|
|
Keynote: Do we need to Unlock IP?
Publish or Protect? Public Interest Considerations in the
Management of Intellectual Property in Education, Training
and Research
Link to materials
The paper will analyse Australian Government policy interests
in the management of IP in education, training and research.
It will discuss the balance between dissemination of publicly
funded information to advance knowledge and sequestration
of IP to facilitate commercialisation. The paper will analyse
some current approaches to managing copyright in education,
training and research with particular reference to approaches
to charging for publicly funded learning materials and scholarly
publications. The paper will describe current Australian
Government initiatives to improve access to publicly funded
information.
Evan Arthur is currently responsible for coordinating DEST
involvement in innovation and research issues, including
the implementation
of Backing Australia’s Ability – Building our
Future through Science and Innovation (BAA). A key BAA initiative
is the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy,
a $542 million program to strengthen Australia’s research
infrastructure.
Responsible for coordinating Commonwealth involvement in
issues associated with the use of information and communications
technology (ICT) in education, Dr Arthur is
a key policy maker in this vital area. As Deputy Chair of
the
principal cross
sectoral body advising Commonwealth, State and Territory
Ministers,
Evan is associated with high level decisions relating to
the use of ICT in education. He has a doctoral thesis in
the area of Stoic Philosophy
and completed studies at Cambridge University (UK) and at
Newcastle University (Australia).
Back to top^
Prof
Yochai Benkler,
Professor of Law, Yale Law School, USA
http://www.benkler.org/
Commons-based production
Information, knowledge, and culture, and how we communicate,
are constitutive of individual autonomy, the functioning
of democracies, and the building blocks of human development.
How we structure our information production system, and how
we permit and constraint access to, and control over, information,
knowledge, and culture, is therefore a decision that must
engage our most basic moral commitments.
The emergence of
sharing and commons-based production as a sustainable modality
of production in the networked information economy offers
significant improvements over the industrial information
economy along all these dimensions. It allows individuals
to exercise greater control over their own information environment
and expression; it provides an alternative system of mass
communication for critical democratic discourse, and it offers
a source of steady flows of information-embedding goods and
services, knowledge, and culture that are not constrained
to focus on those who are able to pay the most.
Yochai Benkler's research focuses on the effect of laws
regulating information production and exchange on the distribution
of control over information flows, knowledge, and culture
in the digital environment. In particular the neglected role
of Commons-based approaches towards management of resources
in the digitally networked environment, and large-scale effective
sharing of privately owned goods and resources.
He has written about the economics and political theory
of rules governing telecommunications infrastructure, especially
wireless communications; rules governing private control
over information, in particular intellectual property; and
relevant aspects of US constitutional law. He is currently
a member of the Board of Advisors for Public Knowledge, an
organization advocating a fair and balanced approach to copyright
and technology policy. Recent publications include 'Coase's
Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm', 'Some Economics
of Wireless Communications', 'Freedom in the Commons' and
'Through the Looking Glass: Alice and the Constitutional
Foundations of the Public Domain'.
Back to top^
Prof James
Boyle
Professor of Law, Duke
Law School, USA
http://www.james-boyle.com/
The Opposites of Property
We have a simple word for, and an intuitive understanding
of, the complex reality of property: a richly textured
understanding of mine and thine, of rights of exclusion,
of division of rights (like tenant / landlord), of partial
transfers of rights (like rental). But what about the opposite
of property, its antonym, its outside? That, call it public
domain or commons, is harder to grasp than its inside. It
tends
to have a negative connotation: stuff in the Lost and Found
office which needs to be back into circulation as property;
the tragedy of the commons, the unowned or collectively owned
resources will be managed poorly and overgrazed. With intellectual
property, this knowledge gap is important, because our IP
system depends on a balance between what is property and
what isn't. Our art, culture,economy and science depend on
the
public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual
property.
The opposite of property is at least as complex and variegated
as property itself: not one opposite but many. I want to
distinguish two strands of analysis: the anti-monopolistic
critique of IP that argues for a rich public domain; and
what Yochai Benkler calls "
commons-based production".
James Boyle is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law
at Duke Law School in North Carolina, and faculty co-director
of the Centre for
the Study of the Public Domain. He writes
widely on issues of intellectual property, internet regulation
and legal theory. Professor Boyle is a founder and board
member of 'Creative Commons', which works to facilitate
the free availability of information, art and cultural
materials
by developing innovative, machine- and human-readable licenses
that individuals and institutions can attach to their work.
He is also a member of the academic advisory board of the
Electronic Privacy and Information Centre (EPIC), and of
Public Knowledge. In 2003, Professor Boyle won the World
Technology Award for Law. Recent publications include 'What
the Squabbles over Genetic Patents Could Teach Us,' 'The
Second Enclosure Movement,' 'Fencing Off Ideas,' 'The First
Amendment and Cyberspace: The Clinton Years,' 'Cruel, Mean
or Lavish?: Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination and Digital
Intellectual Property,' 'Missing the Point on Microsoft'
and 'Britney Spears & Online Music'.
Back to top^
Prof
Michael Pendleton
Professor of Law, Law
Faculty,
Murdoch University, Western Australia
http://wwwlaw.murdoch.edu.au/apipli/staff.htm
The Copyright Balance
Link to materials.
Creating quasi exclusive legal rights in information, or
aspects of it, is essential to provide incentive to create
and innovate. Markets are thus created which,
without these quasi exclusive legal rights, could not exist. The incentive
is the monopoly profit to be reaped from these markets. However, law makers
have long recognised the need to balance the interests of competitors and
consumers of information with those of the creators. This
recognition is reflected in
all intellectual property laws and in copyright law may be termed the copyright
balance.
Preserving this balance requires constant vigilance. Contracts,
whether online or off line, frequently purport to contract
out of defences available
under copyright legislation, such as fair dealing. The executive government
in Australia and elsewhere (the Crown in right of state and federal government)claim
copyright in a vast amount of information such as legislation, case law,
regulations, tide tables. The copyright term of some of
this information is perpetual. There
is a case that the copyright balance is severely undermined.
Michael Pendleton is a former Chairman of the Law
Reform Commission of Western Australia, a member of the Federal
Attorney General's Copyright Law Review Committee, and of
the Intellectual Property Committees of the Law Council of
Australia and the Law Society of Western Australia. He is
also a legal practitioner in jurisdictions in Australia,
the UK and Hong Kong.
In a review of Professor Pendleton's 1984 book 'Law of Intellectual
and Industrial Property in Hong Kong', the late Dr Steven
Stewart QC, Director of the Common Law Institute for Intellectual
Property in London described it as only the second anywhere
in the world on intellectual property in the modern unified
sense of the word and concept. Prior to this there were books
solely on trademarks, or patents, or copyright, or designs,
or trade secrets, but never as a totality.
He has written eight books on intellectual property published
by Lexis Nexis Butterworths, Sweet & Maxwell and CCH
International, and over one hundred articles.
Back to top^
Chair: Professor
Graham Greenleaf,
UNSW Law Faculty, Co-director, Baker & McKenzie
Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre
http://www2.austlii.edu.au/~graham/
Graham Greenleaf is a Professor of Law at UNSW where
he teaches most aspects of cyberspace law and the computerisation
of law. His main research interests in cyberspace law are
in privacy and intellectual property. He teaches courses
on Internet governance, Internet content regulation, privacy
and surveillance, legal research, and computerisation of
law.
He is a co-director of the Australasian Legal Information
Institute (AustLII)
and the WorldLII Legal Information Institute (WorldLII),
and the General Editor of Privacy
Law & Policy Reporter. He is also foundation co-director
of UNSW Law Faculty's Baker & McKenzie Cyberspace Law
and Policy Centre, which is co-hosting this conference.
Back to top^
|
|
