 Hi, everybody. I wanted to talk about innovation today, but especially in the context of ICT Qatar, which is the regulator here, I wanted to talk about the sort of whole ecosystem that I think is really important. And I started my career. I look a little younger than I am probably. I started before the Internet was around. I was in mainstream media. I was in television motion pictures. And I worked very closely with the Japanese regulator and with the Japanese telephone companies. And we went through a period where there was a huge struggle when we were building the Internet. And we thought the Internet and openness looked like a huge threat on the institutions that we had. It looked like a huge threat on innovation. And then professors and lots of academics had this vision of this chaos and the disaster that was coming with the Internet. And as we built the first Internet service providers and we built the Internet, we realized that it wasn't actually the end of the world, but it was the beginning of a whole new kind of innovation. We still have all of the traditional forms of innovation. We still have newspapers. We still have television. The telephone company in Japan is stronger than ever. And so one of the things I would like to say, having come from Japan, having worked with the Japanese telephone company and the regulators, having gone through this open process, we came out with all of the players, except for some of the very specific players that built certain pieces. Generally speaking, as an economy and as a telecommunications industry, we came out much stronger and much more globally competitive than ever before. I noticed that the Wi-Fi in the hotel is run by Dokomo, which is a Japanese mobile phone operator. I didn't realize that they would even be here. But it shows that open standards allow companies to be globally competitive. Anyway, I wanted to put that in the context. I know I saw the ITU logo on the ICT Qatar website and I want to make sure I have very good friends at ITU. And it's a good institution, but I want to kind of compare ITU-style innovation, first of all, with Internet-style innovation. So I'm an Internet guy, just so I want to be fully disclosed. Internet is almost a kind of philosophy or way of life, which is slightly different than the way of life before the Internet. But the traditional style of innovation was you would get large governments, large companies, large telephone companies, and they were higher experts with PhDs and accreditation and approvals. And they would go to ITU or similar intergovernmental agencies. And they would discuss and discuss and discuss all of the possible problems that could happen, all of the opportunities. And you create these huge specifications that are meters high. And I've seen them. I've carried them before. They're very heavy. And what happens is that no one person would ever be able to read these specifications. They're so big. And then what happens is big companies then take these R&D labs and convert them into code, right? It's an amazing process. If you look at 3G, if you look at a lot of infrastructure we have today, what it is, is this combination of experts, intergovernmental agencies, negotiations, specifications, large contractors that then create systems like the 3G network that we pay when we use our phones. And they come back to the government and large companies as fees and taxes, right? This is a traditional system of IT innovation. What happened when we had the internet was, sorry if this makes you seasick, that's the last spin we have. So internet innovation is very different. So internet innovation started out when we started connecting with everyone. And it's flat. The big companies, the little companies, the noisy people who work on Firefox, all of us are all on the internet, on the mailing list with teenagers and we're talking about this stuff all the time. And no one really has that much power over everyone else. And it's an iterative process. It's a chaotic process. And it's a little bit scary for people who are used to sitting at a desk, sitting at a round table with only authorized experts, right? Because anyone can participate. And what happens is that because of that we created this thing called the stack. Now, the technical people will say that this, my stack is a little bit too simplified. But let me describe this architecture because this is really, really important in understanding the internet. What the internet is built on is built on layers. And each layer of the internet, if you split this off, you might have ethernet at the bottom, TCPIP, these are all protocols. And there are a couple of key functions about the protocols. One, they promote interoperability. So interoperability, I don't know, everyone in the Arab world is much younger than in Japan. So you might not remember when the Macintosh and the PC didn't connect to each other. And you had to buy software, Banyan Vines, Novel Networks. And you couldn't print stuff across the networks. But when I first downloaded TCPIP for the Mac, or when it was first installed on Windows, suddenly all the computers in your office could talk to each other. And you didn't have to pay for the software. You didn't have to pay for software engineers. Those software, those network engineers are gone. Actually, they're doing more interesting work. They didn't disappear. And when the World Wide Web came out, I remember when the first browsers came out, everyone said, why do we need this browser? We already have university databases that we can log in, we can connect. We don't need all of this simplified thing. But what happened was by making it so that anyone, the standard for the web was so simple that I could, after 15 minutes, make my own website by lowering that friction, creating an interoperable standard so all the content on the net could blink to each other. Suddenly you allowed browsers to emerge and you created things like Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon. And each of these layers creates an explosion of innovation. And a couple of key things about this explosion of innovation is that there's no central designer. Each person who created, or the groups of people who created Ethernet, TCPIP, the web, they didn't try to predict every problem or every opportunity. What they did was they tried to create a tool that could be used for many things, that connected things together. There's a great saying, small pieces loosely joined. Most of the things, the first browsers, the first FTP servers, the first clients, they're built by little teams of two or three people connecting together using open standards. And that can happen because the specifications are very small. And no one is trying to control everything. Everyone's trying to build something and connect it to the network. I would call it open innovation because anyone can innovate without asking permission. This is also very important because as the regulator, you have the ability, for instance, in the early days of the Internet, you couldn't connect something to the phone line unless it was approved by the local authorities. And that prevented people from connecting bad stuff to the network. But it also prevented people from innovating. And I used to run InfoSeek Japan. And when we were running this, we created a search engine. Well, if Google were prevented from creating a competing service, then we would still be here. The net would probably be a little less smart. Google tried to sell us their algorithm for a million dollars and we told them to go away. So they came and they competed with us, right? And they won. But the other important thing about the stack by allowing this interoperability, this competition, is it continuously increases the quality and lowers the cost. And lowering cost is also a very, very important part of innovation because the lower the cost of innovation, the lower the cost of failure, the lower the cost of failure, the lower the cost of investment. And as a venture capitalist, which is the other thing that I do, I can place many more bets. So it only cost Google several thousand dollars to build their first system. If the Japanese telephone company had used that big system and negotiated with the ITU to develop a search engine, it probably would have cost millions of dollars and taken decades. I will argue that Creative Commons is the next layer on the stack. Because what's happened is each layer becomes open. It becomes very low cost. So in the old days, when the Al Jazeera wanted to work with NHK, they would go to Ken and they'd sit around and sip champagne and they would say, oh, I want to mix your documentary with my documentary. And they would fly in the lawyers in first class. And the lawyers would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars negotiating a contract so that the IP rights would be cleared, right? And $100,000 for a $5 million joint production between Al Jazeera and NHK, that's not that much transaction cost, that's fine. But now, suddenly, we have the ability to connect everyone on the internet. For me to connect with a student in Qatar, a teacher in Croatia, now a $5,000 legal bill to clear the rights, to come up with a contract suddenly is a lot of money. And so what's happened is this stack has lowered the cost of collaboration and the lower the cost of dissemination of information so much that now the substantial cost has become the legal fees. And just as we got rid of the network engineers and we got rid of the content management systems, we have to get rid of the lawyers. And again, I will say, just for to, on the lawyer's side, clearing rights is one of the most boring things a lawyer can do. It's grunt work. We're going to move the lawyers on to more interesting work. But the other thing is just as each layer, like the World Wide Web, created an explosion of innovation that no one could have imagined, I think that creating an open layer of access content layer will create an explosion of innovation on the content layer and explosion of knowledge and we'll hear about science and all these amazing things that are going on in entertainment, things that we can't even imagine. And that's the important thing that we can't imagine. Like if I'm a venture capitalist, somebody came to me and said, I'm going to make a wiki, anyone can edit it, it's going to be better than Encyclopedia Britannica. I would say, good luck, I'm not giving you my money. But the good thing is with open source, you don't have to give the guys the money, they can go ahead and do it because the cost of innovation is so low. Similarly, once all of this is unlocked, you don't have to sit around and approve every single teacher's idea about collaboration because they can go ahead and do it. And in hindsight, the web, Wikipedia, most of the great stuff that's happened on the internet, Skype, they're only interesting in hindsight. It's hard to predict. So the thing about innovation also is about openness and open access is you want to allow all kinds of things to happen. And again, it's hard when you're in control because you have to get used to being out of control. I'm going to skip this section, but these are the different entities that run the different layers. I'm going to speak quickly to creative comments, because some of you may not know it. We'll have some more examples. But one last thing I'll say, because I think Chris is going to talk more about open source. What's happening is that as you also lower the cost of collaboration, lower the cost of interaction, you create the ability to have open source software because it used to be that you had to convene all these people together. The stack is another thing that empowers this. Again, the thing that added benefit is the addition to the telecommunication cost being low. As you get open source software, the whole package becomes cheaper. So again, Google model, they use so much open source software, they just connected to the internet at Stanford and for thousand dollars they could compete. And again, it would have cost millions of dollars. Open source is a really important element of that. An open video is another area. They think there was a question earlier about HTML5 and open video, but this is also one of the things that until recently was sort of a second class citizen on the internet, but now because the internet evolves has become a major part of the open internet. And I'll just give you a few examples of creative comments. And I think many of you may not know what creative commons is. So creative commons, we looked at and copyright is very tricky. Copyright was originally designed for companies to prevent other companies from exploiting each other. Copyright was designed for people who have lawyers. The thing about it is that the internet, as we started using it, now affects every human being, every person. And it's not very well designed. So one way of thinking about creative commons is a user is copyright law. It allows copyright law to be used without lawyers. It's like we're now able to connect computers, networks without network software engineers. And what we did was we went through and we said, okay, let's look at the different ways, decisions people want to make about copyright. Well, one thing is most people want attribution, not everyone, but most people want it so that if you use my photograph, I get the attribution, they say the photograph came from Joey. The other one is a question called share alike. So this is if you use my photograph and make a Arabic version, none of it with a dish dash on, I get to use it too in my book. That's a good question because, for instance, if it's going to go on Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera has a copyright on some of their programs, and maybe they can't share it back. So by putting this restriction on, you prevent certain people from using your works. On the other hand, if you put that restriction on, you can make sure that anything that's created back. It's a little bit tricky, and I'll explain a little bit later. For instance, Wikipedia uses this to make sure that anything that's used, created using Wikipedia content is also contributed back into the commons. The other one, two-thirds, I think, of our licenses are still non-commercial, which means that they have a restriction to prevent people from using your works for commercial use. That's two-thirds still, right? Is that right? Around two-thirds. We're trying to make it less because we'd like to have things less restricted. And then the last one is no derivatives. So documentary producers, other people sometimes don't want you to make modifications. Maybe Eric doesn't want me to put a mustache on Diane's picture. So then you put this no derivatives. No derivatives also has a lot of problems because, for instance, translation is a derivative work. So if you want your work freely translated, you want not to put this restriction on. But anyway, these are the choices. And when you put these together in a combination, you end up with six different licenses. And so if you go to our website, or if you go to Flickr, or if you go to Vimeo, many of our sites that support Creative Commons, you answer these questions. It gives you a little icon that shows you the license. It gives you a legal document that's translated into 62 jurisdictions right now, hopefully soon, in Arabic and Qatar. And the local lawyers and judges can read what you mean in legalese. So we have the icons so that people can read it. And then we have the legal documents so lawyers and judges can read it. And more importantly, or just as important, we have metadata so that the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and all the different service providers can also understand what the copyright is. Just a few examples. So Wikipedia I mentioned is using a Creative Commons license. Until last year, they didn't use a Creative Commons license. And this is important because they created Wikipedia before we had Creative Commons. They had a very similar license to Creative Commons share alike. It was called GFDL. And it said you could do whatever you want with Wikipedia, but you have to share the results under the same license. And this is technical, but it's very important. I want you to think about this. So there are many educational sites like Connections and Khan. And they have a Creative Commons share alike license. It says you can do whatever you want with our work. You have to share it back on the same license. But there are two different licenses. So if you took Creative Commons work, you can't mix it with this work because the result is not one of the two licenses. It's like having two different religions where you can't get married or it has two different parts islands of work that can't be mixed. It's like having two Internet. It's like saying send me email on something like the Internet. That doesn't work, right? You have to have one thing. And this is where Creative Commons sounds a little bit imperialistic, sounds a little bit pushy. But I have to go around and kill every competitor to Creative Commons just in the same way that we had to kill all the different things that try to fork off the Internet because you don't want five Internet. You want one Internet. Instant Messenger sucks. The reason Instant Messenger sucks is because Yahoo can't send messages to MSN can't send messages to Skype. Now, this is a disaster, right? And we can't allow that to happen in the content space. That's interoperability is key because not only does it lower friction, it's almost like a kind of pollution. If you start creating what we call vanity licenses, if you allow countries like Japan, for instance, have created their own version of this thing, they call it open, they call it free. But they make a license that's like Creative Commons but not. And then what happens is you have to read those agreements, so that doubles the lawyer's time. But more importantly, you can't mix the stuff together. So it's really important to understand and the lawyers don't get this, many of them, because lawyers are used to doing everything by hand, like the software guys. You say, oh, I'll connect your Mac in your PC. Oh, I'll connect your Mac in your PC too. That's not, that's not scalable. What we're trying to do is trying to create one open standard. I'm pushing on this because it's very important because now that it's becoming a fad and very popular to talk about open, you also have to talk about interoperability. And interoperability, just like TCPIP and the web, you want to, you know, and we'll talk to Mitchell, you fight like crazy to try to come to a consensus around what's going to be an HTML. You have to have one global conversation, and it may get kind of tough at times, but you have to come to a conclusion of one standard. And Wikipedia, I'm doing Creative Commons and has helped with that. And we can talk about this more, but I really want to stress that we don't want to go off and create lots of forks. So we already talked about Al Jazeera. They are still our best example of a broadcast using a Creative Commons license. We're very proud of Al Jazeera. The White House, on the other hand also, uses Creative Commons license for stuff uploaded. I heard that when Al Jazeera visited the White House, they talked about Creative Commons and that was their thing. That was cool. Recently, the New Zealand government, and this I really think that the government here should take a look at this because this is very great stuff. The Australians, many countries are starting to do this, but they are saying open access is a key part of transparency and involving the citizens. They are using a Creative Commons license for all of the government creative works or they're recommending this. This kind of initiative is happening all over the world and especially in places where it's not a default. And the last thing that I'll give an example of and we'll talk about some other examples in science, although Creative Commons started out with the six basic licenses, which I think covered the six basic needs of traditional creative people. We also found that this three layer sandwich that we make, which is the human readable deed, the lawyer readable deed and a technology and our ability to bring people from 100 countries together to have a discussion to come up with a consensus. This actually works in all different fields like patents and other things. Recently there's a group called Europeana, which is like a network of libraries and cultural heritage institutions in Europe. And what they decided was they were trying to put all of their works, the public domain works, the public domain works that have no known copyright to make them available online. And they were trying to create some kind of notation to mark their works as no known copyright. And Diane and our team went over there and said, well, we are already working on something like this. We don't want to create proliferation. We want to make sure that Flickr and Google and Yahoo only have to look for one mark to find all the public domain work in the world. We had long negotiations with them and we created this mark here, which is the public domain mark. We just launched it. But Europeana, this is a great thing. And again about licensed proliferation is that they dumped the work that they were doing and adopted our standard. And we're trying to push this as a standard. And this is a very useful standard because a lot of old work are in our museums and they're actually public domain. And this is where also I want to explain it's not all about lawyers because when you make something, say, public domain, no known copyright, anyone can use it without any restriction. But we've added this thing that we're asking. We allow. And what are we calling it now again? Not norms, but use guidelines. So what we're doing is we're adding use guidelines along the work. So if you're a museum and you have all of these public domain works and you want to scan them all and you want to make them available on the internet, but you want some credit for the fact that you did all of this work. So legally, somebody using something with a public domain mark doesn't have to give the library or the museum credit. But the guidelines are saying, oh, please give this credit where you can. And I think this is also very important. People ask us how often does Creative Commons work tested in court? That's not the important thing is how often do people understand what you want? How often do people do what you want? And so in that sense, this is a very important initiative for us because we're saying, give up all of your legal rights, but tell us what you would like us to do. And let's ask the community to follow those rules. And so this is an area that we're working on. And I think especially as if you're thinking about the educational materials here and the cultural heritage of the Middle East, I think Creative Commons is a great license to use for newly created works that have copyright. But for stuff that's no longer in copyright, we should really think about these kinds of marks. And we're working in other areas. And I think John Wilbanks will talk about patents. But I wanted to give you an example that we're not working with just the core licenses. But thank you very much. That's basically the end. And I think that do I have time for questions? Do I just point to maybe whoever has the mic? Can you guys hear me? OK, great. I have, first of all, I'd like to thank Mr. Ito and Miss Baker. Really great talks. I have about nine questions for you as the guy sitting next to me can attest to. But in the spirit of openness for everybody else, I restrict myself to two. The first is the first is a bit more specific. And it is that you spoke of broadcasters, especially on just zero, which has really embraced creative commons. And I was wondering what will it take to get some of the other broadcasters and other content producers like New York Times, et cetera, to really embrace the idea of creative commons? What is holding them back? What are some of their concerns that you might have to address? And is it you that is addressing them? Or is it more sort of the world community that is slowly nudging them towards coming over to creative commons or other standards like that? And the second question is a bit more general in the sense of I'd like to sort of pick your brain about if you had a vision for this phase of creative commons, where would you see it ending? Where would you see it going? And a more expansive vision of where this openness movement is going in the future if you sort of were to share your ideas again in the spirit of openness. Thank you. So the broadcaster one, I think is a very long and difficult question. At the last zero forum, the European Broadcast Union was there and all of them were there listening to Mohamed Namibay talk about Al Jazeera. They were very envious, you could tell. But I think that, you know, especially in so Al Jazeera, I think is a very particular model because it's state sponsored. I've been doing diving recently. And one thing you do when you do diving is you put air in your float and you relax and you look around and then you think about what to do next. Most broadcasters are they're drowning and panicking. It's very difficult to think about what to do next when you are running out of air. And so I think this is true with newspapers and most broadcasters is they're really having a hard time struggling for survival. And it's very difficult to be very forward looking. Having said that, I think that the example of Al Jazeera has been very compelling to many broadcasters and we're talking to many of them. They're all trying to experiment. The Japanese broadcasters are trying to experiment. The other problem is that there's lots of rights. And so even if you talk to the Al Jazeera people, you know the Gaza stuff was easiest because it was all shocked by Al Jazeera people. Mostly when you start making all kinds of work, you're using footage from here and footage from there and Reuters from here. And you can't make it all creative commons license when you have little bits of pieces sort of contaminating. Contaminating is a bad word but it's contaminating the rights. I think it's going to happen. Now it's people are working on it. And I think Al Jazeera is really kind of continues to be the leader. But it's just a matter of time because it does make business sense. That's the key when you listen to Muhammad and the team is they will say that they made more money giving it away. And it's not just for public stuff. I'm going to use your last question to say something that I forgot to say. But it ties into this. So I'm a college dropout which means I can't be a CEO in the UAE, which is kind of a bad thing for an entrepreneur. So I have to hire a CEO for my startups. But one of the things that's interesting, whether you're talking about education or whether you're talking about broadcasting, is that in the days before we had this low cost stack, cost of disseminating information, the cost of producing information was so high that you could only give access to a few people who were properly qualified, properly trained, and so on. And it was a scarcity game. So the producers and the directors, they had to go to school. You spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to cost the studio and then to put it on the transponder and put up a huge cost. Same with university. We're all of university, convening people, having meetings like this, and also disseminating information. Huge costs. So you have to pick the smartest kids in the society so you can dish out in little pieces the education that you have because you don't have enough. Well, now with the internet, suddenly, anyone can make a video. Anyone can access other people's information. And suddenly, we have abundance. And I think the tricky part right now is we have many institutions that were designed in a day when we had scarcity. And some of the greatest institutions that we have are all about protecting and giving access to just those people who deserve it because there wasn't enough. And if you think about, even when you look at the culture of the Middle East, when you had very little water and you had the oasis and all this, a lot of it was about borders trying to create this access. And open access sounds great, but when you don't have enough stuff, it's terrible. The thing that's happening with all of this is now we have this abundance, but we're institutionally, we still don't have that thing. When people want brands, people want institution, people want kind of exclusivity. And I think the tricky part right now with, for instance, with formal versus informal education, which is I think one of the key things that's going to change is that we want to give people credits and we want to give people accreditation and we want a centralized system that gives people the ranks, right? And I think that that is actually holding back a lot of participation in government, for instance, participation in government. You had representative democracy because everyone couldn't be in the parliament watching and listening to all the debates. Well now you can. So maybe you should allow the citizens or maybe you can allow the citizens to participate more. Same with the education. You can allow students to be in the classroom watching the professor. You don't have to exclude them, right? But I think it's very tricky because just like we know from evolving your government, you go through many, many changes. It's not easy. You can't just switch. I think we have many, many institutions that are going from this institution of scarcity to an institution of abundance. Again, it's not easy because you can see in China and all these other places where they're trying to go through this change, it can cause a lot of chaos. But I think that if I would say the future, really the great future is once we get through all of these problems, we will have abundance and we will have ability for people to participate. People should be happier. And I think that the key thing here though is going to be that education will become much more available to everyone and access to that is going to be key. And as part of education, we'll talk about it in science, but research also should involve everyone in the world and not just the Western developed world. That's where you're going. How do you get other content owners to follow Al Jazeera's lead? How far can CC go? Well, so there's a couple of different things. I think that the content owners, especially the for-profit content owners, have to realize that it makes business sense for them. And it does. And I think it's just going to be a matter of a couple of the content owners figuring out new business models that make them tons of money. Like for instance, when video games, video game guys are very smart. They're very innovative compared to the music industry. They switch from selling CDs to subscriptions. One of my friends runs a mobile game company in Japan called DNA. I know Mitchell doesn't like video games, but each game, one game makes $2 million a day just on credits. And she can switch the business model, so she doesn't have to protect her content. She can give away all of the images she wants because they have to connect because the community is actually what people are connecting for. There's many, many ways to do new business models. So I think new business models are going to be the way to pivot. And how far can CC go? This is a really interesting question. So Creative Commons is not a lobbying organization. We don't try to change the law. We are a tool that exists in order to make an existing and somewhat broken law easier to use. We exist because copyright law is complicated. If someday copyright law got better, we didn't need Creative Commons anymore. Not at least in the way that we exist. I mean, I think the idea of Creative Commons would remain, but I would love the day when we didn't need Creative Commons anymore and it was built into the law and it was built into society and people didn't have to think about it anymore. And so just like the internet, I remember when I started the internet, I used to wear internet t-shirts and it was a fight. The internet against the telephone company and it was political and people tried to throw us in jail and we fought and we fought and we fought. Now it's kind of stupid to fight for the internet. I mean, you fight for open internet, but it's not political anymore. Same way, I think Creative Commons right now is a struggle, it's a fight. But someday I think it will no longer be a struggle and I think how far can CC go? I think CC goes as far as we can until no one has to think about us anymore and just like you don't think about how the internet works, you won't have to think about how CC works anymore. Thank you.