Intellectual Property

I’m at the Open Translation event, and we’ve just had a great session on open content business models. It was very useful, and interesting, and gave me lots of food for thought. I’ve been interested in issues of how we sustain open content for a long while. I was the note-taker for the session, and I feel like there are a lot of great ideas out there.

In general, it seems like most models depend on some sort of up-front funding, whether it be an investment or a grant, to fund the initial writing of a large amount of content. The problem of how do you fund the actual writing of content was not really addressed, and I think that is one of the harder nuts to crack. There was one interesting model was asking for pledges, and if the pledges got up to a certain amount, the content would be produced. But ongoing sustainability of already written open content seems to have been at least conditionally solved by a variety of folks in a variety of ways:

• Training and consulting based on existing content
• Generating revenue by doing print on demand, with a markup
• Production of corollary items such as t-shirts
• Hybrid model – most content is free, some content is closed, and paid for
• Advertising on a site with open content
• Corporate sponsorship
• “Robin Hood” models: asking larger Northern organizations to subsidize the distribution of content for the developing world

This is very interesting fodder for my thinking about the puzzle that is how to make NOSI a strong, sustainable organization. The thing we have actually done the most of is write the primer, and I’ve got more ideas for types of open content that NOSI could get involved in doing, so these suggestions for business models are quite welcome.

I’d taken a long break from Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks – I had a lot going on, and, well, it’s a really, really meaty read. But I picked it up again, and was in the middle of it around the same time as the discussions around the Journal of Information Technology in Social Change happened. And as I finished reading the chapter, it came clear to me that the chapter might well be Yochai’s two cents on our conversation (not that I’ve asked him, but some things seem kinda clear from this chapter.)

The chapter is titled: Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information and Law. Basically, it talks about the kinds of ways that individuals live, and the kinds of things that increase autonomy, and things that decrease it. He starts out laying the framework: the networked information economy puts materials in people’s hands for action, it provides non-proprietary sources of communications, and it decreases the extent that people can be manipulated by those they depend on for communication. He then goes into detail into each of these ways that the network information economy increases autonomy.

There’s a lot in this chapter, and I can’t possibly do it justice – go read it. But what I want to highlight is his section on autonomy, property and commons. First, because it bears most closely on issues of open content in the nonprofit sector. Second, because it’s a set of concepts that are pretty new to me, and I found interesting, and the arguments compelling.

First, both markets/property and commons have something in common – the ability of people to have some amount of certainty that there is available to them a set of resources so they can, as Benkler says “execute plans over time.” I’d just say, live our lives, or in the case of nonprofits, accomplish their missions. But markets and commons create these certainties in different ways, as you can imagine. Markets are dependent on the willingness and ability of people to pay for goods and services, and are constrained in certain ways. Commons are also constrained in certain ways. He says:

Whether having a particular type of resource subject to a commons, rather than a property-based market enhances freedom of action and security, or harms them, is a context-specific question.

Basically, we have to take things on a case-by-case basis. There may be times (I’d say home ownership is a good one,) where a property-based market would enhance security and flexibility, and a commons-based resource might not. And there will be examples (see below) where the opposite is true. It is his opinion, and based on his arguments I agree, that a mixture of proprietary (market-based) and commons provides people with the most flexible set of resources leading to the greatest autonomy:

Given the diversity of resources and contexts, and the impossibility of a purely “anything goes” absence of rules for either system, some mix of the two different institutional frameworks is likely to provide the greatest diversity of freedom to act in a material context.

He goes on to say:

As to information, then, we can say with a high degree of confidence that a more expansive commons improves individual autonomy, while enclosure of the public domain undermines it. This is less determinate with communications systems. Because computers and network connections are rival goods, there is less certainty that a commons will deliver the required resources. Under present conditions, a mixture of commons-based and proprietary communications systems is likely to improve autonomy.

He thinks that if conditions change, including increasing peer-to-peer networks, and wireless mesh networks, a commons-based communications policy would increase autonomy.

Later in the chapter, when he talks about mass communications, he uses a great metaphor of storytellers. I won’t detail it here, because this is already getting pretty long. But it’s worth reading – it has to do with how free we are to tell our own stories, and to hear the stories of as wide a range of people as possible.

I think that his contribution to our discussion about open content in the nonprofit sector, would be that, since it is information (a nonrival good), and since information is both output (I write a whitepaper that people read) and an input (someone takes the information from that whitepaper, and updates it, or uses a piece of information about one of the specific aspects of that paper in another paper with a different focus) a commons-based approach is the approach that will provide the greatest security and flexibility. In other words, an approach that will allow nonprofits to best fulfill their missions, or in Benkler-ese “execute their plans.”

Technorati Tags: intellectualproperty, nptech, opencontent

I had heard about this new journal a while ago, and it was sitting in some small corner of my brain, waiting for me to pay attention. I ran into an old colleague at NTC, and it came up, because he had been thinking of contributing to the journal, but decided that he probably won’t, for reasons I will talk about.

The new journal, the Journal of Information Technology in Social Change, is, I think, a needed part of our landscape of resources for the sector. And the editors, both of whom I respect highly, are impeccable in their credentials to pull this sort of thing off, and make it successful.

But then I looked deeper. The journal is, basically, business as usual. It’s peer reviewed (good), but it’s got a rather restrictive license, and the content is not freely available. The licenses are as follows:

Personal License:

If you have purchased a copy/subscription to the Journal with a personal license, this means that it is for your personal use. You may make copies for backup purposes or to allow you to personally use this report on more than one computer. You may also print copies, but not for circulation of any kind [emphasis mine].

Corporate License:

For most of you, we recommend a corporate license. If you have purchased a copy/subscription to the Journal with a corporate license, this means that it is for use by people within your organization. You may make paper copies for internal circulation. You may post it to your intranet, so long as access to that intranet is restricted to those who work for your organization [emphasis mine].

In other words, don’t make a copies for a workshop, or for a colleague who isn’t inside your organization, and definitely don’t make a copy for your mother to read.

But it’s a journal about technology and social change! This goes back to my constant refrain – the means are the ends. How can we talk about technology in social change, while, at the same time, publishing in a format that limits the availability of this knowledge to people privileged enough to pay for it? How can we talk about promoting change when we’re not pushing this content into the commons?

The Public Library of Science is a wonderful example of a reputable, respected peer-reviewed journal where articles are freely available to the public. They say:

Published research results and ideas are the foundation for future progress in science and medicine. Open Access publishing therefore leads to wider dissemination of information and increased efficiency in science …

Which is, actually, a very practical down to earth argument. Benkler goes further, and I go with him:

Information, knowledge, and information-rich goods and tools play a significant role in economic opportunity and human development. While the networked information economy cannot solve global hunger and disease, its emergence does open reasonably well-defined new avenues for addressing and constructing some of the basic requirements of justice and human development … More importantly, the availability of free information resources makes participating in the economy less dependent on surmounting access barriers to financing and social-transactional networks that made working out of poverty difficult in industrial economies. These resources and tools thus improve equality of opportunity. [emphasis mine]

I think it is incumbent upon knowledgeable leaders to provide models for how to do things differently – provide tools that foster social change in ways that foster social change, not in ways that help to sustain the status quo.

I invited Michael Gilbert to a dialogue about this, which he readily agreed to. Below is his response. We’ll be continuing this on each of our blogs, with cross-linking. Please feel free to join the dialogue, either in comments, or on your own blog. I’ll respond to Michael’s response in another post.

Thank you so much for wanting to start a dialogue on this issue.

I would like to respond in three parts. First, I want to say a few words about my enthusiastic support for the critique of closed licensing offered by Michelle by reflecting a bit on my past actions in this regard. Second, I want to lay out as clearly as possible the circumstance that led to a decision to use a traditional closed license. Third, I want to invite people to participate in a conversation about how this could be done differently.

As anyone who has followed my advocacy work over the last ten years will know, I am a fervent supporter of open licensing models as a profound public good. I started promoting the Public Library of Science to the readers of Nonprofit Online News as far back as December of 2002. I’ve praised the innovation of the Creative Commons licenses on more than one occasion, along with Lawrence Lessig’s other work and ideas. (I have in fact offered a great deal of content under Creative Commons licenses in the past and will no doubt do so again.) I have been a champion of openness of all sorts, including such things as open licenses and the destructiveness of DRM, in panel after panel in the nonprofit tech community for a decade. I have more than once written challenges of others similar to Michelle’s challenge of me and I must say that I can only hope that I’ve been half as courteous as she has been.

Before I explain the circumstances that led to our licensing decision, I want to make one thing very clear. Although the Journal was prepared in partnership with NTEN, I take full and personal responsibility for the decision to use a closed license. Katrin Verclas (the Executive Director of NTEN, for those who don’t know) was eager to know if there was any way to make it open and pushed hard for it. I am the one who, with the interests of the sustainability of my own small organization in mind, refused.

The question of licensing is a terrible dilemma for authors, readers, reviewers and publishers right now and I happen to be all of the above. I’m in an absurd position, personally. I want our efforts to reach the broadest possible audience and at yet on a gut level, I loathe the restrictive nature of the journal industry. At the same time, I have a small organization with an established based of customers that will pay for high quality information. (In other words, I have paying subscribers who have been waiting for this journal for months.) Most importantly, I have staff to pay. Thus, the journal has a fee, although we’ve done our best to make the personal rate much lower than the organizational one and in no case are we anywhere near some of the stratospheric prices of many mainstream journals.

I’ve watched open journals fumble along and when they publish at all it’s the result of great sacrifice on the part of the people publishing it. Some, that have a home in the extra time that some academics can spend on such things in their jobs, are almost sustainable. Others aren’t at all. I’m really not sure what the answer is. The overhead of finding sponsors for a small publication is enormous. We experimented with it briefly two years ago when we first decided to publish a journal, but we couldn’t make it happen. Is there a business model that will make this work? I’m really not sure.

Quite frankly, nothing would please me more than to find a way to finance the expense of the journal without fees for licensed copies. The licensing is a pain for everyone. It’s friction in the system designed only to create some financial accountability for the work involved in nurturing the relationships involved and husbanding the papers into the best form we can manage. Maybe the answer is to abandon that and just use the Internet for direct publishing by authors, but I don’t think we’re far enough along yet in developing network centric models that do what competitive selection, peer review, and editing will do. Maybe the answer is for a single donor to step forward and fund the next half dozen issues. Maybe the answer is some kind of quarterly bounty which, as soon as financial pledges reach a certain amount, the publication goes to open license (or maybe that’s when the next issue is commenced). I really don’t know. If you want to help figure it out, I would be very grateful.

To wrap up, I just want to say thank you to Michelle for jumping on this right away. (I only wish you had been at the panel for the Journal on Friday where we talked about our larger goals. The licensing issue would have been a good piece of that discussion.) The sector benefits from this sort of criticism and we’ll all be better off for it.

Technorati Tags: 07NTC, intellectualproperty, nptech

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