CODATA, The Committee on Data for Science and Technology

World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)
Past, Present and Future of Research in the Information Society
13-15 November 2005, Corinthia Khamsa Hotel, Tunis

Abstract:

The 'Global Information Commons' and the Public Domain: An Introduction

Paul A. David
The Oxford Internet Institute and Stanford University
pdavid@herald. ox.ac .uk or pad@stanford.edu

The proposed Initiative to create a Global Information Commons for Science constitutes a distinct and important part of the larger movement to achieve a productive balance between the domains of proprietary R&D and publicly funded open science. The broad goal is to devise and implement new policy guidelines and legal structures that are especially adapted to promoting the future conduct of collaborative scientific work in a variety of research domains. (See http:// www.codata.org/wsis/GlobalCommonsforScienceSept1.html .) Success in this endeavour would contribute to the global mobilization of knowledge-generating talents and material resources that can address the problems and aspirations of humanity in the twenty-first century.

This presentation briefly sets out the underlying economic and legal basis for the practical feasibility of developing a “contractually constructed commons” approach to counteracting the deleterious effects of encroachments made upon the public domain by intellectual property rights. At the core of the new approach which the Initiative would develop is the voluntary use of the rights held by intellectual property owners , allowing them to construct by means of licensing contract s those conditions of “ common-use ” that emulate the key features of the public domain which have proved so beneficial for collaborative research in all its forms. Thus, essential ownership rights can be preserved and utilized in a way that contributes to maximizing the social benefits and returns on the public’s investments in research. Creating legal coalitions or “clubs” for the cooperative use of scientific data, information , materials and research tools that are not in the public domain, offers a practical, “bottom up” way to reduce if not completely remove the adverse effects that patent thickets, copyright royalty stacking, and similar impediments can have upon the conduct of fundamental, exploratory research programs. The resultant pooling of data and information for in a specific research domain is properly described as “creating an information common for science ” -- inasmuch as a “common” is a collectively held and managed bundle of resources to which access by cooperating parties is rendered open (though perha ps limited as to extent or use) under minimal transactions cost conditions. Furthermore, and somewhat paradoxically, cooperative licensing arrangements of the kind envisaged by the Initiative will enjoy the full legal protections afforded the participants by the intellectual property regime itself. Common-use licensing to promote broad access and reuse of intellectual property rather than restricting it, is being widely used by free and open-source software development communities, and others applications of this legal strategy currently are being developed by the Science Commons (under the auspices of Creative Commons: http://science.creativecommons.org).