The Social Movement of A2K
Speakers:Margaret Chon, Ahmed Abdel Latif, Ronaldo Lemos, Jamie
Love, Sisule Musungu, Jerome Reichman
Moderator: Amy Kapczynski
Mobilizing Industry
Speakers: Pam Samuelson, Nagla Rizk, Brent Woodworth, Brad
Biddle,
Andrew McLaughlin, Jule Sigall
Moderator: Colin Maclay
Mobilizing Governments
Speakers: Irina Bogdanovskaia, Getachew Mengitsie,
Luis Villaroel Villalon, Carlos Correa, Shamnad Basheer
Moderator: Eddan Katz
Mobilizing Technologists
Speakers: Helen Nissenbaum, Erik Moeller, Jon Hall, Daniel
Dardailler, Brewster Kahle, Rishab Ghosh
Moderator: Georg Greve
Mobilizing Civil Society
Speakers: Nnenna Nwakanma, Josh Silver, Madhavi Sunder, Gwen
Hinze, Sherwin Siy
Moderator: Becky Lentz
Partnerships for Access to Information
Speakers: Hala Essalmawi, Serge Bounda, Jason Phillips, Crispin Taylor
Moderator: Ann Okerson
Internationalized Domain Names
Speakers: Ram Mohan, Wei Mao, Hong Xue, Milton Mueller, Peter
Yu
Moderator: Robert Guerra
Patent Quality
Speakers: Tahir Amin, Daniel Ravicher, Frederick Abbott, Arti Rai
Moderator: Josh
Sarnoff
Open Access Literature
Speakers: Achal Prabhala, Binyavanga Wainaina, Gary Dauphin,
Rob Spillman, Michael Vazquez
Moderator: Manon Ress
Search Engines
Speakers: Michael Geist, Richard Owens, Niva Elkin-Koren, Judith
Dueck, Robin Gross
Moderator: Sudhir Krishnaswamy
Traditional Knowledge and Genetic Resources
Speakers: Graham Dutfield, Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Antony Taubman,
Elpidio Peria
Moderator: Anupam Chander
Community Media and the Global Public Sphere
Speakers: Murali Shanmugavelan, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Ethan
Zuckerman, Natasha Primo, Wijayananda Jayaweera
Moderator: Fazila Farouk
Broadband WiFi in Developing Countries
Speakers: Caio Pereira, Satish Jha, Kaili Kan, Susan Crawford,
Willie Currie
Moderator: Diana Korsakaite
Agriculture and Intellectual Property
Speakers: Susan Sell, Fleur Claessens, Dalindyebo Shabalala,
Daniel Kevles
Moderator: Andrea Glorioso
The Political Economy of Digital Archives
Speakers: Guy Pessach, Magdy Nagi, Denise Nicholson, Paul Gerhardt,
Glenn Otis Brown
Moderator: Teresa Hackett
Education in the Digital Age
Speakers: Mira Sundara Rajan, Titilayo Akinsanmi, Saskia Harmsen,
Andrew Rens, Geidy Lung
Moderator: Jack Lerner
Access to Scientific Knowledge
Speakers: Chris Armbruster, Subbia Arunachalam, Juan Carlos
De Martin, Sibusiso Sibisi, Larry Peiperl
Moderator: Dan Burk
check out last years A2K pages for full description and transcripts
Speakers: Jack Balkin, Yochai Benkler
Speakers:Margaret Chon, Ahmed Abdel Latif, Ronaldo Lemos, Jamie
Love, Sisule Musungu, Jerome Reichman
Moderator: Amy Kapczynski
Panel Description:
This opening panel is intended to provide a brief introduction to the concept of access to knowledge (A2K), and to address the strengths and weaknesses in the past and future coalition or movement of A2K. We would like panelists generally to address themselves to the past and future of A2K as a concept, coalition, and movement.
Questions to be addressed will include:
Speakers: Pam Samuelson, Nagla Rizk, Brent Woodworth, Brad
Biddle,
Andrew McLaughlin, Jule Sigall
Moderator: Colin Maclay
Panel Description:
What role does the private sector play in fostering access to knowledge (A2K) initiatives? What role can it play? What role should it play?
The private sector has undeniably invested in certain aspects of knowledge development. Technology companies have donated equipment, created technical training programs, and helped develop the infrastructure necessary to grow and sustain access to knowledge. Mobile service companies have increased access to telephony and the internet. While other companies within the private sector have invested in more traditional methods of knowledge development, taking the forms of grants of physical infrastructure, direct foreign investment, or partnerships with technology transfer provisions.
And yet, despite the private sector’s investments, the government sector and non-profit sectors often work merely in parallel, as opposed to in partnership to achieve A2K goals. This lack of coordination may derive from pragmatic factors or theoretical disagreements. This panel seeks to address how the private sector and civil society and can work more closely as the A2K movement develops.
Panel Description:
What role, if any, should governments—national, state or local—have in influencing and/or giving effect to the ideals of A2K? If A2K is in the end a commitment to distributional justice, governments ought to have a role in furthering that ideal. Governments interact with information and knowledge-embedded goods in more ways than one – as procurers, as producers and as regulators. As market participants, governments often buy and use information and knowledge goods -- their role as procurers. Additionally, governments remain actively engaged in the processes of producing and collating these resources, both directly -- as active market participants, and indirecty -- by providing others with subsidies and financial support. Lastly, in their role as regulators, governments often aid (and occassionally impede) the movement and production of information and knowledge. How can their regulatory role be transformed into a facilitative one.
How can each of these roles be directed towards the goals and objectives of A2K?
This Panel will focus on ways in which governments can contribute to achieving the goals of the A2K movement – in each of their capacities. Mechanisms might range from local policy shifts to directing national intellectual property policies toward development goals or even more expansive international efforts and the bilateral and multilateral levels. What lessons can the movement learn from these various mechanisms? Can any threads of commonality be found? Most importantly though, how might the discourse of A2K structure/locate itself in order to actively facilitate government participation and support? These are some of the issues this Panel will attempt to address.
Speakers: Helen Nissenbaum, Erik Moeller, Jon Hall, Daniel
Dardailler, Brewster Kahle, Rishab Ghosh
Moderator: Georg Greve
Panel Description:
As we know, as more and more aspects of modern society are mediated by technology in general and ICTs particularly, the stakes in the battle on the political economy of knowledge are upped. The outcomes have significant influence on our lives. The transition from a political economy in which the key actors that control technology are governments and firms to a participatory economy that promotes access to knowledge and in which many actors are self-selected volunteers, can greatly alter the ways in which we communicate with each other, engage in business, study, participate in our culture, eat, create and even procreate. This panel seeks to explore the role of technologists --within and outside the market, within and outside industry-- in the access to knowledge movement. The panel will explore the relationship between technologists' work and the A2K movement building, and the role that technologists, both companies and individuals, have in leading the way for A2K.
Questions to be considered by the panel include:
Speakers: Nnenna Nwakanma, Josh Silver, Madhavi Sunder, Gwen
Hinze, Sherwin Siy
Moderator: Becky Lentz
Panel Description:
When people speak about the "Access to Knowledge movement," they are most likely to have in mind the civil society groups who advocate along many dimensions of the access problem. This panel will address the historical role of civil society in the movement and its role in the coming years. Panelists will focus on three issues: the scope of civil society coalitions, the conceptualization of "A2K", and the use of movement tools beyond issue advocacy.
Since the birth of the movement, coalitions have formed between civil society groups in the North and South that work in the domains of intellectual property rights (software, medicines, educational materials), telecommunications, library services, and other sectors. When are civil society coalitions across sectors most effective and when, if ever, do they interfere with effective advocacy? What are the best of examples of cross-sectoral coalitions have been successful to date? What new opportunities for cross-sectoral work are on the horizon? What are the particular challenges of working across the North-South divide? How can civil society build coalitions with other movement actors, such as government officials, firms, and technologists?
Another challenge for civil society concerns how to conceptualize "A2K" to build the movement, and to promote policy change (two goals that may require different strategies). In national and international forums governments and policy advisors often analyze A2K in economic terms. Should civil society groups insist on a broader conception of A2K that includes a cultural foundation? What are the advantages and disadvantages of a broader approach for movement building? For effective advocacy?
To date, civil society groups in the access to knowledge movement have primarily relied on issue advocacy. Is building a grassroots movement the next step? Are there promising signs of grassroots activity? What are the issues around which it is easier, or more sensible, to put resources into building grassroots support? When is grassroots activity unrealistic or inappropriate? Would it be useful to pursue more litigation in national and international fora? What are some examples of successful and unsuccessful litigation?
Speakers: Hala Essalmawi, Serge Bounda, Jason Phillips, Crispin Taylor
Moderator: Ann Okerson
Researchers and students, in all countries of the world, need access to high quality, peer reviewed information in all disciplines, and access to such materials (scholarly books and journals) can be immensely facilitiated through the Internet. There is a tendency to think of the traditional publishing or the business sector as antagonistic to the goals of A2K because they can't or won't give away everything they produce for free (or perhaps because we are unrealistic about the costs of producing quality stuff and paying for it in a sustainable way). Yet much of at least the scholarly publishing sector has programs that do make information widely available, especially to "countries in transition," i.e., developing nations. Speakers representing some leading publishing organizations will describe the steps they have taken to make books and articles widely and freely available -- particularly to the developing world.
How can this be accomplished? What are the costs? How are the costs being met? How can these initiatives be sustained over a long period of time? Is it reasonable to expect wealthier countries and institutions to cover costs for the rest of the world? What benefits can be seen and how can we measure them? What does "success" for such initiatives look like? What are some of the trends in these kinds of initiatives and partnerships?
Speakers: Ram Mohan, Wei Mao, Hong Xue, Milton Mueller, Peter
Yu
Moderator: Robert Guerra
If we borrow the three-step analogy from Dr. Vint Cerf, the Chair of the Board of Director of ICANN, then information society is like the universe, internet governance is only a planet, and internationalized domain names (IDNs) seems like an egg on the planet. When taking a view through such a "Universal Positioning System", we know the IDN issues cannot be separated from the context of internet governance and information society. Meanwhile, the IDNs issues, though as small and fragile as an egg in the universe, is containing the element of new life and may exert the butterfly effect to the whole system.
Domain names were originally limited to the letters A to Z, the numbers 0-9 and the hyphen. As the Internet has expanded, so has the number of users who use alphabets based on alternative scripts, such as Russian or Chinese. There is a strong interest in the existing and nascent Internet community to have the ability to register domain names written in the characters used in their preferred languages and therein lies a huge technical challenge. Such domain names are sometimes called "International Domain Names" (IDN).
The Internet Engineering Task Force has developed a system which converts domain names from other alphabets into Latin-script characters. This is already in use with several TLDs, such as ‘.com’, ‘.info’and ‘.cn’ within second level domains. ICANN is testing the use of IDNs within TLDs. Some have criticised ICANN for being too slow in implementing IDNs, and warn that others could create an alternative system, which could misdirect internet traffic.
The panel will discuss how IDN technologies may facilitate the users’ access to knowledge and bridge the digital divide and how to ensure an open, transparent, multi-stakeholder IDN policy making process, centered with the local internet communities of certain scripts or languages.
Speakers: Tahir Amin, Daniel Ravicher, Frederick Abbott, Arti Rai
Moderator: Josh
Sarnoff
The failure of patent systems to maintain high patent quality (with low quality relating both to procedure and to substance, and thus including patents that should not have issued under existing legal doctrines as well as patents that issue under legal doctrines that permit overly broad, minimally innovative, or improper subjects for claims), to limit uncertainty of patent scope and application, and to prevent improper patent-related behaviors imposes large social costs. These costs may increase the price of important technologies, limit development of useful alternatives, and place a drag on innovation. In both the U.S and abroad, broad concerns about low patent quality and high costs of patent-related litigation are driving calls for diverse reforms. This panel will explore the patent quality and system problems, with an emphasis on innovative solutions. Panelists will discuss proper institutional incentives for quality patent examination, online peer review for patents, pre-grant opposition processes in India as a response to "evergreening" by pharmaceutical companies, post grant oppositions here in the U.S, doctrinal changes to patent validity standards such as limiting patentable subject matter to exclude business methods and software and raising the non-obviousness (inventive step) threshold, changes to litigation requirements and standards such as the burden of proof of validity and eliminating willful infringement, strengthened misuse doctrines and antitrust enforcement, and a variety of other ongoing efforts.
Speakers: Achal Prabhala, Binyavanga Wainaina, Gary Dauphin,
Rob Spillman, Michael Vazquez
Moderator: Manon Ress
Open Access has thus far been applied to obviously “useful” things such as science literature. Although Creative Commons (CC) has made an effort to bring music, literature, and art under its banner, it remains true that most CC licenses remain confined to scientific scholarship and other such practical materials. However, while the objective value of Open Access literature is less immediately apparent to many observers, access to literature nevertheless contributes significantly to international, cross-border exchanges of knowledge. This panel will explore the benefits of open access literature in fostering cross-cultural dialogue and in improving information flow between and among nations. It will further attempt to answer such questions as:
Speakers: Michael Geist, Richard Owens, Niva Elkin-Koren, Judith
Dueck, Robin Gross
Moderator: Sudhir Krishnaswamy
Panel Description:
Search and information retrieval tools are an essential component of any information policy. Without effective search, even nominally open access to knowledge resources remains theoretical, given the scale and dispersion of information today, particularly online information. At the same time, questions of search are profoundly political. Search tools can be biased to favor particular information providers or to censor some forms of information altogether by hiding them from view. They similarly raise deep and problematic questions of control over information resources, including privacy, intellectual property, and telecommunications. This panel will ask how debates about access to knowledge infrastructure apply to search in the international development context. It will examine issues such as:
Speakers: Graham Dutfield, Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Antony Taubman,
Elpidio Peria
Moderator: Anupam Chander
Panel Description:
Many developing countries are rich in traditional knowledge and genetic resources. These resources have been explored, collected and exploited by institutions and multi-national corporations from developed countries with little to no compensation to the original knowledge holders and local communities. Furthermore, there have been cases where intellectual property rights in the product have prevented original knowledge holders from having access to the resulting technologies.
Since the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, national governments as well as international coalitions have sought to develop an effective response to these issues. Many developing countries have passed domestic legislation consistent with the CBD framework in an effort to prevent misappropriation, regulate access to their genetic resources, ensure equitable sharing of benefits and protect traditional knowledge. This panel hopes to conduct a holistic examination of popular modes of protection, such as Access and Benefit Sharing agreements, as well as debate the feasibility of alternative models.
The panel will first explore the rationales and objectives for protection of traditional knowledge and genetic resources. What goals should a protection scheme serve? Will protection be used as a tool to extract value from these resources, or rather as a tool to preserve them? While some advocates argue that any protection scheme should ultimately serve the goal of equity, others focus on conservation of biodiversity and preservation of local culture. What role should local communities play in determining these goals?
Next the panel will discuss the possible mechanisms to achieve these goals. Currently, much national legislation conforms to a property model where control over access to and use of genetic resources, and in some cases traditional knowledge, is retained by an owner who then negotiates licenses by contract. Is the property-contract model employed by most Access and Benefit Sharing agreements the most appropriate means to achieve the goals of a traditional knowledge and genetic resources regime? Or might a more flexible and creative sui generis system be more responsive and efficient? If so, what qualities would such a regime have, and to what extent should local customary law play a role?
Finally, we hope to touch on the tension between “positive” legal protection of TK and the ideals of the Access to Knowledge movement. Positive rights for traditional knowledge holders clearly confer needed legal legitimacy and control over TK. Yet some critics argue that such a regime represents the harmful foray of IPRs into yet another body of knowledge which will be heedlessly removed from the public domain. Is this knowledge in the public domain now? Should it be? What values are stake in this discussion, and do any of the policy options offer potential means of reconciliation?
Speakers: Murali Shanmugavelan, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Ethan
Zuckerman, Natasha Primo, Wijayananda Jayaweera
Moderator: Fazila Farouk
Panel Description:
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have the potential to greatly improve quality of life in developing nations by promoting cultural and political democracy; stimulating trade, e-commerce, and local entrepreneurship; and providing tools for sustainable development. Technologies such as blogs and FM radio also have the power to enable local conversation by routing around the roadblocks thrown up by centralized media ownership: blocks, censorship, and access problems. Community media such as these are usually discussed in the context of grassroots activism, which is largely executed by agents of civil society either at the individual or institutional level. In attempting to affect change on a small scale, those agents have become part of a larger alternative community, creating what is perhaps a tense interface between local and global goals and concerns. This panel will explore that interface by examining ICTs' effects on local communities, attempting to answer such questions as:
Speakers: Caio Pereira, Satish Jha, Kaili Kan, Susan Crawford,
Willie Currie
Moderator: Diana Korsakaite
Panel Description:
The Access to Knowledge (A2K) movement includes questions about how information and communication technology (ICT) architectures both reflect and facilitate the ability of communities and individuals to produce, access, share, and use information. The international development community has placed emphasis on the promise of broadband technologies like Wi-Max, GSM, and Wi-Fi to deliver critical communication infrastructures expeditiously and cost effectively. In the West, these technologies are usually considered access mechanisms, yet in developing countries, they have the potential to serve as low-cost, multimedia backbone infrastructures leapfrogging over traditional land-based fiber and copper backbones. Community initiatives are eschewing the cost and complexity of deploying traditional wired infrastructures in favor of wireless broadband projects, but often face barriers not grounded in technology but in economic, institutional, and legal realms. For example, impediments to wireless broadband deployment include legacy regulations, resistance by incumbent telecommunications providers, restrictive intellectual property arrangements, and institutional and cultural barriers to participation in wireless standards development. To what extent can government policies ameliorate these problems and accelerate wireless broadband deployment? What is the appropriate role for private industry? What even counts as a successful broadband wireless infrastructure when meaningful access requires more than technical architecture alone? This international panel of policy-makers, scholars, and activists has four broad objectives:
• Assess the promises and limitations of wireless broadband architectures in the developing world.
• Share real-world case studies of wireless broadband projects.
• Examine possible roles for governments, communities, vendors, NGOs, and international development agencies.
• Attempt to situate the promise of broadband wireless within the larger conceptual framework of the A2K movement.
The following are some questions this panel might consider:
Speakers: Susan Sell, Fleur Claessens, Dalindyebo Shabalala,
Daniel Kevles
Moderator: Andrea Glorioso
Panel Description:
Agriculture, aquaculture, horticulture and/or other farming-related activities are the backbone of many communities throughout the developed and developing world. Productivity in these fields is obviously crucial to people in rural areas, but agricultural issues also affect urban dwellers and indeed entire populations. Agriculture is fundamentally linked to economic stability, social development, food security and human health. Lives and livelihoods depend upon access to agricultural knowledge.
Over the last several decades, intellectual property rights (IPRs) have begun to influence the agricultural sector in new and unprecedented ways. Bio and nano technological innovations have opened revolutionary possibilities, from disease-, drought- and insect- resistant crops to nutritionally enhanced foods and plant-based vaccines. Along with these new technologies have come new rights regimes, stake holders and uncertainties. IPRs over seeds and other products are clashing with classic property rights over land. Due to industrial concentration and economic integration, some stand to gain more than others from these advances. Intellectual property standard setting has played a significant role in this process. Access and benefit sharing is the subject of contentious debate in various forums.
As nations struggle to address genetically modified crop (GMC)-related issues within their own particular economic, social and political contexts, they are increasingly influenced by norms and obligations established in international treaties that often serve diverse interests both inside and outside of the agricultural sector (the WTO/TRIPS, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the ‘International Seed Treaty’ amongst others).
Questions to be cosidered by the panel include:
Speakers: Guy Pessach, Magdy Nagi, Denise Nicholson, Paul Gerhardt,
Glenn Otis Brown
Moderator: Teresa Hackett
Panel Description:
Cultural memory is a political-social construction about the cultural and historical past and present of communities that influences people's life-hoods, beliefs and well-being as well as the emergence of ideologies. Communities create several memory institutions to canonize elements of their culture, including archives.
Until the digital era, cultural preservation had been mostly static in terms of the traditional memory institutions that were involved in cultural preservation as well as in terms of the types and canons of materials that were preserved. Digitized cultural preservation represents a shift toward a dynamic, participatory model. Commercial (e.g. Google) civic-engaged (e.g. the Internet Archive), state financed institutions (e.g. libraries) and individuals are involved in cultural preservation and cultural retrieval, however the relationship between their activities, collections is not transparent at the moment.
These transformations call for attention what could be broadly defined as the political economy of future's past: the mechanisms, frameworks and dynamics that shape and influence cultural retrieval and the landscaping of culture and history in digital domains.
In particular the panel aims to examine the role of commercial archives in digitized cultural retrieval and their relationship to traditional memory institutions in constructing the cultural memory of the global community. After delineating the new social conditions for digitized cultural preservation, the panel will critically examine the manners in which law and copyright law in particular, regulate cultural preservation activities.
Speakers: Mira Sundara Rajan, Titilayo Akinsanmi, Saskia Harmsen,
Andrew Rens, Geidy Lung
Moderator: Jack Lerner
Panel Description:
Both e-learning and distance education play large and important roles in improving access to knowledge. New and emerging technologies have the potential to allow educators to reach individuals and communities in numbers and in manners that were previously unimaginable, even in the midst of great poverty. Public-private partnerships between corporations, NGOs, and government officials are helping to bridge the technological obstacles to the spread of knowledge and educators are beginning to take advantage of these routes of information flow. Unfortunately, capacity without content is useless; obstacles to development of information and limitations on the distribution of that information must be addressed simultaneously with issues of technological and political capacity.
The road blocks to the development of robust e-education programs are many. First, there are institutional roadblocks. One of the most prominent of these is undeveloped or nonexistent physical infrastructure. Many local schools do not have computers, and many students have no access to them either. Even the most basic network infrastructure – the wires, cables, towers, and transmitters of intra- and inter-nets – may be lacking. The commitment of local institutions may be another institutional roadblock. The development of e-education programs may seem an unaffordable expense. Indeed, decision makers are often simply unaware of the benefits of e-education.
A second set of roadblocks are abstract and mostly external to educational institutions. They stem from protections of intellectual property and related rights. These include copyright laws and related exceptions and limitations, as well as broadcast regulations and rules protecting digital rights management measures.
This panel will focus on both sets of roadblocks, as they work in conjunction with one another to block access to e-education. The panel will examine the specific ways in which both institutional infrastructure and legal regimes currently impact e-educators and their students. We will also explore the potential options for improving access, which might include fostering public-private partnerships to build infrastructure and amending existing exceptions and limitations to increase access to content.
Speakers: Chris Armbruster, Subbia Arunachalam, Juan Carlos
De Martin, Sibusiso Sibisi, Larry Peiperl
Moderator: Dan Burk
Panel Description:
Scientific research in the modern era is often expensive, collaborative, multinational, and data intensive. Disseminating the results of this research often results in widespread social benefits, but it poses significant legal challenges. At a basic level, different countries' domestic legal regimes offer different levels of protection for databases of information. It is unlikely that intellectual property law, by itself, can be helpful here. Database-specific laws vary widely; for example, the European Union offers database protection as a separate system, but the United States does not. But even database-specific protection cannot address the needs of scientific information.
Research is often funded by private industry or through after the fact returns on intellectual property licenses, which may generate additional constraints on the distribution of the results. Much research, not just in the United States (through the NSF and NIH and other agencies) but in the world, is government funded. Does government funding carry with it an obligation to make the results accessible? How are these obligations changed for research which is funded through both public and private sources? Do the domestic norms of open access to government funded research translate to norms of international sharing of knowledge?
Numerous social movements are stepping in to facilitate this process. Some organize funding for research; some work to reduce the costs associated with the publication and dissemination of the research; some produce the tools and the communications networks and the databases to share the final results. Are these movements succeeding because or in spite of the ambiguous legal context for scientific information? What can be done to facilitate their efforts?
Questions to be discussed by the panel include: