Law and Information

At a PrepCom meeting for the WSIS II summit, the European Union reportedly changed its position and now advocates for formal international oversight of ICANN. The rhetoric has shifted as well: Several news reports (some of them by quoting government officials) present the story as a question about “who controls the Internet,” suggesting that currently the U.S. is in control of the Internet. John Palfrey has a chrisp response to such a misleading notion of control. It seems to me that this recent switch in the EU’s position contributes to the “politics of control” sections of courses like this one — using the term “politics” in a slightly different interpretation, though.

BTW, some of you might want to take a (second) look into Herbert Burkert’s ICANN piece “About a Different Kind of Water,” discussing some approaches to the problem from a European perspective.

Nice op-ed by Tim O’Reilly in today’s NYTimes. Tenor: “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors than copyright infringement,” and: “I’m sorry to see authors buy into the old-school protectionism of the Authors Guild, not realizing they’re acting against their own self-interest. Their resistance can come only from a failure to understand the nature of the program. Google Library is intended to help readers discover copyrighted works, not to give copies away. It’s a tremendous service to authors that will help them beat the dismal odds of publishing as usual.”

I had the great pleasure to participate in the International Society for New Institutional Economics’ 9th Annual Conference that took place in my favorite European city Barcelona. Professor Oliver Goodenough from Vermont Law School organized and chaired an interesting panel on the design and function of digital institutions. It turned out that New Institutional Economists, by and large, have not yet explored this topic in such a great detail as one would expect, and Oliver’s session, in fact, was the only one at the conference dealing with cyber-issues at all (which is a bit surprising given the breadth and depth of the conference — check the program.) Oliver did a terrific job in framing the key questions we were talking about - “we” also includes Berkman Fellow John Clippinger, who presented some striking theses about cyber-institutions born out of social networks and their interactions with institutions of the offline world. My own contribution is posted here. Thanks to Oliver, John Clippinger and, last but not least, John Palfrey for making the conversation possible.

The OECD will soon release an interesting study on digital content in scientific publishing, which analyzes scientific publishing’s new business models, including open access publishing, open access archives and repositories, and subscription bundling and site-licensing, their impacts on science and diffusion of knowledge; and the role of governments in enhancing access to publicly funded research.

Among the main findings are:

• Scientific publishers have invested heavily in online publishing and in 2003 75% of scholarly journals were available online.
• Overall, the balance is shifting towards direct access to primary data sources, which is having major impacts on publishers.
• Three major business models depending on digital delivery are emerging: The so-called “big deal”, open access publishing, and open access archives and repositories.
• Change is driven by mounting user needs to access increasing volumes of research data and information, new ICT applications and development of digital content and digital access technologies, and greater cost transparency and competition in publishing and distribution of information.

The OECD study also contains policy recommendations. Among them are:

• Enabling maximum access to findings from publicly funded research in order to maximize social returns on public investments.
• Coordinated efforts at national and international levels are needed to broaden access to data from publicly funded research.

As with the other reports published as part of the OECD Digital Broadband Content Project, the OECD secretariat has done a terrific job– both in terms of stocktaking and looking forward.

Berkman Center’s Executive Director John Palfrey has a nice op-ed on political campaigns in cyberspace in the Boston Globe.