The framing panel sets up the remainder of the conference by giving us the language to talk about what access to knowledge requires, and identify the core concerns of justice that drive this movement. Justice, human flourishing, economic development, and human rights were the main themes. Helen Nissenbaum moderated this panel, which included Jack Balkin, Sisule Musungu, Joel Mokyr, Davinia Ovett, John Howkins, and Yochai Benkler. Detailed notes after the jump.
Update: See the conference wikipage for this panel.
Jack Balkin, a law Professor at Yale Law School, Director of the Information Society Project, and author of the Balkinization blog, kicked off the panel by making three points: A2K is a demand of justice, a matter of economic development and liberty, A2K is about far more than IP. A2K is a set of principles that have emerged from a loose collection of social movements responding to changes in the economy. Information, like capital, is a set of relatinships between persons and groups: some people control it, others don't, and law enforces this divide.
1) "Access to knowledge" refers to four things: knowledge, information, knowledge embedded goods (drugs, electronic hardware, software), tools (materials and compounds, software). The goal of A2K is to improve access to these four goods.
Access to knowledge is a matter of distributional justice. Justice requires two things: 1) If you can produce the same or greater amounts of these four components, and distribut them more widely, jsustice demands this. 2) If you can spur additional innovation and production in areas that markets don't currently serve, justice demands this too. In other words, the right policies can increase total production and distribute knowledge goods in a more equitable fashion. The goal is: promoting economic development and human flourishing in our historical moment, the global information economy.
2) A2K is a question of economic development, human flourishing, and liberty. It's not just about economics. However, a balanced IP policy is good for economics. The best information policies actually lower barriers to A2K. They produce more information goods and distribute them more widely. The economics are on the side of this argument: it turns out that IP maximalism doesn't make economic sense. A more balanced set of IP policies actually creates more wealth.
Decentralizing information production to make it more participatory makes society more democratic, and promote human flourishing. There is overlap between focus on development and human rights. But focusing on human rights brings two risks. a) People have started to argue that strong IP is a human right; b) Much information policy requires government investment (e.g., education, libraries, telecom infrastructures), and encouraging the private sector to innovate. Some of these policies and reforms are hard to squeeze into the rhetoric of human rights discourse. This is why we have committed ourselves to other frameworks: including justice, democracy, human development.
3) A2K is largely about IP, but it is far more than that. There is good reason to focus on IP. If our goal is the promotion of human flourishing, economic development, and freedom, A2K must look beyond international trade and policy. Providing basic telecom access and fundamental healthcare may be more important in some countries. We should distinguish between law on the books and law in action -- countries often sign IPR treaties that they don't enforce, or enforce only selectively. In some cases IP enforcement isn't the major stumbling block to a good information policy. e.g., To develop a pharmaceutical industry you may need to focus more on public investment than on IP. A free press, government transparency, may be necessary to reduce government corruption -- but these go beyond IP.
That's why this conference has panels that go beyond IPR's.
Sisule Musungu, the team leader of IP Investment and Tech Transfer at the South Centre in Geneva, spoke about A2K from the perspective of international lawmaking in Geneva.
1) Defining A2K: A review of the origins and evolution of the international A2K movement. Wikipedia as of this morning defines A2K as a draft treaty. Hopefully by the end of the conference we will have a better definition of Access to Knowledge.
A2K in the context of the WIPO Development Agenda: The term "A2K" existed before the WIPO Development Agenda, but the discussion then was different from the conversation we're having now. The proposal is to enact a treaty that will ensure minimum access and tech transfer. The initial proposal by the Friends of Development focused only on access to publicly funded research. It has grown to much more than that. There were other A2K-related proposals in the WIPO Development Agenda not termed "A2K," related to norm-setting and impact assessment. For example, proposals on how to foster the creation of public goods, and enlarge the public domain.
The Geneva Declaration on the Future of WIPO and the A2K treaty: The February 2005 meeting was the first one, a very technical discussion on what should be in the treaty. Documents are available on the CPTech website. The Drahos proposal is for a framework treaty as the basis for a very complicated subject.
Note, "A2K: has not been important in the actual negotiations of the Developoment Agenda. We can probably explain this by noting that the initial proposal was very narrow but the international discussion is much wider. Within government circles there probably isn't a good understanding of the full dimensions of A2K. The broad goals of A2K may make it hard for government officials to argue for it when they are under pressure to show concrete results.
Is this just a development issue? The Friends of Development have made great efforts to explain that this is not a North-South issue at such. However, at the governmental level only the developing countries are arguing for these things. So this is why it has been framed as a North-South issue.
Is this just a WIPO issue? I don't think so, but that is the origin of the movement. The movement goes beyond IPR so we may need to go beyond.
2) Basic considerations in framing A2K: A2K is an organizing and advocacy tool. It is also a political tool. Third, A2K is an analytical framework suceptible to scientific inquiry, e.g., the economics of A2K or measuring A2K.
3) Possible normative frameworks.
Human rights is important as a strategic tool. But it is much more power in the economic, social rights, than in the civil, cultural rights.
An economic framework is challenging because the focus there tends to be a comparative advantage theory of trade. IP is produced in the North, commodities in the South, and that is a sensible tradeoff.
Human development
Free culture
Joel Mokyr, a leading economic historian at Northwestern University and author of The Gifts of Athena, started by noting he is an economist but there are different breeds of economists. When we talk about A2K we need to realize that not all knowledge is created equally. "A2K" may be too vague a term. I'm going to focus on "useful knowledge" in the sense of knowledge than can lead to more useful technologies and can therefore lead to economic growth.
"Propositional knowledge" is essentially descriptive in nature: science, math, geography, etc. "Prescriptive knowledge" includes instructions on how to make something, much like recipes. These should be sharply differentiated.
Propositional knowledge is almost non-proprietary, and most people who produce it do so for credit, not profit, and place it in the public realm. For prescriptive knowledge the profit motive is stronger, but other factors play a role. Proprietary and commodified to a point, but the market is complex and IPR's are difficult to navigate.
Why is access to knowledge so crucial to technological change? Creating new knowledge often depends on a base of propositional knowledge. You also need a catalog of existing knowledge because a lot of invention is recombination. You don't want inventors reinventing the wheel.
Access is costly: economists call it "transactions cost." It takes no money to give knowledge, but it can be costly to take knowledge. Four components to the cost: Does the knowledge exist? Where is it or who has it? How do you actually get the knowledge? (costly in terms of time, at leaste) How do you verify that it is trustworthy?
The costs have two aspects. 1) Technological: paper, printing press, railroad, internet. Search engines: alphabetization, library classification codes, encyclopedias. 2) Institutional: What incentives does the owner of the knowledge have to provide it? In an open source world signalling and reputation are critical. Emergence of open science in the 17th century. Open science is a signaling game -- it wasn't already around.
Historically there is a sea change in the late 17th and 18th century. The enlightenment. But the value of A2K is heterogeneous. Not everyone needs to know about every area of knowledge. Technology may imply a great bifurcation in access: a few need access, most may not. Rising inequality? May not be that bad.
We are going to see the emergence of access specialists. We need mechanisms to verify information to select good from bogus information. Any mechanism that diffuses knowledge needs to be accompanied by a reputation mechanism to establish authority.
In sum, we need to know: Access to what kinds of knowledge? Access by how many and whom? Direct or indirect access? Access at what cost?
Davinia Ovett, program officer on IP and Human Rights at 3D began by speaking about the cost of access to knowledge from the framework of human rights. Will individuals have to pay the cost of access information?
A2K is a crucial basis for the enjoyment of human rights. Can support development, transparency, participation in policymaking, exercise of human rights.
Framing A2K in human rights terms comes from several legal sources: The right to freedom of expression includes "freedom to seek, receive, impart information and ideas of all kinds." Art. 19 UDHR, ICCPR, & art. 13(1), CRC; The right of the child... Art. 17, CRC; regional treaties. e.g., African Charter on Human and People's Rights; the right to education, adequate food, health; the right to protection of moral and material interests (UDHR, ICESCR); right to development.
Human rights are not just rules and regulations. They also include monitoring bodies, special rapporteurs -- these have made recommendations on IPRs saying that IPR's must be consistent with human rights obligations.
There are limits to framing IP in terms of human rights. Many countries haven't ratified key treaties, including the US. IP rights-holders have tried to distort human rights language to argue that IP rights are human rights. Activists and academics need to push back against this.
John Howkins, Director of the Adelphia Charter on Creativity, Innovation, and IP, noted that we need a framework and starting point for the discussion. His preferred starting point is the creative economy. The main reason is that the creative economy more than any other brings together the individual -- their imaginations, dreams, sense of identity, drive to change the world -- and the economic system of transactions and rules about what's public and what's private.
This is just as much a North as a South issue -- it is not just a development issue. It is also much bigger than a digital issue. And it's more than just "knowledge." Monty Python is about jokes, cultural experience.
We have to be aware of limits to A2K, including the need for privacy. This is a more highly valued concern in Europe than in the US. It wasn't important in the Soviet Union, it is important in China. I want China to take a forward policy in this discussion.
Carlos Correa has identified the UN as the main target, including WIPO, UNESCO (the Convention on Cultural Diversity), the General Assembly, UNDP, UNEP. It is the UN in New York that should be a target.
The World Bank and the IMF alos need to be targets.
Yochai Benkler, professor at Yale Law School and author of the new book Wealth of Networks, began by recognizing the amazing collection of people from across disciplines, sources of knowledge, and geographical areas. He will offer a draft: Why now? Why care? What is to be done?
Why now? There are four long term trends. 1) Move from decolonization, to self-determination, to integration into a global trade system; 2) Rapid industrialization to rising capital intensity to an information knowledge economy; 3) Move from mass media to increasingly competitive media environment, to rise of netowrked information society; 4) From communism and statism to the scendance of human rights, human dignity and participatory politics, development as freedom.
The first two trends underlie the emergence of the global IP and trade system as an integrated system. From the late 19th-mid 20th century IP was largely peripheral to the international trade system. Early 1980s-mid-1990s move to integrate IP into trade. TRIPS was a major component, 1995. WIPO responds by offering competing maximalist sevices to the IP exporters. Since 1996 trend towards playable international system, the emergence of bilateral FTAs.
All of this is relatively new. It's not 100 years worth of settlement. It is very challengable. The major strategic moves are: the inclusion of IP in trade, wweaving of unilateral, bilateral, multilateral, the abstraction fo pharma/hollywood/semiconducotrs into IP industries; discrete policy cocnerns to industrial policy in a global info economy; from EU/US/Japan as competitors to a bloc in int'l trade.
From this has emerged a countermovement. Access to medicines/AIDS activism --> information common the net --> information freedom movement (encryption, privacy, speech) --> FOSS emerges as a movement --> human genome/patents in life forms/university patenting integrates scientists --> digital inclusion --> spectrum commons --> digitaization of info --> open access, all come together.
Wikipedia, Creative Commons as focal point, FLOSS, Brazil-Argentina, commercial firms, TACD conferences providing platform for coalescence.
Human development and justice are at the core. Regulatory mechanisms are at the periphery. Diverse conditions require diverse responses. Move from coalition of diverse movements to a global A2K movement.
Why care? Identify A2K as central to human development as central to information and justice. Mor of what maeks for human welfare depends on info, knowledge and culture. Look at the HDI: each element is critically dependent on access to info.
In freedom we see social sharing and exchange emerge as major modalities of economic production. Greater individual autonomy.
What is to be done? Regulation of information production is a huge potential barrier. Telecom, ICT policy, broadband, open spectrum. Open standards and tech regulation policy, like trusted systems and patenets in standards -- the values of openness in technology. Educational materials, libraries. Self-organization in society: civil society efforts, commons-based efforts.
This is a moment of opportunity. The stakes are high. How we shall be as free, equal, productive human beings in a global information economy?
(You can't get this from the text: this was a rip-roaring speech.)
Questions
What about the knowledge you need to access knowledge?
What are the intellectual costs of presuming one future ahead of us?
Why speak of these as countermovements rather than consequences of the digital network?
Benkler: Yes, I was referring to consequences of the global digital network. They are countermovements in the sense of pushing back against IP maximalism pushed by business interests.
As to the question about presuming one future: things are happening. The critical question is not how to command the sea to go back, but to understand that it can be channeled for a better world.
Answers
Ovett: It is possible to have diversity in an A2K movement. This requires being inclusive in the social movement. We have to ensure that everyone is listened to and included in this debate. We also need to pay close attention to grassroots groups.
Balkin: Many kinds of reforms in info policy make no sense unless there are literacy problems. But more than literacy is required.
Mokyr: You don't need access to all the technical jargon. You need translators, people who can interpret.
Musungu: A2K is a tool for bringing together people who care about things that are not exactly the same. We should not presume that we all agree on the same set of approaches.
Questions
It's not all about the knowledge, but the institutions to make the knowledge useful
The critical task is translating our issues to non-specialists. How can we articulate the main reasons for paying attention to A2K when there are so many other demands on peoples' time? What very concrete strategies are available across these communities to go beyond pointy-headed intellectuals?
We need to think about our values, not just scientific knowledge.
Answers
Balkin: I second the point that we need to think about public sphere and we wish we had time to have a panel on media concentration and IP policy.
Ovett: To get the policy interested we can talk about political participation. To get involved you need to know what's going on at all levels
Mokyr: We shouldn't judge people for not imbibing the knowledge we think is important.
Questions
[missed]
Isn't there a difference between access to information and access to knowledge?
Howkins: This kind of distinction can be limiting.
Musungu: A2K does go beyond IP.
Ovett: We can only figure out distinction between information and knowledge by going to the grassroots.
Balkin: In response to the question about whether we have to overhaul our IP regime to make any progress. Technology is always changing. It disrupts patterns and expectations about how to make money. The technological changes before us have only just begun. We already see firms moving away from maximalism, e.g., Google.
(Thanks to Lea Bishop, the Yale student who helped organize this conference.)