From A2K Wiki

Contents 1 Panel description 2 Speaker presentation slides 3 Notes on panel 3.1 Terry Fisher: Drugs, Law, & the Global Health Crisis 3.2 Joaquim Falcao: Broadcast TV: Anaog to Digital 3.3 Douglas Johnson: IT Standards 3.4 Achal Prabhala & Lawrence Liang: Alice & the White Rabbit 3.5 Richard Jefferson: Mapmaker, mariners, shipwrights, and sailors. 3.6 Q & A

Panel description

Solutions for A2K
Speakers: Terry Fisher, Joaquim Falcao, Douglas Johnson, Lawrence Liang & Achal Prabhala, Richard Jefferson
Moderator: Jerome Reichman
Student organizer: David Tannenbaum

There is widespread consensus that innovation is a significant driver of economic development and human flourishing. Supporting innovation in the information economy will undoubtedly require reliance on tried and true methods carried over from the industrial economy, and new methods adopted to new technologies and social structures. What are the viable options for nations and individuals situated at all points along the development curve as they enter, or strive to enter, the networked information economy? The conventional wisdom is that there is a significant conceptual and political gap between those who believe innovation is best supported by public-sector or non-profit enterprises that build the commons, and those who believe that harnessing the market is the most efficient and just path to creative production. The last five years has highlighted the prominence of a middle option, commons-based production underwritten in large part by the private sector. There is a growing corps of market actors who believe that openness--whether in standards, code, or basic research--is the driver of successful business models in an innovation-driven economy. Non-profit solutions, backed by formal institutions and informal social networks, have proliferated in the network. Some government actors, particularly those with a mandate for increasing access to knowledge and supporting basic research, have intervened to maximize the impact of public funds by supporting the commons. Which solutions will carry us into the next decade?

Speaker presentation slides

Joaquim Falcao (PDF) (PPT)

Douglas Johnson (PDF)

Lawrence Liang & Achal Prabhala (PDF)

Notes on panel

Terry Fisher: Drugs, Law, & the Global Health Crisis

• Where we stand

[unfortunately, I missed the beginning of Prof. Fisher's talk. If you have notes, pls fill in]

• What we might do

will talk about one particular option: regulate drug companies

model: CAFE Standards requiring corporate average fuel economy

proposal: each pharmaceutical firm must achieve aggregate ratio: DALYs/gross revenues DALY = disability adjusted life years drug companies could comply by greater focus on neglected diseases, greater access in LDCs, etc.

allow DALY vouchers to be bought and sold by companies to meet their requirements

capitalizes on information advantages of firms highlight distressingly low cost of saving a marginal life (because that would be the price of the DALYs)

Joaquim Falcao: Broadcast TV: Anaog to Digital

broadcast TV in Brazil has been a huge success. Brazilians buy more TVs than refrigerators. 95% of homes have broadcast TV. Cable has been much less successful

Globo TV set the standard in teh 60s: domestic production and content. 70% domestic production average for all networks. 9% domestic for Globo Even on cable, most watched channels are broadcast channels

The viewer was considered a viewer and a citizen, and the content includes information, values, etc. TV molds domestic habits, and domestic habits molds TV.

As the country moves to digital, has to make a choice: Japanese or European? Also, Telcos coming to the plate as a new player. They each have different characteristics. TV content will be domestically produced. But telcos will provide foreign content.

What is the real "digital choice?" airwaves? content production? social values?

Douglas Johnson: IT Standards

The Crisis: IT innovation is amazingly accelerated (triggered itself by Internet open standards). But global standard setting has not sclaed with the growth.

We have seen an explosion of (mostly weak) patents filed on IT standards infrastructure. Has led to a balkanization of ICT standards

This has undermined growth in the industry, as well as global development

Sun tries to blow up as many standards bodies as they join these days, because many are not helping the environment

The point is that if you control the interface, you control all possible implementations.

The proposal: create a particular category of technologies called "interfaces," which cannot be protected by patents.

The goal is to make encumbered standards impossible. (with the emphasis on standards...if you want to control your tech, fine, but not as part of a

If you must have an encumbered standard, must have RAND terms, with terms declared ex ante.

On ODF specifically: Mass. decides to use an open standard. Gets a lot of grief from MS and others. Look at CED report, "Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovations."

Achal Prabhala & Lawrence Liang: Alice & the White Rabbit

AP:

India: Been very progressive on patent since the 70s. But on (c) arguably India has been insufficiently progressive, especially with respect to exceptions and limitations to (c).

Illusion of equity in knowledge goods market. But as a proportion of income, costs are very high.

South Africa: High income inequality. Publishing market gets to only about 15% of pop'n. A legal regime with few enabling provisions for A2K.

LL:

The standard account of the "digital divide" is accurate, but not necessarily meaningful.

Great information inequality in the global south. OTOH, pervasive presence of non-legal information cultures ("piracy")

How does A2K movement respond to legal grey market. You could disengage. But some of demands of A2K movement can only be met through piracy.

A paradox: At the heart of the A2K movement is reconfiguring idea of user to user/producer. This seems to conflict with development agenda centered around idea of "access," which implies passivity of recipient. Need to think about lack—but also about subjectivity.

AP:

Two stories:

Nancecol, and adult learning school in Soweto in Jo'burg. _None of 400 students owns a textbook._ But some students are working on facility to allow printing of open source textbooks to fulfill some of this need.

Bangalore: One of issues in IT is willingness of IT to employ disabled people. For example, the blind in call centers, b/c they require screen readers. JAWS, the leading screen reader, costs $1200/yr. Many of improvements in screen readers are hacks made by people who are themselves the blind.

LL:

In priacy, the problem that dealing with the “domain of pleasure.” One example: An NGO friend working on training program for rural women trainers on access to the Internet. Cleaning up the computers in the classroom after the training session, found that the women has all spent the session surfing pornography! "While the trainers were holding forth eloquently about the real information needs of the poor, the poor were quite happy to access their real information needs."

The problem: An “exclusion by homage” of these aspects of the poor.

AP:

In the context of A2K and South Africa, perhaps the problem is not that there should be less piracy but that there should be more.

Richard Jefferson: Mapmaker, mariners, shipwrights, and sailors.

When are thinking about many of the people implicated involved in the development issues here, we tend to think about: poor, diseased, etc. We need to replace those with adjectives like: communicative, creative, etc.

Go all the way back to the development of agriculture. People developed norms, processes, etc, that made raw materials useful. Innovative people working collectively to advance their own self interest. This was FLOSS before there was FLOSS.

In mercantile age, knowledge of maps became central. Nation states came to power by their control of this crucial element of knowledge.

The new enclosure movement is as much about capability as it is about knowledge. Like the ability to make maps, not just the maps themselves.

Science: Have to develop a means by which anyone with a need can navigate to a potentially successful solution to their problem.

Thus, the BIOS (Biological Innovation for Open Society) initiative.

The Patent Lens: Why are only multinationals doing biological innovation? We have a clergy of patent practice. An egregious fragmentation of data so that noone can negotiate.

The largest, public cost-free, full-text database of patents.

Began to analyze the landscapes to find egregious patents. Looking particularly at agricultural context. The precursors to the GPL were breeder’s rights.

Will be adding ability to annotate and comment all patents in the next few months. Again, mapping.

Q & A

• To the whole panel: How do we increase access to knowledge in the form of loose social connections – i.e. the kind of knowledge that cannot easily

Jefferson: Indeed, a crucial and very hard problem.

• To Terry Fisher: Access to medicines doesn’t seem to be the problem. The relevant medicines are overwhelmingly known and off-patent. The problem is very basic health practices.

Jefferson: Morbidity from malnutrition grossly outweighs that from disease.

Fisher: There are diseases for which drugs are very relevant. AIDS is the obvious example. Similarly, if we had a malaria vaccine.

When I started the project, I also felt that access to meds. was probably a relatively small part of the problem. But data suggests that health improvements in 20th century are very heavily dependent on technological advances. Greatest in the vaccine, rather than therapies era.

• Jamie Love: On the global health issues, do you feel that its important that the system that deals with priorities of research and access is not determined by US congress alone, but that local populations should have some role?

Fisher: Both inevitably have a role, given the nature of the treaty regime we have. But there is flexibility even within these treaties. And so the urgent need not let that be lost in TRIPS+ negotiations.

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