Brief Hiatus – Finals Week

My friends, I bid you farewell for a days – I now go to crawl into a cave with my books and stuff my head for the final exams of my first semester of PhD training. Drop me a line in an email – it will help keep me awake .

ad hoc Friday #3: Copyright and Copyleft – A Conflict or Coexistence?

I have been making the argument that the creative commons ShareAlike and other licenses are in fact different than copyright licenses and their intellectual property cousins, patents. I want to be specific in defining my approach: ShareAlike and other forms of the CC licenses resemble copyright laws in the sense that they are written in legal jargon consistent with the US constitution – which gives congress permission to grant rights to originators – and US law. These licenses do grant rights to the originators, but emphasize the sharing and distribution of ideas. Traditional copyrights and patents, etc primarily focus on the restriction of distribution, CC focuses on freeing distribution. Were these licenses already in existence in other realms of intellectual property (copyright, trademarks, patents, etc) there would have been no need to develop them. They were developed in response to the criminalization of the online culture of sharing permitting individuals to have access to free licensing of creative efforts by granting express blanket permissions to all users. I don’t want to be too technical here, because my purpose is not to debate the details of IP in its myriad forms, but to discuss the benefits or problems of a worldwide culture of sharing made possible by the Internet and the limits of this sharing.

The core questions are quite straightforward:

• Is sharing fundamentally better than the alternative?
• What are the limits of sharing?
• Should art, science, inventions, services, etc. become the property of the commons? What should not be considered a part?
• Should the commons become more global? Is it only effective locally? Where is the balance?
• Cui Bouno? Who benefits? What are the benefits? How can we extend these benefits universally?
• What are the shortcomings? How do we manage these failings? What institutions/apparatuses need to be innovated? What is already in existence? Do existing infrastructures need to be modified?
• As we share, we become more transparent. What data should not be shared? Is full transparency desirable/possible? Should we expect full disclosure from politicians, businessmen, etc?

This discussion in comments here or on the ad hoc Friday Google Wave:

h2oneuron at googlewave dot com

Just ask to join the discussion, and I’ll put you on the Wave.

Open Source vs Patent System #2

…a patent system is more desirable for the protection of originators and inventors than a lack of one.

From reading my recent post, you might be tempted to think that I am anti-patent; on the contrary, I am pro-creativity and pro-sharing. I think that a patent system is more desirable for the protection of originators and inventors than a lack of one, but I am critical of the current system and its abuses. My contention is that the patent system as it currently stands is mired in backlog, litigation, and stifles real innovation and creativity. Additionally, I think that if you read my last post, you would see a link desert: I apologize for not taking the time to cite experts in my pursuit of knowledge, since this may have prevented you from seeing for yourself.

Patent Trolls

It seems as though the current patent system has become a mill for mass-producing intellectual property (a problem for the little guy) for the few and its true effectiveness is mostly restricted to those who have the capacity to leverage action through their legal apparatuses. Those who are startups with less cash on hand end up taking out large loans hoping that they will be able someday to pay them back with the return on their patents. It is especially an issue in software development and use of online tools: there is greater difficulty finding and establishing novelty in the Internet age. Due to the fact that the internet moves much faster than other human endeavors and that the culture of sharing is the de facto rule of law online, origination becomes even more difficult to establish. Most patent reviewers are overworked and underpaid which means that unless you have a more persuasive legal team – or do your patent applications in a place more favorable to your kind of patent – you have some serious barriers to obtaining and using your intellectual property.

Creative Commons License

On the other hand, a creative commons license deals away with a lot of this: it is free, attribution is paramount, licensing is almost unlimited, and money is taken out of the picture almost altogether. There are many options to your distribution of an idea, but most permit commercial use by others. With the removal of exclusive commercial use from the equation, the cost of the legal protection falls to almost zero while the ability to regain any of those costs depends completely on the overall benefit the creative project has for the market/community at large. The best products survive, rather than the most legally protected products.

Aside from an overall benefit to consumers in general, this is also better for markets in terms of the group-thinking that occurs between competitors: when innovators see what other competitors are doing, they innovate more rapidly. This leads to more competitors innovating more ideas, more ways of generating revenue with the same tools or sets of tools. This then increases market diversity, robustness, resilience, and creativity. It also means that your ability to leverage money is not as much a factor in deciding whether your idea “wins” or not – your success becomes more dependent on the product and the benefit it has for the market than on your ability to manage money.

CC and the Money

So how does one go about making money in a creative commons system?

This is the great part: there is no limitation on commercial use (unless the individual has specified it), only a limitation that the licensee cannot sell/patent the part that is already under the CC license. In short, you can do what you want, as long as you attribute the originator. That simple.

I know that open sourcing and creative commons licensing is not a silver bullet. Nevertheless, I think it is simply the best set of solutions that have been proposed. I am not expert in patents, intellectual property, or the production of inventions; however, as a scientist, I do understand the importance and necessity of origination and sharing/debating ideas. Without origination, no credit can be given where it is due; without openness, no real innovation can take place either.

More from IP and Open Source expert Lawrence Lessig (here, here, and here)

Stay tuned – this week’s ad hoc Friday will incorporate many of these ideas.

Rick Smith

@h2oindio

Open Sourcing vs. Patenting

Sharing

Open Source/Open Access

The fundamental concept behind open sourcing is access to, production of, and distribution of a project that is unrestricted and free. Openness does not imply that resources such as time, talents, and ATP (yes, I’m a biologist) are not expended – only that money (extrinsic motivators) be more or less taken out of the picture. In this sense, open sourcing is really all about developing common pool resources – resources that a group of individuals agrees to share, develop, and protect in a common fashion.

Openness does not imply that resources such as time, talents, and ATP are not expended – only that money be more or less taken out of the picture.

No commons is without rules: in fact, the most successful commons have very strong rules which the community agree to abide by. In the case of the traditional sense of free (read: “open source”) software, the GNU license is thought of as the core body of rules that users agree to abide by. Fundamentally, this set of rules is based on a philosophy that creativity and participation are renewable, unlimited resources which will be continually developed if there is sufficient trust.

Patents

The exact opposite philosophical approach is that of patenting. Patents assume that there is a shortage of 1) ideas, 2) altruistic, participatory behavior, 3) trustworthy use by others, and provide a means of protecting the resource for the 4) express monetary use (also limited) of that resource by one individual or organization. The obvious attraction to patents is the promise of monetary reward for the effective exploitation of a specific resource/piece of information in order to successfully compete in a free market (also driven by monetary value). Unfortunately, though patents fundamentally protect the rights of the originator, they tend to be prohibitively expensive to produce, license, and enforce. The allure is that once the patent is obtained, you will be able to recoup those costs by licensing or protected production.

Patents fundamentally protect the rights of the originator, but tend to be prohibitively expensive to produce, license, and enforce.

This whole system is based on a definition of economics that is inherently narrow – most people experience little or no intrinsic value (utility) from money; it is the definition of monetary value as an economic utility and its (current) universality that drive people to desire it. The very philosophy behind Open movements opposes this definition and identifies more intrinsic and meaningful sources of value/utility for individuals and organizations.

Conflict

My goal in describing the dichotomy between these two systems is not to diminish the importance of protecting intellectual property, only to identify that building walls does not build innovation, but rather causes stratification. Access to ideas enables people to disagree with them and propose alternative solutions. The access that academicians have to knowledge about the universe has not diminished the variety of ideas nor the proliferation of ways and means of doing things. On the contrary, the greater access academicians have to each other’s work(s) leads to greater debate and discussion which inherently leads to greater innovation and advancement of intellectual pursuits. This is the same with other intellectual property pursuits as greater access does not somehow diminish the development of ideas: when more people can share their ideas and debate them, greater work can be accomplished.

Caveats

The obvious caveat which the academic world has more or less dealt with is that of attribution: when a scientist proposes a theory and works on it, it becomes their unique property, though others have access to debate and or improve it. This is a subject open to much debate in the private sector: how to protect the originator of the idea/process etc. I want to address this in the next couple of posts, but here’s a quick spoiler: I think the solution is protection of attribution with full sharing of the data/product.

ad hoc Friday #2: Open Source Transit

There's got to be a better way...

Problem:

Anyone who has ever been just a little late for work knows the scenario that traps thousands of commuters every day – gridlock. Call it a traffic jam, sai che, or tráfico, the result is the same: you’ve just wasted 30 minutes of your life. New GPS modules enable you to avoid serious traffic, but are limited to the effectiveness and quality of the data your provider has access to. Additionally, your provider only has access to traffic data – this means that your computer may adjust the route according current conditions, but this does not include any information about the routes other motorists are using. In the end, you’ve got a pool of limited mobility, a pool that more often than not occurs for no apparent reason.

Diagnosis:

Traffic and transportation experts suggest that many of these “phantom” traffic jams are caused by the combined, spontaneous ripple effects of many small poor choices which add up to systemic blockage of traffic. Mathematical models suggest that these kinds of wave strongly resemble explosions: an initial event (or events), propagation, exhaustion of fuel, dispersal (more on the science of phantom jams here).

Treatment:

Some advocate installation of monitors in every vehicle to track vehicle positions and speeds, essentially government control of traffic. While these experts are well-intentioned, they underestimate the resistence and resentment the would occur in the public eye – no one wants to be controlled. Rather than create more bureaucracy and red tape, my proposition is to open the system up for the public to interact with. Create an open source transit system.

How would it work?

Routes, maps, and transit info posted online. Users contact each other and communicate desired info, creating a ridesharing network. This collection of online metadata allows understanding of not only traffic conditions (current methods) but also the actual routes that flow into and out of that pool of traffic. This enables a systems-level approach to traffic management, complete with stocks (traffic), inflows (route entry), outflows (destinations), and regulatory feedback loops. Apps (open source or proprietary) could then be developed more efficiently integrating waypoints and destinations, permitting cities to adapt traffic lanes to accomodate most common routes.

Not only does this encourage public and private organization to positively affect traffic, but it allows the public to independently choose more intelligent routes to their destination. Naturally, this system would only get better with the profusion of GPS and self-reported data. In addition, integration with current traffic data (stop light schedules/sensors, etc) enables an enhanced smart grid for traffic, permits more intelligent, dynamic urban design, and encourages public to be involved in alleviating gridlock, etc.

Now it’s your turn!

So let me know what you think – perhaps we can turn Los Angeles into a commuter’s paradise. If nothing else, you’ll be getting from point A to point B in a more informed fashion.

Thoughts on Practical Openness

I usually write about open source from a theoretical rather than a practical perspective. This is partially because I am still a student, and do not want to give the impression that I have more experience than I actually do. In some ways, this is a form of humility which conveys my recognition that I am relatively ignorant of the world. However, it is often the case that this humility may be construed as ignorance – not that I’m holding back, but more that I simply do not know the subject matter at hand. I want to jot down (while it’s still fresh in my mind) some thoughts on the practical aspects of transparency, access, and participation – the core foundations of open sourcing.

Transparency is professing, expressing what is in our heads and giving others a look. This requires a relatively thick skin, and an honest recognition that we know very little. For myself, I frequent share everything I can about science and reveal all within my power and the power of those listening. Naturally, there are limits, but they are the exception not the rule: to posses and not share is to horde, and I am no horder.

Access refers to allowance, permission – a lack of limitations. I have found that access depends on personal understanding (scientific knowledge, philosophical grasp, language, etc) and your specific skillset. For example, though the open source programming movement is open to anyone (transparency) I do not yet have full access to contribution in Firefox because I do not possess the skillset necessary to do so. Were the requirement and English or Chinese language requirement, I’d have little difficulty. Access, in this sense depends on a combination of personal effort and legal freedoms – the counter example being Windows, were a competent programmer has the language skills necessary, but lacks the legal access to contribute.

Participation is my favorite part, and seems to be dependent on one’s social connections. It really means getting outside yourself, getting to know others and doing things that help others (perhaps in addition to oneself). Participation/service is ennobling, and whether the effect is neurological (limbic stimulation) or something more, it helps people be better. I love collaboration in the laboratory because every researcher possess different skills and everyone’s contribution helps in discovery of the new. Collaboration in and out of the classroom also collectively boosts the group’s performance and understanding of key concepts.

I know that I don’t have much experience outside of my training in molecular biology, genetics, Chinese, and service, nevertheless I have had experience with the principles of open sourcing of ideas and it’s opposite. I believe that the former is superior in every way – democratization can only serve to continue to promote itself and the end result, in my opinion, will be a culture of shared vision and shared responsibility.

Kickstarter: A Funding Source for Open Source?

Two weeks ago, I was doing some background research on an open source project called CandyFab, and stumbled across Kickstarter.com. At first, I thought it was just another social networking gimmick, but it’s not.

Kickstarter is a community-driven microfunding project for entrepreneurs, freelancers, and dreamers from all walks of life. Only one requirement to getting funding for your pie-in-the-sky idea: you have to be invited to post your pitch. You aren’t able to even start without an invite – just like the original GMail or Google Wave. Once someone sends you an invite, you post your project(s) on a searchable, social-media driven message board and the community has the opportunity to see and pledge money to your project.

After you’ve set up your project and established a timeline for funding, your project may now be “pledged” to. People interested in funding your project do so through an Amazon.com account (all Amazon.com’s legal restrictions apply). If you don’t get enough pledges by your deadline, you don’t get the money – no exceptions. If you have already met your pledge goal, there is no funding limit until the deadline is reached.

Kickstarter maintains itself through a 5% revenue sharing (they get 5% of your pledges, so factor that into your pledge goal calculations). The system is more or less based on community trust. If there is sufficient trust that you will put out on your claim, you get funding; if there is enough demand for your idea, you get funding. The community also maintains integrity via public pledging – there is no anonymity here. Just like any venture, successful Kickstartees occasionally give out incentives (free stuff for the first X pledges, pledges over $X get special item X) to encourage greater participation and trust. Their website is a minimalist, flawless work of design and is well worth the visit. In addition to the social network involved in Kickstater itself, you or your backers may place a pledge widget on a website, and thus drive more traffic to your pledge drive – anybody anywhere may fund your project, provided they set up an Amazon.com account.

The greatest part is – there’s no limit to the scope, scale, or type of project. Open sourcers who previously produced their works without any funding may rejoice; now your creative idea has the potential to put food on the table, and you perform even better because you are accountable to your backers to put that beautiful Creative Commons license on it.

What this means for open source projects is simple: open source does not preclude you from supporting yourself financially on the product you are producing or want to produce. Projects range from whimsical to revolutionary and practical, and there’s no limit to what the community may want.

ad hoc Friday!

A new project on OpenSourced! ad hoc Friday involves an open call to all readers to add in ideas on a topic du jour and encourages fleshing out of ideas and foundations of open/crowd sourcing in a community-driven fashion. The goal is to use this to build a wiki (or dare I say it – Google Wave) of community ideas regarding the structure of Open Sourcing and how best to pursue it, if at all.

adhoc Friday #1: Distributed Production

Citizen galatic exploration at Galaxyzoo.org

The advent of the web and social media has brought with them the rise of distributed production as manifested in open source programming, citizen science, crowdsourcing of creativity, rise of the professional-amateur, and distributed manufacturing projects. These ah-hoc ventures have grown from their nascent roots to full-blown endeavors. Despite their occasion hiccups, these projects have been successful.  There’s no denying the great promise: thousands of curious and passionate individuals working together to get a job done whose participation is motivated almost completely by the human urge to create and participate. An untapped public waits to learn and share everything they can about the world around them. The public here does not include everybody – even the open source programming community is small – but each project appeals to a sizeable community/crowd nonetheless. Of course, the goal is to extend these endeavors to all interested individuals with minimal expenditure and maximum results.

The minimal expenditure is a relatively simple issue: most projects are driven by the inherent open format of the internet and provide a platform for citizen participation that is cheap, accessible, and (mostly) transparent. The results are more difficult to gauge, but nothing a little bit of computational magic cannot solve (read: I’m not going to discuss it here). The biggest challenge is choosing projects of an appropriate scale – or breaking large ones down into more manageable chunks – and user-friendliness that interested lay may participate easily with little or no training, while simultaneously sparking the desire to engage.

In terms of citizen science, these projects are easily envisioned for planetary science or birdwatching (links needed) – people dealing with stuff that can be understood with basic human intuition. Even the galaxy zoo project allows individuals interested in participating to screen through thousands of very simple pictures and to distinguish between galaxies in a very intuitive way. Life science projects – particularly those that deal with molecular and cellular biology – will be more difficult as they require more specialized training and understanding in abstract and often counter-intuitive models in order participate in the simplest experiments. In order to make these projects amenable for lay researchers, this will require visually meaningful presentation of data, access to the academic community, and especially open access to primary and review literature on the systems involved which are often obscure.

Despite the obvious difficulties, the benefits are clear: large scale resolution of highly complex problems in a cheap, efficient manner that maintains the public integrity of public science.

Some important issues need to be worked out – not just for citizen science, but also for distributed production as a whole. Please feel free to comment on solutions to these problems:

1. Attribution – Everyone who is involved wants recognition. If we distributed the means of producing academic research, scientists would object, as they would be more likely to “get scooped” in their research.
2. Funding – Where does the money come from? Where/to whom does it go? No-one wants to fund a “going nowhere” project, but without a little risk, there’s not likely to be any success.
3. Incentives – Cui bono? Who benefits? And how? One aspect of this involves the balancing of intrinsic incentives (community, participation, passion, recognition) with extrinsic benefits (money, goods, services, etc).
4. Structure – Should these projects be well-organized and structured, or ad hoc, done with little planning or organization? How should the rules be established?

If I were to summarize my own thoughts/opinions, I believe that a model similar to the Creative Commons licensing needs to be followed so that everyone can have attribution for what they’ve done. I think micro-funding (similar to the micro credit model) on a per-project basis would be advantageous. I think that the organization should strive to reduce most if not all extrinsic motivations in favor of more intrinsic one based off the human need for creative participation (read: game theory). Finally, I think that organizations should be more or less completely (task forces) ad hoc, but establish clear rules for participation for the duration of the organization’s existence.

I look forward to the discussion here, on facebook, or twitter.

Twitter: @h2oindio

Before We Have OpenSource, Things Just Need to be Open!

Contributed by:

Jonathon Howard, author of Di Mortui Sunt

I haven’t contributed anything to the blog recently, for several reasons, but the primary reason is that it’s hard to write about something that has yet to happen.  While the world of software has been dealing with opensource for years the rest of the world continues to operate on a need-to-know or even a refuse-to-tell basis.  Only recently have writers begun to look at opensource as a viable option for their own works, Cory Doctorow the most popular author who has done so.  Traditional businesses and the government though have failed to see the benefits of opening themselves to the public; in fact, they continue to operate under the greatest secrecy and fight tooth-and-nail to maintain that secrecy.  The worst by far are government agencies, and publicly funded institutions that take taxpayers money to fund studies, research, experiments, and projects and then try to profit from the findings, or prevent their release to the general population.

So, before we can have Opensource institutions, public or private, we must first fight to make sure that we have open and transparent institutions.  There are a number of ways to do this; the best as always is to become personally involved.  I don’t merely mean that you should write to some official or vote, those are easy, I’d go as far as saying that those are duties we all have as citizens.  Instead, I’m advocating that you buy ownership in the companies whose products you use, and then you vote with those shares.  I’m telling you to find out the communication policies for the company you work for and then make sure they’re followed and push for more transparency.  I’d say it is a good idea to find out what it is your local government is doing, find out how they decide legislation, negotiate contracts, and then make sure that they’re open to the public, so that the public can see what decisions are being made and who makes them.  I’m advocating you to find out about the Freedom of Information Act and to use it, and to look into Sunshine laws and the organizations that support them.  Demand from your State and Federal officials that any research, studies, projects, etc. that are funded by the taxpayer are available to the taxpayer!  The state of Oregon for awhile was trying to copyright their constitution to control how and why it was disseminated, or Santa Clara county trying to charge a quarter of a million dollars and signing a non-disclosure act for a data rich map called a geographic information system that was paid for by tax payers (more on that here)!

Before we can move towards crowdsourced, opensourced solutions to the world’s problems we need access to all the information and we’re not going to get that if the institutions that surround us hide everything behind high walls!

Resources:

Wired’s How-to Wiki on Open Government Data

The Sunlight Foundation

National Freedom of Information Coalition

Your local government’s webpage

Your State’s legislative and executive webpages

Your Federal officials’ webpages (find it here and here)

Shareholder Voting Rights and the Debate over Expanding Them

Want to contribute? Email h2oneuron at gmail dot com