti-Counterfeiting' treaty rather than a broader enforcement treaty.

When you compare both of these points from Palmedo and Love, what you come up with are negotiators who are negotiating an agreement without much concern for what the agreement is supposed to be about or what it will actually do. That's downright scary.

Anyway, we've included Palmedo's full notes after the jump, so click on through if you want to read the differing views on patents, safeguards and key issues like access to medicine.

Filed Under: acta, copyright, intellectual property, negotiators

Comically Absurd IP

from the Blatant-Self-Promotion dept

Certain arguments come up over and over again in copyright debates. Mike recently wrote about copyright monopolists calling Free Culture "neo Marxist." This is so absurd, yet so common, that there's a comic about it:

In fact there is a whole IP* category over at Mimi & Eunice. How many times have we heard an indignant "thou shalt not steal"?

How often do we hear competition denounced as theft?

There are strips about business models...

Price vs. Value...

Patents...

and of course, Lawyers:

Naturally, these comics are Free, copyLeft, share-able, copy-able, and embeddable. It is my fondest wish that writers will use these images in their articles and comments, without asking permission. What's in it for me, you ask? The more people see Mimi & Eunice, the more cultural value they'll have. Watching works find their audience is a singular pleasure for an artist. But since Techdirt is more about business models, I'll add that the more people share the strips online, the more value a paper book will have, which I can then sell.

*"IP" stands for something slightly different over there.

Filed Under: comics, intellectual property, nina paley

Why Kenya's Attempt To Put Intellectual Property Rights In Its Constitution Is A Mistake

from the a-european-perspective dept

We recently published a post about Kenya's decision to put intellectual property rights into its proposed constitution, noting that this probably wasn't great for Kenya or other countries (who have likely been pushing Kenya to include those features). Amelia Andersdotter (who is supposed to be a member of the European Parliament, but still technically hasn't been given her seat due to what can only be described as bureaucratic incompetence on a continental scale) has written up a guest post, giving her analysis of why Kenya's move makes little sense

A review of the Kenyan constitution has been undergoing for a long time, and only now has a final draft proposal for a new constitution been released. But, despite the stated aims of freedom, democracy, participation and the free exchange of ideas (pdf), the released draft seems far from that ideal: Kenya is taking the Euro-American route to heavier information restrictions, including more copyright, more patents and more private knowledge monopolies, instead of keeping their legal environment open to creativity, participation and sharing.

From the perspective of someone working with information policies in the European Union, I can only see this harming Kenyan interests. While many sub-Saharan African countries still have relative freedom with regards to information sharing, this is being diminished by pressure from external groups. Most prominently, American and European corporations. Moving the Kenyan legislation towards the European will shift power from Kenyan entrepreneurs to European big business. Ownership concentration is one of the most harmful tendencies we have seen with intellectual property rights in Europe.

What is more, I worry that this will damage my home turf. The complexity of international trade has made it almost impossible for any single country to pass any law into effect without it affecting other nations, and as long as nations around the world keep changing their laws to accommodate for restrictive innovation and creativity policies, we will find it difficult to see new art, communication and new businesses flourish.

History

Intellectual property rights are quickly morphing out of hand in the European Union. They're used to motivate breaches of freedom of speech, privacy of communication and proper judicial course. We've seen proposals enter and get approved by parliaments that wish to send people to jail or shut them off communication networks for listening to music, and laws that have made it very difficult indeed to be (or to remain) a small-scale entrepreneur.

These proposals are often pushed by very large and rich industries, but not always to their own advantage. In the industries that rely the most on patents, innovation is decreasing (pdf), and in the European Union we have a unique experience with the Database Directive that, while certainly creating more intellectual property rights, did not stimulate European economical development (pdf) or the European population. On the part of the music industry, they have managed to make their customers resent them.

Big business does not always know what it ought to want, and if legislators want to promote culture and innovation, my experience is they should try and do that instead of trodding down roads that already failed a trial and error test.

Kenya has previously only protected property in general, and not intellectual property in particular, leaving it up to the legislator to decide whether commodification of common cultural goods or knowledge heritage is appropriate or not. And while European and American politicians have started to discover copyright problems with fair use, orphan works and common cultural heritages, Kenya and other African nations have been urging for exceptions for education, libraries, general dissemination, higher access to medicines and more possibilities for small scale entrepreneurship (such as domestic innovation not consisting of state of the art technology, but adapted to the educational and economical development of a local and regional market).

Small scale businesses: opportunities and possibilities

Most regions in the world where the economic growth is the largest is where the intellectual property protection has been the lowest, or least enforced. These regions typically also have a thriving climate for small and medium-sized entrepreneurs (pdf).

Those considerations are sadly lacking in the European economic policies. While small and medium sized enterprises stand for 50% of the European economy, and employ more than 90% of the European population, in policy making they're made to be only worth their existance to the extent that they can grow or be incorporated in larger enterprises (pdf).

The tactics of making legislation that re-affirms the strong players' place in the market may be useful in the short-term, especially for the strong players. For economic development and the growth of a domestic industry without previous strong actors, it can't be. The effects may, in the worst case, make the Kenyan economy benefit the European economy more than it benefits Kenyans.

From the European perspective, such a course by Kenya would signal a success of the European legislative tactics and lock our economic development in with the strong players as well. A need for rejuvenation and adaption of the European economy to the time of instantaneous information transfer would fall on its head and turn European business practises into practises of channeling Kenyan gains into themselves.

Collective rights

But what about the community-protecting parts of the constitutional draft?

The reformed constitution also aims at protecting the traditional knowledge of Kenyan socities by introducing collective rights for cultural heritage. It's certainly experimental. It's not present in European constitutional culture to specify types of intellectual property and their extent in constitutions. Creating collective intellectual property rights hasn't been tried at all in Europe, to my knowledge. It would likely be an ineffective way of protecting Kenyan cultural heritage against trademarking and patenting in European and American economies. Intellectual property law is still based in the nation state so the Kenyan jurisdiction can't touch those who wish to exploit their traditional knowledge or genetic resources. Considering the few advantages I see with such a right, I would be cautious about introducing it into a constitution.

The European experience to me is also that double intellectual property rights protection is more likely to stay double, rather than negate the effects of one or the other.

A Kenyan collective right is likely to be applicable only where a European company with a trademark or patent in Europe is active also on Kenyan soil, or to the extent that the Kenyan collective can withstand law suits. Neither scenario is likely, and once again, from where I'm standing, keeping the information flows as open as possible is that which will bring the greatest remedies to the cultural robbery plight.

Conclusion

Intellectual property law is still based in the nation state, but is very much shaped globally. A reform in one part of the world does not go without consequences in other parts, but, contrary to what some may imagine, the effects are rarely beneficial to either party.

An approval of the intellectual property rights provisions in the Kenyan constitution could come to be an example of that.

At best, they will not benefit European and American industries so much that they completely strangle Kenyan innovation, and they will not lock Europe and America on the path to democratic failure induced by our own intellectual property law reforms. At worst, and as often happens, a law reform in Kenya will create a precedent for reform in the entire East-African region, and become part of a global web that will lock in East-Africa, Europe and the Americas in an information policy of law suits and power concentration, harmful to creativity as well as innovation.

Hopefully, I have provided a European perspective that may make Kenyan policy makers consider the implications of reforming the constitution in this way one more time.

Filed Under: intellectual property, kenya, protectionism

Washington Post Notes Summit Entertainment's Twisted View Of IP Laws On Twilight

from the nice-work dept

We've been following how ridiculously aggressive Summit Entertainment has been when it comes to IP issues, and the Washington Post has an excellent article highlighting all of the same points we've raised. It almost reads like someone went down the list of our Twilight posts and wrote an article about all those vignettes. I doubt that's how the article came about, but it is pretty cool how neatly the stories in the article line up with what we've written about, concerning Twilight and copyright and trademarks. But the key point made underlines exactly what we've been trying to say for a while now (though does so more succinctly and eloquently):

Its lawsuits go far beyond curbing piracy and end up limiting how we can talk about pop culture.

The law may be on Summit's side in some cases, but the spirit of what the company is doing -- shutting down almost anyone referencing Twilight without its permission -- shows the shortcomings in how we understand and interpret copyright law.

In its lawsuits, Summit essentially argues that it should control almost any expressive activity related to the Twilight franchise because it has copyrighted the material and acquired trademarks associated with the movies. The studio might win its cases, but it fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of intellectual property law. Trademarks exist to prevent customer confusion about the source of a product, not to prevent discussion of the product or the trademark itself.

The piece was written by Christina Mulligan, who recently got plenty of attention for her thoughtful piece on the mixed messages on copyright found in the TV show Glee. It's great that a paper like the Washington Post is giving her a platform to write about these concerns. Hopefully it will finally reach some of our more stubborn and misguided DC-based politicians that intellectual property is being widely abused in troubling ways.

Filed Under: abuse, copyright, free speech, intellectual property, trademark, twilight
Companies: summit entertainment

The Myth That Without Gov't Monopolies Or Subsidies, Discoveries Will Be Hidden By Secrets

from the look-at-the-data dept

Stephan Kinsella sends over a fascinating talk by Dr. Terence Kealey, a UK biochemist and professor, discussing why -- contrary to what most people think, "science" is not a public good, and that government-funded science actually tends to do more damage than good for global economies: Many of the points raised actually apply to issues related to patents as well. For example, he starts out by quoting Francis Bacon, who defended the idea of governments funding science by claiming (as we often hear about patents), that if an individual invests in research, it will cost a great deal to do so, but any competitor can then copy the results for free. And thus, Bacon concluded, science was a form of a public good which the government should fund. Sound familiar?

The problem, it turns out, is that as with patents there is no actual data to back this up. Kealey points out that there is no historical or econometric data anywhere that supports this claim. For example, he points to the OECD's sources of economic growth report (pdf), where it found very high correlation between economic growth and countries that had high levels of private R&D. When it came to publicly supported R&D, the report found no impact on economic growth... but, more worrying, it found evidence that public funding of science tended to crowd out private funding of R&D, which (again) correlated highly with economic growth. Now, of course, correlation is not causation, and there may be many other factors at play here. However, it is interesting that there doesn't appear to be any direct evidence that public expenditure in science leads to economic growth.

Dr. Kealey points out that many people believe in the importance of public funding of science based on the same thinking as Bacon above: the idea that science is a public good. That is, that once it's out there, anyone can use it -- and thus, it either needs to be enclosed and limited in some manner, or funded by the government. In the last couple decades, however, more and more economists have begun to realize that this thinking on public goods is not only overly simplified, but it's often wrong. It appears to be the case here again. Kealey points out that science is not, in fact, a public good.

Why? Because of a combination of social mores and the need to do your own research to understand what others are doing:

The standard story... was that science was a public good, in the sense that anybody can go to the journals -- or the internet today -- and pick up the Journal of Molecular Biology and read the papers for free... We can get it for nothing. Or we can go to the Patent Office, which very kindly publishes all this stuff... and read all the patents... and get ideas, blah blah blah.... We all know that "science is publicly available," and therefore is easy to copy and all the rest of that.

But hold on a second.

How many people in this room can read the Journal of Molecular Biology. How many people in this room can read contemporary journals in physics? Or math? Physiology? Very, very few. Now the interesting thing -- and we can show this very clearly -- is that the only people who can read the papers, the only people who can talk to the scientists who generate the data, are fellow specialists in the same field. And what are they doing? They are publishing their own papers.

And if they try not to publish their own papers... If they say, 'we're not going to get engaged in the exchange of information; we're going to keep out of it and just try to read other people's papers, but not do any research of our own, not make any advances of our own, not have any conversations with anyone,' within two or three years they are obsolescent and redundant, and they can no longer read the papers, because they're not doing the science themselves, which gives them the tacit knowledge -- all the subtle stuff that's never actually published -- that enables them actually to access the information of their competitors.

This is a huge point that fits with similar points that we've made in the past when it comes to intellectual property and the idea that others can just come along and "copy" the idea. So many people believe it's easy for anyone to just copy, but it's that tacit knowledge that is so hard to get. It's why so many attempts at just copying what other successful operations do turn into cargo cult copies, where you may get the outward aspects copied, but you miss all that important implicit and tacit information if you're not out there in the market yourself.

He then goes on to discuss the Royal Society of London, which encouraged scientists to publish their own research, and points out that while initially, people might think that it was better to not be a member, not publish your information and just scoop up what others had done, in practice that wasn't the case. Why? Because the members of the society beyond publishing themselves, also had much greater access to all the other members as well, allowing them to continually further their own knowledge. In other words, the argument that researchers or competitors will prefer to keep their inventions secret via trade secrets goes out the window when companies realize that by sharing more freely their own inventions, they also get greater access to the inventions of others.

What's interesting here is that this story of the Royal Society and the benefits of membership actually fit -- almost exactly -- the research on why Silicon Valley became such a huge success when compared to other, similar arenas. What that research showed was that due to a lack of noncompete agreements in Silicon Valley (where they are outlawed), the rate of job shifting was much higher. And, partly because of that, information flowed much more quickly between competitors. While one might normally think this is a bad thing, what actually happened was it allowed all the companies in that space to grow much faster, because the knowledge sharing led to faster and faster advancements for all. Rather than being limited to just what one group could figure out, they could all effectively build on each other's knowledge as well -- and the end result was much greater growth for all.

But, still, as with the situation that Dr. Kealey describes, there had to be a level of expertise from everyone involved. It wasn't as if some other party, with no knowledge of the space at all could just copy it. So too, it appears to be, with scientists:

You can't access the science of others unless you're part of the game. It is only the molecular biologist who is publishing his own papers, getting invited to the conferences, having the discrete conversations with other fellow molecular biologists, who can capture the work of others. And so you don't get the information for free. You pay a very high price to access the information of your fellows. Science is not a public good.... It costs as much to access information as it does to make it. It's just that the cost of accessing is the subtle parallel cost of the work you have to do before you're ready to read it. And, as a part of that, you're contributing to the common pool of knowledge.

From there, he discusses the famous story of how the Wright Brothers and their patents effectively killed the aviation industry in the US until the government stepped in to force them to open up. And from there, he makes the point that I was discussing above about the research on Silicon Valley:

What is really interesting about the exchange of knowledge, is the work of von Hippel and others at MIT Sloan Management School: industrial scientists collude -- or I don't know what word you want to use -- exchange information all of the time. Even competitors. It's a straight quid pro quo. Just like academic scientists. von Hippel showed, for example, the 12 leading steel makers in America... 11 of them routinely met discretely, and exchanged information as quid pro quos. It's a very nice model, economically. There is actually shared knowledge amongst scientists. One of the leading economists of science -- I'm not going to name all the names because it's boring -- but he's showed that there are no industrial secrets in America or in Britain or in the West. Scientists at the level of research, in companies, exchange so much information, that no secrets exist more than about a year, a year and a half....

...

Scientists discovered a very long time ago that their own self-interest is assured if they share knowledge with competitors. Because the ones that don't share knowledge, whether they're academic scientists looking for their Nobels or business scientists looking for money, that if they don't share, they will absolutely get left behind.

It's great to see that there's even more research on this particular subject than I had been aware of before, but which confirms many of the points that I've been making for years.

Filed Under: innovation, intellectual property, openness, science, sharing, terence kealey, trade secrets