 I'd like to welcome you all to the first Fall 2005 session of the MIT Communications Forum. Our website is projected on the screen behind me. And for those of you in the audience who have not joined our mailing list, let me encourage you to do so. If you go to the site, you can find a way. If you look under Mailing List, if you click on that, you can sign up. We use the Mailing List very austerely. We never share it with anyone. We're very parsimonious and respectful toward the people who have signed up, and it is used almost exclusively for announcements of forums. There are very rare occasions when topics of central interest to forum constituencies are also announced, but that happens very rarely. You won't be bombarded with email and you'll hear about every forum that we run. The site itself has become something of a resource for scholars and citizens interested in communications, and you might want to spend some time on the site browsing around. There's a considerable collection now of papers and talks that have been delivered at conferences and forums over the years, and a kind of mapping of the last decade and more of the forum's work is available on the site. Today's forum, the future of the Digital Commons, is of special interest, of course, to many of us in this environment, especially. I'm especially happy to be able to welcome our speakers today. As a moderator, my job is going to be primarily to introduce the speakers, give them a chance to do their thing, and then orchestrate a discussion. I'm going to describe each of the speakers right now so that the session won't be interrupted by further praise songs. We'll get all the praise singing out of the way at the start. Nancy Cranich, sitting at the end there, has served as president of the American Library Association in 2000 and 2001, and while she was president, she specialized, focused on the role of libraries and democracies. She has been a senior research fellow at the Free Expression Policy Project in New York, where she wrote a pamphlet, do you have a copy you could hold up, Nancy, called The Information Commons, a Public Policy Report. For my money, the best single piece of writing on this important topic. Previously, she was Associate Dean of Libraries at New York University, where she managed NYU's libraries, press, and media services. Sitting in the middle is our respondent, my friend Steve Pinker. He's long been committed to democratic and civic uses of technology, as many of you may know, and he's the John Stone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and the author of many essays and books, including The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate. He's also, as some of you surely know, a legendary MIT figure whose loss is still felt here at the Institute. And finally, Anne Wolpert, right next to me here, is the Director of MIT Libraries, a member of the MIT Committee on Copyright and Patents, and also chairs the Management Board of the MIT Press and the Board of Directors of Technology Review, which publishes the magazine of the same name. Anne has served on other panels for me on topics related to this, and I'm very pleased to have her along with our other speakers. I think the order is Nancy will speak first, then Anne, then Steve will respond, and then we'll open the floor to discussion. Nancy. Thank you, David, and thank you for inviting me. This is awesome to be in this building and to be at MIT. Back in the very old days, when us librarians were trying to work it out and figure out how to use technology to give you access to information, NYU and MIT did a lot of work together, so I used to come up here, but it certainly didn't look quite like this, so I'm thrilled to be here and be part of this, and I'm quite honored to be in your midst. And I'm especially pleased that you're having a forum on a topic of great interest to me, but also having two librarians be your speakers. I want you to know, though, even though it's great to be a librarian in this audience, it's been a really tough couple of years for librarians, not just because we have to put up with all of you, which is part of the pleasure we get in doing our work, but because we have been pretty much at the center of many public policy disagreements and tensions over the past, I'd say 15 to 20 years, and I personally have had my fair share of hate letters, et cetera. So just to give you an idea of what we've been through in case you haven't been following it. In the 1980s, we fought hard to make sure that you had free electronic access to government information, something you take for granted today. In those days, they were telling us librarians for fighting for this were going to break the bank of the U.S. government. Now they tell us having print publications is going to break the bank of the U.S. government. But in so doing, in promoting free access, we were called left-wing Looney librarians. And then in the 1990s, we had pornography to deal with and dealing with the issues around pornography over the Internet. We were accused of running peep shows, and since I was ALA president, when we went to the Supreme Court, I have often been called the Porn Queen, which is definitely part of my training in library school. And then in the 1990s, we also got into the war over who owns information. And our friend, the former Congresswoman, Pat Schroeder, whose great ally in Congress became head of the American Association of Publishers, and she accused us of being pirates even though we were spending a good $5 billion a year on materials that her members were producing. And then finally, I'm sure some of you remember what Mr. Ashcroft had to say about librarians over the USA Patriot Act in privacy. He told us that we were hysterical and that we'd been duped by the ACLU because we were fighting to make sure that your transactions at libraries and elsewhere were kept private. Now, why were we in the middle of all of these debates and tensions? Well, because librarians have been steadfast in promoting the free flow of ideas in the digital age, and it's not been an easy area for any of us. Now, like us, I'm sure many of you have also spent the last two to three decades fighting many of these fights, trying to debate the merits and flaws of all kinds of policies coming before us, policies related to digital information, electronic networks, information resources, et cetera. And we, and maybe many of you as well, have been caught within these tensions of the information age, tensions between whether or not information is a public good or whether it is a commodity. And it's been a highly contested environment. And I used to track it, the higher the amount of profits that you can make off of this materials, the higher the tension got. So back in the days when government information was in brown wrappers and nobody cared, there wasn't a lot of tension. But once it became digital and a highly profitable commodity, all of a sudden the tensions rose. And it's been rising ever since. So it's been an uphill battle for the library community. We continue to fight the battles over and over again. But we often have to recognize that our values, values like intellectual freedom, equity of access, diversity, and democratic participation easily get lost in these races to dominate who is going to have access to your home, to your office, and that PDA that you carry around with you. So after opposing so many of the policies that we've been facing over the years, policies that in effect enclose what we call the commons, we've begun to learn firsthand that we can be a lot more successful in fighting these debates by reframing the issues and setting the terms of the discourse ourselves. Saying not just what we don't like, which a lot of what we're seeing is what we don't like, but saying what we do want, what do we want for public access in the digital age. So if you had to sit down and talk about what would you want, I think it's a good idea to think, well, okay, so if we had a clean slate, what is it we would want? Well, the library community has some pretty clear ideas, what it would like, what kind of information society we would like to see in the 21st century where everyone gets opportunities to participate in our democracy. So how do we begin to think of a new information society where we create a more balanced marketplace for the exchange of ideas that reflects not only the needs of consumers, but also the needs of citizens, of scholars, as well as consumers. How do we populate a public sphere that complements the private sphere, not that has just tension with that sphere? How can we ensure that there are opportunities for full participation in the digital age, opportunities that are so essential to sustaining our democracy? How can we build civic spaces or commons like the traditional public square and traditional public libraries that are so important to the free exchange and sharing of information? And finally, for those of you in the academic world, how can we increase access to the ideas and products that you are producing for scholarship and learning? So in order to propose what we want, not just what we don't want, we really need to think about reframing the debate. Day after day, I read articles in the newspaper and see all kinds of articles put out by scholars that frame the debate based on public versus private, and it's the same tension. Well, maybe it's time we rethink the way we approach the subject. Some of you may be familiar with George Lakoff. Don't think of an elephant. Anybody read his book? Good, a few of you are right. Well, OK, so we're not going to think of an elephant. We have to think in a different frame. Lakoff talks about the words we choose, how important they are to what our message is. So if we're talking about tax relief or the death tax or partial birth abortion, we have a definite message. As I think many people learned during the last election, it's not just facts that matter. It's also values that matter. So when we reframe the issues, we need to reframe them from the values from where we come from. And librarians definitely, as John Ashcroft and others, have learned, come with a set of values. So our job is to reframe based on those values, values that reflect our mission, our mission in academia, our mission in democracy, et cetera. So our language that we use in talking about these issues is about metaphor. It's about the stories we tell. And it helps us to reclaim the language of this important debate. So if you want to talk about pornography and piracy, you are framing a debate. But if you want to talk about creativity, innovation, free expression, participation, reciprocity and trust, you're framing another debate. And that's more of the debate that we in the library community would like to have. And I think many of you, perhaps, would like to have that debate as well. So how do we reframe that debate? Well, part of it, in my mind, is looking at a different metaphor. And that metaphor that I like to choose is the commons. I like the commons because it really better reflects what we're talking about. It's not public. It's not private. It's what we share. And so much of what we do in the library community, what you do in academia, is producing and sharing information with each other. So it's a much better fit in my mind than the other ones that we keep trying to respond to. So most of you, I'm sure, have some notion of what the commons is about. Ian Wolpert's going to talk more about it. But, you know, we like to start thinking about it in our mind as those open fields that farmers used back in the medieval period in England, fields that eventually got enclosed for a multiple of reasons, most of which meant that those fields could be used more productively, at least economically productively, for other purposes. What we see happening with our commons of information is the same thing, this enclosure movement that's taking away, not adding to, that's blocking off access. And it's doing it haphazardly without one systematic way, but slowly but surely, we're losing more and more of what we so value. What we often have produced ourselves and no longer have the kind of open access that we would like. So throughout history, we've not only had fields in common in England, but we've had all kinds of resources that we share, ranging from fisheries and forests to things like public libraries in the United States. And we have shared them quite successfully. We have heard about the tragedy of the commons from a man named Garrett Hardin, a biologist who talked about it in the 60s, who talked about how the commons can't really work. But in response to his article in the 60s, a number of scholars created a literature of the commons to demonstrate, in fact, how the commons can work. And if you look at that literature by scholars of the commons, political scientists, economists, sociologists, you see that there is a very strong fit with the idea of these shared resources that we manage and sustain together and what we do so much in our fields, how we create and share information together. So there's a lot of parallels here. And it's not only people like me noticing that's the entire, not the entire, but a lot of people who look at copyright from the public access viewpoint are using the metaphor of the commons, the idea of the commons. Activists are looking at the commons as talk about taking back our public assets. Civil engagement, civil society scholars are looking at the commons as to talk about places where we can share ideas and have more democratic discourse. In addition, in the technology fields right here on your campus, you've got software pioneers developing commons from Linux and open source to other kinds of opportunities. You've got scholars talking about open access to our journal literature type of commons. And you've got librarians out there doing their thing with their core values of promoting ideas around the free flow of ideas, intellectual freedom, creativity, innovation. So you've got a lot of different people coming together saying, maybe this concept of the commons is what we need to focus on in reframing our debate. So I wrote this pamphlet, which is available on the web, under the Free Expression Policy Project website. I've had a few copies that some of you may have gotten. I want to really look at this idea and who's using it and what kinds of stories can we tell. What I found was there is an amazing number of commons springing up. Most of these places don't call themselves commons, but they are springing up here, there and everywhere, where people who create information and people who use information are coming together and self-sustaining these resources. Many of them are here, right here at MIT. We have them springing up where we have civic space commons, where people are finding ways to come together in communities, share information, but also share democratic discourse. We have digital libraries where we have resource sharing among libraries of collections, where people are creating them and sharing them together. We have open source software, a wonderful model that the rest of us are looking at, how we can create, contribute and share. We have learning commons. We have information networks. We have networks where people like me who like to knit can find other knitters and share knitting patterns. And people concerned with democracy can find others interested in democratic discourse. And I can go on and on. We have commons within the scholarly community like the anthro commons. Anybody here an anthropologist? Anthropologists are doing a lot of good things. I was an anthro major, so I'm particularly proud of the anthropologists, but a lot of you are doing some really good things. And there's numerous examples. We also have the creative commons, which is an attempt by copyright attorneys led by Larry Lassig to create legal models, that models for which we can have legal contracts to share what we're doing, not to restrict access to, but encourage access. And then we have the activity going on in the scholarly community, going on right here at MIT. What happened in the scholarly community came out of necessity. In the 80s and 90s, we had this incredible crisis where we were giving away the information we were producing on campus and buying it back at astronomical prices. And when the pricing became so onerous, we decided that we could find alternatives, and the technology came to help us. So there's all kinds of alternatives. Springing up in the scholarly community led somewhat here at MIT, with dSpace and your learning, open learning communities that you've created. Some very exciting models that give us the kind of stories that we can use to tell people there's a different way to do all this. We have alternatives. And what we're finding and I think Anne will talk about is it's not only a different way to manage, to create, and sustain what's so important to us as well as share, but it's also really helpful to us because it means that scholars get cited a lot more and that we have access not only to our direct communities, but to people in countries that don't have access, to people in fields that don't have access. So we're seeing an incredible impact, positive impact from coming together and creating these commons. So what is the metaphor of the commons really mean for us? Well, it's a novel approach to providing the kind of information access we want. Stopping talking about just what we don't want, but talking about what we do want. And now we have great examples to show it can work. It helps us go beyond that public private debate, that tension that so many of us have been caught between. It allows us to find a different place for all of us to participate, to govern, to control our own assets. It allows us to adopt a different language, a language with a narrative steeped in some of our common values. And it allows us to have a different policy discourse, a policy discourse that maybe won't be quite as contentious with so many dead ends. So how do we move then from metaphor to reality? Well, there's many things we could do and I think Anne's gonna talk about a few of them. But first we need to become much more aware of what the problems are and how we can support the good behavior, not just the bad behavior. I'm sure many of you have written articles just in the past couple months where you've given away your intellectual assets to somebody else. We don't have to do that anymore. There's opportunities for you to manage your own intellectual property, manage your assets, help sustain communities of interest in areas that you care about. And we can do that in lots of ways. We also need to make sure that our public policy debates start to talk about some of these more positive ways that we can share information, not just talk about piracy. Yesterday in the New York Times, big article about how the Motion Picture Association was going to stop piracy and put all this money into piracy, never did it talk about the users of information in the different kinds of ways that their products really helped to advance science and the useful arts, things that our copyright law was meant to do. So in closing, let me say that I think the idea of the comments, the information comments, provides us a lot of exciting new opportunities, to build a different kind of institution, a fundamental institution for 21st century democracy, to include some of the public interest values that we care about in the digital age, to manage our resources in a sustainable manner, one where we're not seeing the tragedy of the comments, but we're seeing the comedy of the comments. And to foster such important values is free expression, creativity, innovation, democratic participation. Finally, in the 21st century, I don't think there's gonna be any single model out there for creating, distributing, and sharing information. But I do think that looking at the comments as one of those models will finally provide us a safe alternative, an alternative that we can look to, to ensure that we have a meaningful role, not just for the creators and owners of information, but those who use it as well. Thank you. Excuse this interruption, people. I'm delighted by the size of our audience, but I apologize to those of you who don't have seats. There are a few extra seats around. I see one over here. Someone, please come down and take them. You're also empowered to go out into the hallway and abscond with chairs and bring them in the back. But I'm actually delighted that we have such a large audience. This is our first time in this room and we will make adjustments. We will find larger rooms, but stick it out. We're happy to have you all. We are indeed happy to have you all. Thank you for being here and my thanks to David for the opportunity to speak in this forum. As Nancy said, she and I share an interest in the Commons and in particular, what I wanna talk about this afternoon is a little more academic perspective on the digital Commons. Why the digital Commons, the creation and maintenance of a digital Commons matters to MIT and why the creation and establishment and maintenance of a digital Commons matters to you. My remarks, it seems to me, are a perfect example of the importance of the digital Commons to the Academy in that my personal library, probably yours does too, includes not only hundreds of books, but also hundreds of digital articles, chapters, papers, essays, and other digital works that I have found on the internet and downloaded into my personal library. These digital materials have influenced and formed my thinking on the issue that we're talking about today and they have come to have an important role for all of us in the Academy in the way we think and do our work. I hope that those of you who are listening today will participate in the discussion at the end. We've saved a good hour, I think, to talk about your thoughts and ideas on the digital Commons and how we might make it happen. But interestingly enough, thanks to MIT World, this particular program is being videotaped and will be available for a period of time on the MIT World. So every question that you ask in this discussion will become a part of the record of the digital Commons for as long as it's maintained in MIT World. Niels Bohr once said that you should never express yourself more clearly than you think. So I thought it might be useful, I thought it might be useful just to start with a definition. What is this Commons that we're talking about, this digital Commons? Well, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a Commons is a resource held in joint user possession to be held or enjoyed equally by a number of persons. So it follows from that, of course, that any member of a given community of persons has the right to use the resource without obtaining the permission of anyone else. And of course, in this particular definition, payment is a surrogate for permission. So when one considers how most information and other kinds of resources are created on behalf of society, it becomes obvious why society has looked to both government and markets to pay for resource creation. It is not enough to have an idea as many venture-failed computer companies can tell you, you also have to have capital. You have to have production and you have to have distribution of your work. The roles and implications are different when resources are developed by governments than when they're developed by markets. Government, in fact, pays on our behalf to create some Commons. Think of public schools or roads or public parks. And it also, government also establishes public policy that creates Commons. And if you're familiar with the U.S. Copyright Law, you know that in the United States anyway, you cannot get copyright over facts. So items of fact formula, other sorts of factual data, are not subject to private ownership. They are part of the intellectual Commons that we all share. The market, on the other hand, creates value and expects to recover the expenses in those values. And thus they fall in typically into the control domain, which is the non-common domain. I think it's quite appropriate to be examining the issue of the Commons in a room like this at an institution like MIT, because American education has in fact participated in a tradition of the Commons for 200 years. Scientific discoveries that come out of higher education are shared, extended and consulted across physical and intellectual boundaries. Academic freedom is an important means to sustaining the free and open dialogue that participates and contributes to the Commons. And college and university libraries, as well as public libraries, in the aggregate cover an enormous range of subject material, and that matter is shared readily and easily across institutions on behalf of individuals who are looking for information. The Academy, therefore, understands that access to Commons resources is crucial to innovation and creativity. Every endeavor relies on prior work. Everything that we do in the Academy is based on work that has gone before us. This is as true in science and technology as it is in art. In the tangible world, one can look, for instance, at the periodic table of elements and how important that was as a factual commons to discovery. But especially in the cyber infrastructure world, one looks to the human genome project, initiatives like PubMed Central, and other activities that happen in the Commons in the digital world that feed innovation and creativity. But in 10 very short years, the internet and digital technology have changed the ground rules of the Commons. The change has been rapid, the change has been filled with experiments, many of them bold, and here I think of peer-to-peer file sharing. Music shared peer-to-peer, evolved as a rapid and obvious way for people to build Commons, and in turn there was a rapid and dramatic response from the music industry in the form of both policy changes in the manner of the DMCA and other laws, and also in direct activities, pursuing individuals whom the music industry believed was violating their ownership of work. Larry Lessig in his very interesting 2001 book entitled The Future of Ideas says it's important to determine what a Commons is. And he says that you think of a Commons in terms of two attributes, the character of the resource and how the resource relates to a community. When he's talking about the character of the resource, he's talking about things such as whether a resource is used up or consumed when it's used. If I have a popsicle and there's one popsicle, by the time that popsicle is gone, it's gone. It is a resource that is used up, it's gone once it's consumed. On the other hand, the ideas that you're hearing about from this forum today are not used up because you've heard them. Ideas are not consumed. In fact, they benefit from being used over and over again. So the challenge for defining the character of a resource in the digital world is of course that the more you use a resource, the less you consume it. In fact, digital reproduction is perfect and you can reproduce over and over again without consuming something. So laws and rules and regulations that were devised to protect consumable resources are now being applied to resources that in fact benefit from being used and shared. The other aspect of a resource is how it relates to a community. And if you think about, for instance, a typical research library in 1960, there was a very close relationship between that library and the academic institution in which it resided. On the internet, however, everybody owns a piece of the internet. You can have your own webpage. You can put your work out on the internet. Everyone believes that they are participating and has the capacity to participate personally in the internet. So the character of a resource and how that resource relates to the community is fundamentally changed in the internet environment and creates a whole new set of attributes around a commodity. An important attribute of information as it resides on the internet is that it can support not just market-based activities and government-funded activities, but it can support activities that are free in the sense that very small, marginal amounts of money, every one of you here in this room can create your own webpage and choose to share that webpage openly with others at no cost on the internet. So all of a sudden, a domain of understanding about how the world ought to work, which was bounded by markets and governments, now has the opportunity for anybody to play at a very low threshold. So all of the rules that were established for managing information are undermined by the fact that anyone can put anything up if they can get to the internet and have the right kind of technology. The internet also affects the attributes of information in terms of the characteristics of information itself. Information can be understood in a domain of richness and reach and persistence. So again, think about an academic research library. An academic research library has a lot of richness because there's a ton of stuff in there, but its reach is very small because you can't use it unless you can get within the walls of the research library. But on the other hand, there is a commitment institutionally to keeping that work persistent. So those dimensions, those attributes of information change fundamentally in the internet and with digital technology because in fact, persistence evaporates for all intents and purposes. Nobody except Brewster Kale is trying to build an archive out of the internet and there's some very real question about how persistent that is. The richness is enormous. The reach can be huge, but only if you can get past the constraints that grew out of an era that assumed somebody had to control what was there, either the government or markets. And of course, all of this then raises the question, just because a resource can be controlled, should it be controlled? And because the internet is so fundamentally different and digital information are so fundamentally different from the old regimes of property management, these are fundamental questions for us to consider in the digital commons. So let me step back for a minute. Nancy talked a bit about the copyright and how it is the principle control mechanism for information. In fact, my remarks here today are an interesting example. And in 1976, the copyright law applied ownership rights to creative acts at the moment they are reduced to a tangible medium. So as long as I'm talking to you, my work is free to you. But the fact that it's being recorded means that now all of a sudden it's in a tangible medium and it's subject to copyright law. I haven't done anything to make that happen. The law made it happen. So my remarks are now at the point of being recorded copyrighted. The current protection for copyright is the life of the author plus 70 years. So if you think about what a generation is, the conventional wisdom says that a generation is 33 years, okay? So the words that I am speaking today into this microphone are assuming that I don't get run over by a bus on Mass Avenue and make it through the rotary on the way home tonight has a very good probability. These words have a very good probability of being protected by law for three generations. That is an enormous right in works, right? Whether I want it or not. So I've just signed a release that says you can look at this, I don't care. I don't wanna exercise my ownership rights over it. But there is this legal and regulatory regime. Now on the other hand, the copyright law did do a couple of good things. It made a distinction between creation and discovery. So as I said earlier, facts are not copyrightable. Artistic works are. And it does provide something of a balance and fair use. So even if I decided that I wanted to exercise the rights over this recording. In fact, you could use that information to criticize me. You could use it to teach in a classroom. You could use it to make a copy of it for not-for-profit research. There are lots of things you can do with under the provisions of fair use. But here's the rub. I love this quote. It does seem that our perception of where information generally and culture in particular comes from came to be dominated over the second half of the 20th century by a vision of Hollywood and the recording industry. The important work of the Academy, which is intended to be shared, has been stuffed into the same box as Mickey Mouse, regardless of the appropriateness of that regime. The Academy, as most of you know, whoever published anything shares ideas through a centuries-old system of peer-reviewed book and journal publishing. Traditional publishing, in fact, shares a lot of attributes with the music and film industries. Very capital-intensive. They typically, particularly the commercial players, need to maintain high-level profits. And so because of the capital investment, the production and distribution must be tightly controlled. They really cannot tolerate a lot of leaks in the system. These systems rely increasingly on contract law. Now, contract law trumps copyright law. So if I subscribe to or license digital resources on behalf of the MIT community and deliver them to you over the MIT network, it is the license agreement that I sign that typically governs what you can do with it and what MIT can do with it, rather than copyright law. So for these big capital-intensive businesses, social sharing obviously is gonna be anathema, which is why you see the music industry behaving the way it is, and why you see some publishers of peer-reviewed, scholarly information behaving the way they are. I don't know how many of you published through the American Chemical Society, but there are many stories of faculty here on the campus wanting to put up their own American Chemical Society journal articles on their webpage and being called by their own professional society and told to take it down because it violates the terms and conditions of their agreement with their society. So the other attribute of these big capital-intensive businesses is that they have to have support of government in the policy realm, and that's what the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other changes to the copyright law have done to protect the interests of these large players in the commercial domain, and support from engineers is essential. So that's why I'm glad that we're talking about this issue here in the status center because engineers design the control systems that are gonna make it possible for publishers to control the content through technology. Nancy mentioned a new effort on the part of the new movie studios to increase their level control, and this is what the report in the New York Times said. Unhappy with the pace at which consumer electronics firms and IT researchers are developing tools to protect digital content, the six major movie studios will launch a research project to address their concern called Motion Picture Laboratories or Movie Labs. It will focus on technologies to protect content. Now the technologies that are developed to protect their content will protect other kinds of content as well. So you can see that the support of technologists in both the hardware and software realms are really important to the maintenance of ownership and to the defeat of the commons. Now, neither the academy nor society really, I think, can tolerate tight control over the movement of ideas and information. Even the US Supreme Court has said that facts do not owe their origin to any act of authorship. So for knowledge to advance, production and distribution systems can and should occur outside a tightly controlled capital intensive publishing system. Because of the internet, economic production need no longer be the domain of either markets or the state. Every one of you can contribute to the production of ideas in the internet environment. And the internet enables a modality that's known as social sharing or open access. This is tough. Social sharing is deeply rooted in many economics and cultural activities. In fact, I had an interesting conversation with Bill Mitchell not too long ago, who many of you will know was the head of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning here at MIT for many years. And he talked about where architecture would be if architects had decided to copyright building forms. Imagine Washington if someone had copyrighted Doric columns. But there is a social norm in architecture of sharing building forms, of not exercising property rights over the ideas that are represented there. And there are traditions of sharing in other disciplines as well, science, engineering, creative writing. Everyone knows in those fields that one is dependent on the formal work that's gone before you. And in truth we know that social sharing or open access can indeed coexist with markets and the state. Think for example of bookstores, public libraries and open web resources like Google Print. Google Print has full text of out-of-print works available on the internet. Bookstores sell books, public libraries have books that are in print and out-of-print. So those three kinds of activities can coexist and the Google Print possibility has never been there before. And the internet and digital resources make that possible. Universities and governments of course have valid reasons for supporting open access. Obviously the fundamental nature of research-based education relies on sharing of new knowledge. But it's also useful to think about the fact that scientists share their information across space and time. 75% of science articles are written by university scientists and 75% of science readings are by non-university scientists. So you see this tremendous amount of sharing around the boundaries. Agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, the UK Research Councils, and others are increasingly concerned for the viability and availability of the record of advances in science. And MIT is concerned too because MIT's mission statement commits it to creating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge for the benefit of society. So if our work here at MIT goes into a closed system instead of an open system, we have to ask ourselves if we are honoring the commitment that we have to the open access. Researchers increasingly understand that open access work has greater research impact. There are research findings that suggest that mathematics works that are on the open web are used and cited 91 times more often than others. You can see these other numbers here. It's clear that work that's on the open web, it gets out there faster. It's used more often and the citation effect is dramatic. So I wanna leave you with some thoughts about what we might do here at MIT, what we might ask our friends to do with us to advance the notion of the commons, open access, and social sharing. Obviously we can lobby for rational limits on copyright lobbying. Why should my work last for three generations? There is no financial incentive to me to have that happen. Most people in the academy who write, don't write with the anticipation that they're gonna get rich off it, they write to share their ideas. And yet their ideas will be locked down in proprietary systems for three generations. We should all use and contribute to open source code. We should use Creative Commons licenses. We should contribute to repositories like dSpace where our work can be shared and kept persistently. We need to advocate for the right kind of legislation. We need to keep the internet open. We need to put teeth in laws against, in fact it is illegal to claim copyright of something that you don't copyright, but in fact there's no effective way to reinforce that in law. And so you can go to certain sites and you can see people claiming copyright to facts and data. And if you don't know any better, you would say, well, okay, they own it. But as a practical matter, they can't own it because it's a fact. And there's no particular way to punish people who make claims of copyright on work that isn't copyrightable or copyrighted. So these are some suggestions. Nancy had some suggestions. I hope in the discussion that follows that we'll hear some more ideas from you. And I thank you for your interest and attention. Thanks. I'd like to begin by expressing what a privilege it is to be on a panel with two distinguished librarians. I have an enormous amount of respect for librarians that has come out of writing a number of books which have ranged over quite a wide subject matter. I think many people think of librarians as the lady with the pencil behind her here in the high-collar blouse, the rubber stamp going, but I learned through my experience at MIT with the library system that librarians are truly underappreciated and indispensable profession in our society for two reasons. One of them was I expressed in the preface of my first popular book in which I thanked Pat Claffey, who's a librarian at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Library at MIT. I said thanks to Pat Claffey who knows everything or at least knows where to find it, which is just as good. I have found that it often in spicing up discussions of obscure technical matters in psychology or linguistics, I had a dimly remembered anecdote, lyrics of a old Broadway song or a rumor about a rock star or a vague memory of what some Reagan cabinet secretary said. And I didn't want to trust my own memory or maybe since most memories people remember things very well that never happened. But the hit rate of my requests to Pat Claffey and her successors and counterpart at Harvard has been 100%. I have never yet found a single question that a librarian has not been able to answer usually within hours. That is literally true. In fact, this is not widely appreciated. In fact, I think we're in some danger of the role of libraries becoming even less appreciated. I've been corresponding with a 12-year-old girl. I don't even know where she is because it's over the internet. But she's doing an Intel science project and she's been asking my advice and I've been encouraging her. She asked me the question just last night, the email. Well, I occasionally see what look like really interesting articles in journals. But I can't get them on Google and I can't download them. Do you have any idea where I could actually find journal articles? And so I wrote back and said, well, this is an institution called the library. There are these people called librarians. So I think this is a message that has to get out. But also, increasingly, as both Nancy and Anne have expressed, we are facing issues of access of information. And it is librarians, more than anyone, I think, who have advanced the cause of accessibility to information. The example of the professional journal, perhaps being most salient, when I was in graduate school and published my first article in a scientific journal, my father asked me, well, how much did the journal pay you to publish this article? I kind of laughed. And I had to explain to him that unlike writing for the New York Times, you consider it a privilege if they have to write for them. He said, well, I guess there are a lot of expenses because I suppose you told me about peer review. Other people have to vet your paper. There must be a dozen that are vetted for everyone that's published. So a lot of the price of the journal must go into paying for the journal referees. Which, of course, also made me snicker. Those of you who are researchers know that probably one of the most time-consuming and uncompensated activities is refereeing journal articles. So the contributors don't get paid anything. The referees don't get paid anything. A good friend of mine is a journal editor and he gets, I think, some trifling sum for support of his secretary, but he doesn't get paid anything. Then you look at the subscriptions to the journals and the universities are paying literally thousands of dollars a year, which is just pure parasitism. There was even some nominal justification when at least there was the expense of ordering the newsprint and stamping the ink onto it and binding it and sending it out in the mail. But now, of course, that those costs have gone down to nearly nothing. What we all of us are really paying for in these exorbitant journal prices is prestige. That is a limited commodity in terms of the number of articles that are published under a certain imprimatur. And since people who want to get their work taken seriously, want to get tenure and so on, have to publish in just those journals. Whoever controls them is in this position of what economists call this enormous rent-seeking or exploitation. But the nice thing about prestige is that it's a social construction. We can decide collectively what's prestigious. And under the impetus of many librarians, new electronic journals have been forming where, say, an entire editorial board will resign en masse, create a shadow journal with the same editorial board, and therefore, one hopes the same prestige transplant without these ridiculous fees. Now, I should add that I think it's easy to denigrate the role of middlemen and a great deal of persecution and tragedy have come when people have not understood the essential role that middlemen often play. A lot of anti-Semitism and ethnic persecution come from the perception that money lenders and retail store owners and so on are parasites because they stand between producer and consumer. So I don't want to say that middlemen are, I don't want to succumb to the temptation of underestimating the role of middlemen, but of course, this is something that technology is changing and changing in the case of information in particular very rapidly. Both Nancy and and referred to the commons, the tragedy of the commons. And I think it might be worth saying a few words about that because it is so relevant to the policies that we should adopt in different spheres, academic, non-academic in terms of walling off the commons. Tragedy of the commons is the idea that if you bring your cow onto Cambridge Common, you get an enormous benefit of the cow eating the grass, therefore staying alive, turning it into milk and meat and so on. The tragedy being that since everyone can go through that computation, every more and more people will bring their cows onto Cambridge Common, and if it exceeds a certain point, when the last blade of grass is eaten, then it immediately becomes useless to everyone. The problem is that no particular person has an incentive to keep his cow off the common because even if the capacity decreases by a bit, his decision is between zero and whatever capacity is left, but collectively if everyone does it, then it will end up being zero for everyone. And it's actually, even though the construction is, by Garrett Hardin is well known, the solutions aren't, and my reading the literature, I've seen three different proposals for how this tragedy can be averted. We've heard about the comedy of the commons, but I think it's not that simple that these three solutions, each of them have some number of disadvantages. Some people say, well, the tragedy of the commons obviously proves that the government should own it and you should have command and control where the bureaucrats decide who gets to put their cow on the common and they keep it from being overused. Almost the opposite solution that I've seen proffered is that obviously the commons should be privately owned, and it doesn't matter who owns it, whoever owns it will have some incentive to prevent it from being overused and by charging fees, and only certain number of fees, that way we'll keep the commons from being overused. The third is a kind of communitarian idea that informal social networks of people who informally and collectively police access to the commons, such as say, the way lobster fishermen will regulate their own catches in order that a fishery not be depleted is the way to overt the tragedy of the commons. The problem with that is that it tends to work when you have a community, often people who are of the same ethnicity and social class who all know one another and who won't hesitate to use methods like the Sopranos when someone comes in. If someone comes in with a bunch of new lobster traps, they will quickly find them cut free the next day. And then if you didn't even see the movie Alamo Bay by Louis Moll came out about 15 years ago. It was about, I believe it was a crab fishery or a shrimp fishery in the Gulf of Mexico, where this community of Texans, I think, had fished it for many years. And then Vietnamese immigrants came in after 1975 and started to move in, and there was a great deal of ethnic conflict between them. And we all sympathized with the Vietnamese who came in, but on the other hand, it ignores the fact that the solution to the tragedy of the commons that all of us, I think are at least emotionally sympathetic to, namely some sort of community self-policing only works when there is a fixed community, everyone knows one another, you don't want your reputation to go down and it can actually collapse and bring about the tragedy of commons when anyone can, any number can play. Now the, I don't think that, at least I don't know, I'm sure that there are economists who have studied this, but how the tragedy of the commons and its solutions transfer to the case of information as opposed to grass or shrimp. That both speakers alluded to what Paul Romer has called the distinction between rival goods and non-rival goods. Non-rival goods are things like cake where you can't eat it and have it. Non-rival goods are things that can be duplicated without loss, such as digital copies. Or for an earlier example is if you erect a lighthouse and that prevents ships from crashing onto the rocks, it doesn't matter how many ships look at the lighthouse, it benefits all of them. It's a classic example of a public good. You don't need more and more people paying the more and more people who use it in order to restrict access. On the other hand, economists also note that public goods like lighthouses are tend to be under provided because of human nature. People will put in a certain amount of effort to benefit both themselves and the rest of the community. But as with the old story about who will bell the cat, the incentive to do it when everyone benefits is smaller than if you're the only one, since you can always hold back, shirk, engage in what social psychologists call social loafing, wait for everyone else to build the lighthouse, and then of course, since they can't restrict access, they can't wall it off to you alone, you get to be a free rider. And the problem of free riders is a problem in all public goods and it is of course one of the rationales for a market economy. As we all know, the idea that a society can be organized around the credo from each according to his ability to each according to his need did not work out in practice owing to this feature of human nature. So how do we on the one hand balance the absurdity, say, of the scientific journal system where the money really is going to parasites and it is truly an absurd situation no matter how you look at it. With the various solutions to the tragedy of the commons which do involve presumably some kind of incentive-based system. Even though information can be of course duplicated without loss, it still has to be produced. And I often, as both the producer and consumer of information, I think I'm forced to see all the sides of this issue and I certainly haven't resolved it myself. On the one hand, I'm outraged by the price of scientific journals. I find it rather amusing that I have to, for example, sign away copyright to what I'm saying right now because I wouldn't dream of trying to collect money from it. I get many requests for various copyright clearance centers where Professor So-and-So wants to reproduce two paragraphs of one of my books. How much money do I want? And in cases like that, I consider it to be a privilege that undergraduates are reading what I do. So when I have a choice, I don't charge anything. My publisher often has different ideas. On the other hand, there is the question of how many of these books would I write if I didn't get a check in the mail from my publisher every once in a while? Someone who creates a product that I like to think other people want has other alternatives in life. I could spend more time on activities that would bring me esteem in the community that I most value, namely my scientific peers. I don't really care about my prestige in some town in Iowa where someone might buy a book, but I would care if 75 cents of the price of the paperback book goes to me and I can buy something with it. And so there is the fact that people do get paid for their works, that if my books were available on something like Bookster and no sooner did I publish it than anyone could download a copy, well, I might still write a book but probably maybe not put as much work into making sure it can reach as wide an audience as I do with that 75 cents coming back. And multiplied by the number of people who are producing works that people would like to pay for, this does shift the allocation of the efforts of producers. Now in some cases, there are some cases where you get something pretty close to from each according to his ability to each according to his need. We've heard about open source software, the blogosphere, Wikipedia, which is I think it's self deserving of an entire communications forum. I don't know if any of you have seen this free encyclopedia developing on the web, which has its flaws, although so does the encyclopedia Britannica and I would consider Wikipedia to be actually have fewer flaws than the Britannica in areas where I know or think that I know the facts behind the entries or have used it. Why I had an opportunity to talk to the organizer of Wikipedia and I asked why do people put in all of this uncompensated activity simply to make good encyclopedia entries? And he said, well, there are some people who enjoy playing golf and there are some people who enjoy bowling and some people who enjoy knitting and they don't get paid for it and there are some people who enjoy writing encyclopedia entries. There are people who like writing and perfecting and debugging software. They also benefit from some degree of esteem from a community that they belong to and of course another innovation coming from the internet and information technology is that you can have communities of say encyclopedia entry writers where the commodity of prestige for accurate and useful entries is an incentive, something that could not have existed prior to the internet. Bertrand Russell once said that there are two kinds of occupations. Some people move matter relative to the surface of the earth. The other people tell them how to do it. The first kind of occupation is considered demeaning and undesirable and is poorly paid. The second kind is considered prestigious and is handsomely compensated. As long as we have activities like writing encyclopedia entries or perfecting software that people do for the same reason that other people play golf, then digital commons can be very effective. But when there are activities that, say, compete with other uses of the producer's time, then I think one is going to be in a situation where people will want to be paid for doing what they do. Now, how do we balance these conflicting demands? I mean, I think that I would like to see a number of creative mechanisms that perhaps we have not inherited from the economy of selling popsicles that may not be the same as Wikipedia or Napster. In some cases, they will be and ought to be. In other cases, they may be like, for example, iTunes, whereby there's this old idea of micro payments where instead of coughing up big sums of money for big packages of information, there could be some smaller flow where it could be more tightly tailored to both the need of the producer and the consumer. So iTunes, which I think has taken a lot of the steam out of peer-to-peer sharing where you pay 99 cents for a song, the payment is small enough that it gives you an incentive to do it legally instead of through peer-to-peer sharing. On the other hand, people who produce songs that people want will get some degree of compensation. And I suspect that we haven't yet scratched the surface of the mixture of payment and open access and prestige as a commodity and virtual communities within which creativity can flourish. And I think the real tragedy is that because of laws, such as the one that both speakers have alluded to, where the Mickey Mouse model is being applied to information, we're in danger of losing opportunities to develop these new methods of distributing and pricing information that could benefit the largest number of people. Thank you. Thank you very much to all of our speakers. We now come to what is almost always the most exciting and vital part of a communications forum event, an hour of argument amongst ourselves. We have two microphones here. I think it might be well if you raised your hand, let me call on you rather than have big lines come up before the microphone and I'll do it as fairly as I can. I'll move from one side to the other. Questions, I encourage the audience also to make comments, but let me urge you to be succinct because we have only 53 minutes and we wanna get as many voices in as possible. Yes, take the microphone. It would also be helpful people if you would identify yourselves. You are being audio recorded and you're on video as well. Well, let's leave them standing, Henry, because it's easier for the camera to get them that way. Thank you. I'm Bahar Barami, work at the Waupe Center across the street. I want to go back to the tragedy of commons. There is a paradoxical parallel between overfishing, overgrazing the commons when there is no property right on the goods. Paradoxically, with the great abundance of information and free access to it, we are destroying the information that is available. That is, we are everybody, the distinction between opinion and facts has disappeared. To paraphrase, I think with Senator Moynihan, I think we all feel that we are entitled not only to our opinions, but also to our facts, our personal, private facts. Is that what is the explanation for this paradoxical thing? I do research and I see that everybody has his own version of facts and kind of the profusion of digital data visualization sources and so on has really helped kind of corrupt fact and we cannot tell what is fact and what is fiction. Because, it's saying in part, because there's such a surfeit of material available, because there's so much. Exactly. Comments. Well, it's an interesting question whether things are getting better or worse because certainly for millennia, most, almost everything that people believed was false and so the question is whether, say, information technology is making it easier or harder to do fact checking. I'll give you a couple of examples in, I mean, in say something like Wikipedia or in the blogosphere, at least it is said, this is the ideal, that since many heads are better than one, if someone makes an error and there is massive public scrutiny, then someone who knows the fact or can identify it and correct it very, very quickly. And it's, I know there's controversy about it, but it is said that with the proliferation of blogs, the number of people who are listening to each other and looking out for facts has led to a large number of facts from the major media, from CBS and from CNN and so on, being corrected very quickly. Conversely, and in Wikipedia, the obvious question is what's keeping it accurate and the least the advertised answer is that when you have a large enough community all attending to it, then it's likely that someone, either someone with the authority to know or a large number of people who all know will prevent the errors from proliferating. One of my favorite examples for how the internet, I think really can help fact checking, is the site for urban legends. I think it's called Snopes. Snopes, you can track it down like that and I don't know of cases in which they've added to error, they've certainly done a lot in eliminating it or I mean in reducing it, I should say. From the librarian's perspective, we see this as the moment, the teaching moment. We are very concerned about 21st century literacies and it's not just being able to read anymore, it's also being a critical thinker and understanding. How do you ask the questions of whether or not this is valid or not and these are skills that we need for the 21st century? I was very interested in Steve's little story about his 12 year old internet friend because as a practical matter, one of the things that no one has noticed particularly unless you happen to have school aged children is that over the last five to 10 years all across the United States school libraries have been torn out and replaced with banks of internet connected computers and students are told that they don't need to learn traditional or conventional ways of conducting research or citing information or any of those of us who have gray hair who can remember formal training in research and citation and giving credit where credit is due and so on and how to recognize a valid source from a popular source for instance. That whole infrastructure that used to teach society to distinguish between quote quality information and junk has gone away in the school system so I think there is a challenge for society in understanding how best to restore some sense of training about how to evaluate information. In the back, yes, come to the microphone please. Hi, Wendy Gordon from Boston University. The question is to all three of you about what suggestion you might make to us academics who are choosing between different commonses. That is assuming we've written an article, we've got our reimbursement through our paycheck and that we've been strong-minded enough to resist the publisher's demand to assign the copyright over completely. At that point, we might choose for example between a negative common that is just putting it out there for anyone with no claims on how it's used or a positive common, something like Richard Stallman's general public license or creative commons share alike. If you put it out there subject to a positive commons, typically you'll say something like anyone can use this subject to conditions, particularly the condition that you let other people use freely your product. And you require that anyone who uses your product similarly has a restriction of the same kind. The notion known as copy left. How do you, what factors would you suggest someone take into account in deciding whether to put their stuff out there into the public domain essentially for anyone to copy but also exclude third parties from versus putting it out there in a way that says hey, use my stuff as you want but the product of it has to also be open. That was very helpful, Monday. Copy left. You know, I think we need to do a lot more work in this area. Many of the librarians and others on campuses are doing a lot to help faculty to know best options. I have a colleague who's a copyright specialist who gives me model licenses. I say to him, you know, I mean when you talk about this stuff, you're in one sphere and then you become the author and you get this contract and you think oh my goodness, now what do I do? Do I have to go out and hire a lawyer? How do I alter this? We need to have good alternatives out there. Creative Commons is a good way to do it perhaps but some journals don't take Creative Commons licenses and you certainly don't want to give up your options. But what we're finding is journals are much more open to you revising copyright agreements than you think. They send you this form and usually if you cross it out and say what you're willing to do, I've never had them come back to me and say no. What's happened through this movement of open access is even companies like, there I mentioned Elsevier and a few of the others are getting much more flexible but they don't necessarily tell you they're flexible. So who do you go to? Well, certainly hopefully your local librarian can help. We're trying to work with university presses as well although some of them are not as far along so they better understand some of these things. The other thing is this is not necessary either or proposition. One of the most successful digital repositories where people put up their articles online is something called Archive. It's for physicists. I'm sure some of you probably contribute. Physicists tell me they wouldn't think of publishing in a journal without also posting to Archive and it's become commonly accepted now through the physics community, publishing community that you will publish in these peer reviewed prestigious journals but you will also put a preprint and then a postprint up on Archive and they're not necessarily mutually exclusive so you can have both. You can have your cake and eat it too and hopefully the agreements that you will sign will allow you to do the posting. The Chemical Society, I don't know if they modified their position but a lot, I mean the physics journals at first, the main physics societies were, that's where they make all their money. I mean this problem evolved from our professional societies. They saw ways to keep their membership costs down in the 80s when these companies came to them and said, you know, we'll disseminate, you'll get more money. So they used that as an opportunity to keep your membership dues down and then it came back to Hulmpum. It sort of hit them in the face. So a lot of the societies now are having to rethink this and science has been hit the worst so the science journals have been the first ones to really adopt this but it's now going and rippling out to other disciplines as well. So they're a lot more open recognizing now that they need to be more open and that just because you publish in an important journal doesn't mean that you're going to undermine that journal's market by also posting on a digital repository. I would just like to add it, I was like, may I just add, yeah. That wasn't responsive, I was really hoping for some comments about the choice between the kind of public access one would choose after one's already put one's foot down to the publisher. The two big choices as I said are what between what philosophers call open commons and closed commons. Open commons means anybody can take anything so that if someone translates my article into German, they can sell their translation. A closed comment is something with conditions on it, something like copy left where I say you can only use my thing without, you can only use my thing. If you allow other people to freely use what you make so that you could only make the translation unless other people do. And it's that choice that a lot of us are interested in guidance on. I think that in many ways that is a personal choice that's gonna be a function of what discipline you teach in or write in and how you feel personally about the control of your work going forward. I would say that it is important for authors to put their work in persistent places. The d-space repository at MIT, for instance, is a persistent repository. So you get a permanent URL when your work goes in there and you can be quite confident that it will be there for a very long time. So you can agonize over the conditions under which creative commons license you choose, for instance. But if you put your work in a environment which is not persistent, it doesn't matter because it's gonna be going in five years anyway. Let me add though, the creative commons licenses, most of the ones that people sign are for some rights reserved. So you reserve some rights. You don't give away totally to the public domain. They do have a public domain license. But most of the people who use creative commons licenses use the some rights reserved option. Someone have their hand up here for your second. Nolan, go ahead. You're next. I'm Nolan Bowie. I'm a senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. I have some observations and I guess a couple of questions. When Nancy was making her comments and she mentioned George Lakoff's book Don't Think About an Elephant, she said in essence that we need to take control of the language. We need to reframe issues. We need to create our own metaphors. From my own experience and witnessing Noam Chowsky, talk about when he presents new ideas and new perspectives to audiences, often the reaction is he's speaking a foreign language because it's new to them. It's not of their world view of the way things work. So when you introduce these new terms and you don't have stickiness by lacking the opportunity of regular access to mass media where people are exposed to new ideas, new metaphors, it may not work. That's not to say we shouldn't do it. I'd like to know what you think about that. The other observation is that there was mentioned that you can't copyright a formula or a fact. Now, this may be, in fact, a theory, but there are certain things that come close to facts or formulas that are copyrightable or copyrighted or a patent. For example, news. I don't think of news as a statement of facts, but the networks all own their news broadcasts in this sequence. Databases. If your name is on a database with a series of other names, whoever put together the database owns it. Computer coding is a series of ones and zeros. It looks very much like a mathematical formula. In the early case, I believe Apple sued Franklin for copying their operation code. And it was in the form of a chip, which our nearly one would think is a tangible invention, that would be protected by a patent. Instead, they used copyright because copyright was longer. Any comments on that? Why don't I start? Because I'm the one who made the comment. In fact, it is true that databases own the structure and format and composition where there is enough sweat of the brow. There is a whole body of case law in this. You cannot own a fact. Nobody owns the pathetic Red Sox score from two nights ago. You cannot own that. You cannot own the price of a stock that's trading in the Japanese market right now. You cannot own facts. You cannot own formulas. So people will own the wrappers around it and perhaps attempt to assert copyright in facts. But indeed, under United States law, you cannot own a fact. So one of the issues. Is the DNA string a fact? I mean, yes. It seems very factual to me. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I mean, it cannot be copied. I mean, theoretically, it should not be able to be copied. But I thought it was under control of some private companies. Is it no longer? So I think what we're doing, though, is we're thinking of an elephant here. We keep talking about the copyright restrictions and it's very easy to fall back on that. But the example that I like is the one about the architects talking about, where would architecture be if we copyrighted or restricted access to these columns? It's a human genome project. I mean, we need to talk about the positives, too, not just about what it is that's being restricted and how outrageous it is, which we agree on. But how do we start telling the story about how creativity was fostered or innovation? Because people had open access to information and the impact of it. So I think it's just a matter of us trying to get the story out a little bit differently, too. As disciplines, you can choose your path. Those who are working on the human genome project chose to make that data publicly available. It's in the public domain. It's out there. They chose to do that. So now, how do we have our stories about saving people's lives, thanks to this choice? Hi. My name is Michael Klein. I'm a graduate student in library and information science. And I've long been an advocate in my previous life as a software developer for open source software and things that have grown out of the momentum from it, like Wikipedia, open source information, creative comments. And my biggest problem has not really been finding people to contribute to the commons. It's getting people who are used to paying for things and looking at ownership to trust the commons. And unfortunately, they have a point, because as history shows, there's never a shortage of people who are willing to pollute the commons. You only have to look at the revision history of a Wikipedia page to see every other change is vandalism removed, vandalism removed. And so I'm curious about how we start to go about solving that public relations problem and getting people to start bringing their cows back, because they're afraid. Well, if you look at the literature of the commons, which is not necessarily the literature, the information commons, but people who work on managing commons, like people who work in business administration or public administration, there's a whole literature about managing comments, just like managing businesses. And they talk a lot about the conditions that you need to successfully manage commons. One of them is about a community, defining the community, having boundaries, but also having rules. But the community makes those rules. So when we know there's something wrong, all of us have been on the listserv with the people that make the listserv, something that you want to get off of. Well, how do we have norms in that common space where people govern themselves or create rules? And I think those are issues. And sometimes that's what leads to the tragedy of the commons, according to the commons literature. There has not been a well-conceived management structure. It doesn't mean it's not managed. I mean, Larry Lessig and I get into and others get into this discussion. Larry believes the public domain is a commons. Others that study commons say, no, the public domain is not a commons. That's you don't have anybody protecting it. You don't have any boundaries of it. And that's why there's a tragedy of the public domain. And it's being picked apart and not very open anymore is because it's just out there unprotected. So it is not being governed by the kinds of rules and norms and reciprocity and other things that commons that are well managed usually have. I think your last question is a profound one that it's part of. I think it's part of the, one way to understand the problem is to recognize that we are being asked, among other things, to rediscover or to develop new civic virtues that have fallen into disarray. And in which we have to learn or relearn certain kinds of principles of sharing and commonality before the digital commons would remotely become a reality. So it isn't, as is always the case, I think it really isn't so much a technological as it is a moral and political question about how a culture or how a subgroup or a community or a subculture regards what we're calling the information commons. We have to develop new habits of respect for one another and mutuality and sharing before these systems will become powerful. Yes? My name is Will Talheimer. And I actually come from outside the academy. And so my question for you is really does this notion of the commons, is it really relevant outside of that sphere? And I raised that issue for a couple of reasons. Number one, in the academy, the people that are creating the information are paid a salary. And that's relevant because copyright law is originally created to protect creators, OK? The second reason it's important is because not all information from the academy or the information is there's other information besides that that comes out of the academy. And one of the weaknesses of the academy is it doesn't always create information that is practically relevant. In my field, in the learning and performance field, in the training and development field, there's all this great research done by academic researchers. And then there's practitioners, the instructional designers, and the trainers who have virtually no idea of what the research says. And to me, there's a clear problem of communicating that good information to the practitioners. And the current model clearly doesn't work. To me, there needs to be a transformation of the information from the academy to the practitioners. Because the people in the academy are not motivated, are not incented to do that. The salaries that you get are for developing theories and communicating to your other fellow researchers. So the people that are going to make that transformation from the academy to the practitioners need to be compensated. There needs to be, it seems to me, copyright protections for their work. Because it's hard work. I think one of you said, and I'm going to be critical here, that you can put something up on the internet and that's free to do that. It's not free to do that. You have to pay for the web hosting. You have to figure out how to use front page. You have to create the knowledge in the first place. There's a lot of information there, a lot of work. So anyway, does this model relate to outside the academy? Well, I think it's an excellent question. And I think a lot of these, at least for me, are questions of human nature, what motivates people. Fear motivates people. That is, you're going to be sued or put in jail. Money motivates people. Esteem motivates people, usually within some reference group that you care about. And I guess I'm uncomfortable with solutions that seem to call for changing human nature for all of us. We should all be nicer. We should all share. We should all be generous. Because I think that those entreaties have some effect, but they don't solve the serious problems that we have. And we have to look at the incentive structures, both in terms of who gets paid for what and who gets esteem within which community. And it is certainly true that academics, as you say, it's absolutely right. They get a salary. And there are certain kinds of rewards in terms of promotion and grant that depend completely on esteem within their peer group. And so anything that benefits people outside that closed circle of academics taking in each other's laundry brings no rewards whatsoever. I was speaking to a colleague who I was kind of condescerating about the number of requests that we get often from reporters to comment on some story with a scientific angle. And so I just never return those calls. I figured that they're just asking to use up my time. And I was kind of appalled because it is the taxpayers that are paying for research. There's an enormous amount of public money that goes into universities, whether it be state universities or in the form of grants and tax breaks and so on, private universities. So I often feel that there is a responsibility of academics to give knowledge away, whether it be by publishing in accessible places or by doing various kinds of pro bono work, like talking to reporters or the 12-year-olds with science projects. But you don't get either pay or esteem for it, except for certain narrow mechanisms like writing a book that has some minuscule chance of being a bestseller. It's interesting to describe an initiative that's coming out of the National Institutes of Health that kind of speaks to your point. The National Institutes of Health fund an enormous amount of biomedical research in the United States on an annual basis. And they have become very concerned about the fact that the research results that are described from this research that they fund go into commercially published works and are controlled by private companies for the most part. And so they have instituted in the last year a policy which asks their principal investigators who get the funding for the research to deposit with the National Library of Medicine in something called PubMed Central, a final peer-reviewed copy of the manuscript for the articles that they write that describe the medical advances. So the government in this case talked in my remarks about the three different opportunities for using the internet, their market forces, their government forces, and their personal contributions. And it's true that the personal contributions have a relatively low threshold. It's not a zero threshold, but it's a relatively low threshold compared to full-scale industrial production and distribution of journals. So the National Institutes of Health have said to the principal investigators, in order to solve this problem that you have just described, we would like you to deposit in an openly available public place a final peer-reviewed copy of your work so that the taxpayers who paid for it can read it as well as those who can afford to subscribe to the journals that publish it. I think that when we talk about the commons, we're not necessarily talking about an either or. There's just an incredible mix of all this stuff. There's definitely still a major place for private sector publishing, for public sector publishing, but there's also a place for this shared resource. And they're not necessarily mutually exclusive as far as what we're just talking about. Scholars are publishing in journals that cost a whole lot of money they're still selling, but they're also making that article available. And they have very different kinds of audiences. Journals have a purpose in the same way that open access has a purpose. And sometimes you find it through open access, and sometimes you find it coming across your desk or going through a database through a published journal. And there's just all kinds of ways this can happen. But I think too much of what we've seen is that's an either or. And now we've got opportunities to have more both hands. Folks, we still have some reasonable time. Let me encourage everyone again to be brief and brilliant. I have one quick response to the last comment, which is it would be a terrible mistake for us to allow the discourse to narrow such that we allowed ourselves to imagine that to talk about the digital commons meant to talk primarily about scholarly publishing. The model I sometimes have in mind is the model of the public library in the United States, which is hardly a specialized space. It's a civic space that is available to children and old people and uneducated people. And the whole point of the public library was to be a kind of public information commons. In some ways, that model is a very inspiring one. And if we could find ways of bringing it into the 21st century, we'd be in a much more democratic environment than we are. Now, a question here and you're next. Sir. The last question. Please identify yourself. Oh, so as Steve Whitaker, I'm a visiting scientist at the Media Lab. There's a competitive issue around this idea of where the commons apply outside of the traditional academic domain. If you take things like operating systems, you can see that Linux, for example, as a commons has been very effective. So there's an argument that says, if you look at the media industry, what's happened is that online technologies have allowed that value chain to be collapsed and to reduce the amounts of profit. That actually has to be done in that value chain and that they would basically unnecessarily retain profits in that value chain. And the same applies to other industries. So for example, once things become very easy and everyone's doing them but they're just time consuming and your competitors overseas can do them more inexpensively. So for example, if all your software engineers are busy writing low level code that's taking time, they're not adding value and it's being done 20 times cheaper in India, there's no point in doing that. So it's perhaps in the interests of the engineering community to put things into the commons so they can move up the stack. So there's strong competitive advantages in using commons in the right circumstances. The challenge is whether you can use that to stay ahead of the game for a sustainable period or not. And that's an economic policy that I don't think anybody's really answered the question on yet, but that's the ground problem I suspect. Thank you, sir, over here. My name is Steve Marks, I'm a television producer. I have I guess a populist comment about the political and cultural implications of the metaphor of the commons. And you had talked to Nancy a lot about how important that metaphor is. To me, the commons suggests both a sort of New England, comfortably to me, New England-y and sort of literary feeling. When I think of a commons in cultural terms, I feel a little hawthornish or Louisa May Al-Khadish. But I think that for much of the country, a metaphor which I think works out somewhat differently but would be the operative metaphor would come from the movies rather than literature and it's the open range and barbed wire. And there are a lot of movies about the enclosure and the struggle to close off and turn into farms, the open range. And so I think that probably resonates differently but I just wanted to suggest that maybe you think a little bit about it and it, you know, open web, open range and the fact that in much of this country that metaphor is probably a much more comfortable and familiar one to many people, probably not necessarily college professors but to most of the population. Over here. You're next. Yes, ma'am. Jan Merrill-Oldem. I'm trying to reconcile some things. Do we agree that there is information of enduring value that has the potential to emerge in the open commons and not appear in other places? Is that possible? Does the open commons become this juicy thing where ideas emerge and get distributed but don't appear in the published literature? Do you mean like scientific ideas? Yeah. Sure. Well, there are web-only journals and even before there were discussion groups and listservs where often people would formulate ideas that they would never publish in a journal and that would even get cited in the scholarly literature. We'd cite a posting to a listserv or a webpage. And then of course there are collective products like Linux and Wikipedia and the blogosphere and so on. I'm knocking up against the notion of archiving, of capturing and holding onto ideas over the very long term and the cost of doing that and can't sort out how we have this free and open exchange and widespread distribution and at the same time survival of the ideas and the discussion, the discourse that emerges and the cost of trying to retain that information in an environment where the model for paying isn't really very clear. Yeah, I mean, I understand and take your point. I think I wanna go back to something Steve said a little while ago about human nature. I do believe that there is a great, there is the potential for the great swirling mass of information that's out there on the internet that feels like Madison Square Garden at Rush Hour. But as a practical matter, the internet does pretty rapidly it seems to me begin to sort itself out using very conventional social structures and norms of behavior. So D-Lib for instance is a very influential online only journal that speaks to what's going on in the digital library domain. Everybody who needs to know what's happening reads it. It's got a persistent archive as surely as print journals have persistent archives, although clearly we have to figure out what it means to archive something for the same length of time in bits as you archive something in paper. These are totally different technical problems. But I do think that the internet has and is developing the same kind of social structure and norms in the management of the quality of the content as society does in other ways. There's another partial answer to what you've been saying. It's also a response in a way to Stephen's reminders to us that human nature is not going to be transformed and we need to imagine a 21st century in which people remain as greedy as they were in the 18th century. And I wonder, I meant to recommend this at the beginning of our session anyway. There are two very important books, recent books have come out that deal in some ways with new ways of thinking about the idea of property that have come up because of digital technologies. One of them is a book by Stephen Weber called The Success of Open Source. It was just published by the Harvard University Press. A second is a book by the MIT professor, Eric von Hippel called Democratizing Information. I learned about these books from a review by Larry Lessig in a recent issue of the London Review of Books. The review itself is very interesting. Both these books articulate in different ways notions about the way in which certain forms of information distribution can be very profitable in ways that are alternative models to the old idea of a narrow sort of centralized ownership and in his review Larry Lessig talks about the fact that develops this idea a bit and makes a distinction between what he calls a sharing economy as against a quid pro quo economy. If we begin to think about the rewards that come to a sharing economy, to a model that involves sharing, what we recognize is that it isn't often a matter of altruism, that there are particular companies that are getting much richer because they use distributed systems and they open their products to innovation by clients rather than tightly controlling the product from a centralized source. So that's part of the answer as well. There are new models for profit that are beginning to emerge because of digital technologies. I wanna make a comment about the archiving issue that you brought up. Those of us who work in libraries are faced with archiving all the print materials that nobody's taken responsibility for and somehow the research library community got stuck with that one and we're getting stuck with the digital one as well. I mean, companies like Elsevier are these huge publishing companies that are publishing a lot electronically do not have any solutions to this and they've now made some arrangements with some major national libraries to start helping them but the private sector in my experience has taken almost no responsibility for archiving and has always fallen to the educational world and archival world that's not really supported to do it so it's just out there hanging digitally just the way it's always been in print as well. It feels like it's comforting to think that if it's valuable it will survive but I think that the survival of the valuable is gonna require the kind of subsidy that we have in academic institutions and that absent that the notion of long-term survival of good ideas becomes somewhat questionable when we think about researchers going back and grabbing stuff from 300 years ago that isn't in the current literature because it survived through the print record. I don't know. Sir, can I add something? Yeah, can I just have a follow-up on that? Sure. The, and I think this is a problem even before there was digital publishing because in two fields that I participated in here at MIT in the 70s and 80s there was an ethos of not publishing in academic journals. This is both in linguistics and in artificial intelligence where these were new, young, free-wheeling disciplines and journal publication was too slow when things got distributed by technical reports and occasional papers and purple mimeos and xeroxes and you had to be kind of a somastat of informal publication. Now, sometimes I remember like this brilliant article and I wanna go back to it and I may not have it in my filing cabinet and the library isn't necessarily gonna have it although I'd probably be surprised if I ever tried and I have to ask them, does anyone remember this purple mimeo from Haj Ross with this funny title in 1972? There was no one has ever studied that problem since then and if no one, everyone happens to have thrown out that purple mimeo, then that contribution to human knowledge is lost and has to be rediscovered and so it's a problem that I think we're also facing even more with at least there if someone had it in their filing cabinet, I can still read it. If God forbid they would have it on an eight inch floppy disk then I'd really be in trouble. Sir. Adrian Groperman at Commons. I have a question for the, I'm not a librarian or an educator and I am, you've touched very distantly on the issue of bundling as a way of controlling information and I think the example that was given of the professional society that let the relationship with scientific publishers get away from them but this is and people touched upon the iPod spoke of the iPod or iTunes and I think it would be valuable to teach children not just about libraries but about the sources of information coming to them whether it's broadcast media or cable or other ways by which people make the development of the Commons difficult by bundling ancillary services that do not have to do with the intellectual content or copyright itself. I think a lot of the communities particularly the library community looking at this idea of information literacy or 21st century literacies focuses a lot on rights and responsibilities that we have in the information age and I think that's a really important knowledge and we certainly need to impart that at the academy as well which people are just not real familiar with what they can and can't do I think very often and need to learn the kind of responsibilities that they need to have to really be good citizens in the information society. Your remark makes me think of a good friend of mine who spent his life in the advertising industry who used to shake his head in amazement that no one was teaching American children how to understand advertising and it's taken a while so they get whipped around but now there are academic programs that help people understand media and its effect on the way people think so we get there eventually I think. I think we probably understand advertising from the cradle but that's another. We used to learn it from Mad Magazine. Let's go ahead and then you. Let's see I'm Kurt Priest I've been associated with the communication forum for 25 years. I'm also a scholar in comparative media studies here at MIT. Two things I want to make a comment and that's why Ray go to something that Dr. Pinker said. As I hear the discussion talk about all these articles and journals and pieces and so forth. I've just been appointed to be the liaison person for learning objects between IEEE and the American Library Association. Okay, ALA came to us and they said we know you're doing meta-tagging and I just presented the paper last year at AACE about how eventually it's not going to be all these little chunks. They're going to be in the small talk model. They're going to be these things on the internet and they're going to be able to talk to each other and they're going to be able to say do you know this if not go here and so I mean. And we've laid out a framework and I just want to, I don't want to get stuck kind of seeing oh well we're grappling with this particular year's millennium act or something. I'm an H.E. Wellsian. He wrote World Brain in 1938 pre-computer and then the only other question I had and it's more for fun than anything else but it's somewhat of an edge to it. I do have some disdain for publishers. I've marked up many a contract and sent it back. But have they're not particularly in the biological sciences and aquatic life in particular very important symbiotic relationships between parasites and hosts. I don't know if that requires a comment but it's very helpful. Les, do you have a question, comment? Hal, you're next. Les Perlman at MIT. I like that metaphor of the range of the sod busters versus the cattle farmers although I think it actually is inverted that again, if you look at the history of copyright of why it existed until you had printing the cost of producing a book was very much more than its intrinsic value so you actually since it took about a half a person year to produce a book there was no such thing as copyright because the production of the artifact was much more than the book. It's in 1608 you have the copyright act in England and establishes the copyright libraries which not only establishes copyright but establishes the commons in the sense of that everyone has access to copyrighted materials at the King's Library now the London Library, the British Library at the Bodleian and the Cambridge University Library and then later in Wales and Scotland. But, and then what's happened now is that publishers came along and they were bearing the cost of distribution and all those things. Well now the cost of distribution and production has in the digital age gone down dramatically but what's happened really is what they're doing is pushing back. You can think of that open range in things like when they want to extend the copyright, the length of copyright from author's death even longer. They're taking the public property, the range and they're trying to fence it in. And in the same way if you think again of archiving the archiving function has was settled in 1608 by the idea of the copyright libraries and wouldn't it be sensible now that the terrain has changed to say that well if someone, a journal wants to copyright their material they have to have some kind of archiving function done at university research libraries and some kind of reciprocal agreement. Hal. Yeah, I'm Hal Abelson. I started Creative Commons along with Larry Lesig and Eric Elford. He's also the architect of the open course of MIT's open courseware. With all this talk about the commons and people are prone to say tragedy of the commons, the problem is not the tragedy of the commons. The problem is what Halpern and Eisenberg have called the tragedy of the anti-commons with respect to the open range. The tragedy of the anti-commons happens when the open range is fenced off into plots that are one square foot each. And in order to traverse anything or do anything you suddenly need permissions from tens of thousands of people. And what's happening now is that's happening in the world of digital information. So well-known problem in documentary film makers. If you look at Ann's definition of the commons it did not say that people have the right to use all of it for free. It said people can use it without asking permission and it's important not to be confused about that. We set up a false dichotomy and Steve was sort of asking how do people get paid if you put things into the commons? The problem is not that people don't get compensated. The problem is that people have to be asked. So what you need to do is find ways to lower the transaction costs. So the analogy is if I'm a songwriter when someone records my song the first time the next 20 people who wanna make what's called a cover of that song don't have to ask my permission. If I'm a broadcaster over the air if a cable company wants to retransmit my publicly broadcasted stuff they don't have to ask my permission although there are negotiated rates where they have to compensate me. So don't get trapped, don't get into this trap that there is no way to compensate people if you're going to minimize the transaction costs. And this comes back to I think Wendy Gordon's question which is a very, very serious issue which is given that you choose to contribute to the commons what strictures do you put on your stuff? And the answer I think really comes down to an individual choice that is informed by the kind of social mores you believe in. So for example, in academic publishing we probably don't wanna put things into the public domain because at a minimum we want to preserve our attribution whether that's selfish or not we can argue but it's within the norms of the scientific and academic community that you preserve attribution. Similarly, there are other kinds of strictures you might wanna put in but they have to be based on the norms that you're supporting. Let me give a plug for a new book that's about to come out by MIT Press by Walensky called I believe the open access the access principle and in there he talks about one of the norms that should inform the academic community which says if you believe in the importance of doing research and doing good research then you should therefore believe in the importance of making that research available to as wide a group of people as could possibly benefit it and I think this starts getting back to Wendy's question and how you make that choice because I think it's very, very important. Thank you. We've come to the end. This was very exciting. I hope you all return for later forums. Thank you audience. Thank you panel.