John Wilbanks’ slides for this presentation are at:
http://www.slideshare.net/wilbanks/seattle-sc-symposium-2010
He stresses that many of the speakers today share slides, material, ideas freely.
Creative Commons and Science Commons have existed now for 5 years. Why did cc begin? “Consumers do more than consume.” Making is regular now, but was radical then. The large majority of creative work was illegal under the old copyright law. cc began with the intention of legalizing creation.
They began by building a database of creative commons licensed objects; that became untenable, and they realized at one point that “the web was the database.” At that point, use of the licenses took off and now, they estimate exceeds one billion objects. The way they wrote the licenses has exceeded national boundaries and all expectations.
In science, there was not the same criminalization problem — science has always been valuable when given away and by being given away. It has been conservative and effectively pre-technical and needs
“We want Wikipedia for science,” Creative Commons heard, but they also wanted more, like a generic platform for innovation in science, a reframing of the Internet itself, for science.
The goal is to spark generative science. Wilbanks says “open” and “free” are loaded. He cites Jonathan Zittrain “Genrativity is a system’ss capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” Failure is expensive in science and so science has resisted generativity, Wilbanks says.
(I would say there are many more, and more powerful reasons why science is internally conservative than the cost of failure. But then I also think “generative” is a less effective description of these same ideas than “open” : )
For a system to be generative also requires being:
- leverage
- adaptability
- accessibility
- ease of mastery
- transferability
The cost of collaboration and of failure is so low in technology, that a few guys could start Twitter in a week or two, with a simple but good idea. Creative Commons wants to bring those low costs to science.
If we want generativity, we must deal with property rights. We cannot ignore the law.
Where the law intersects with science:
data –> secrecy, sui generis
tools –> contract, patent
narratives –> copyright
“Open” and “free” worked in copyright but do not work as well in data and access, being “open” and “free” can break the commons (how is not indicated at this point).
The most important argument for Open Access? http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
Creative Commons licenses for data? At a minimum we could do attribution, right? but one article from Wikipedia has 27 pages of attribution now, imagine that problem multiplied by all Wikipedia articles and time. This could cripple innovation.
Attribution cannot scale, but citation can if we only cite those to whom we owe the most.
- Waiving all rights to data is necessary for data extraction and re-use in the era of Big Data.
- We cannot afford obligations such as share-alike limiting downstream use
- Request behavior through norms, like encouraging citations
No Copyright: CC0 1.0 Universal is the only workable answer. It could be a leap, that far from the security blanket. The life sciences community has taken this well, however, as with
- Personal Genome Project
- Tropical Disease Initiative
- SIDER Side Effect Resource for drug side effects
- and an opinion piece in Nature which advocates, in September 2009 use of CC0 with data
The Open Knowledge Foundation actually makes data licenses, which CC are not big fans of, but the two sides still agreed on the Panton Principles.
Generativity requires not only dealing with data and licenses, but also deal with tools and inventions.
Creative Commons set out to build tools to deal with biological materials, including modular concepts like no clinical use, and simplifying it down to iconography and legal code. There is no intellectual property, but there is physical property and it, too must be dealt with when publicly funded and a part of the commons.
Success:
100,000 lines of stem cells are now under CC,
mapped to 100,000 genomes under CC,
mapped to 100,000 histories under CC
The Creative Commons patent project: reconstruction of the research exemption model patent license. This used to be the law, but the courts took it away, so we need to reconstruct the research exemption. A few major companies have committed their research rights but it’s still not a model patent license. With this patent, we need to allow a revenue stream (revenue clause) and allow limitations and exceptions in the field of use. Nike could allow their patents to be available, but only outside of their markets (shoes for example) which would enable unexpected and noncompetitive innovation.
Finally, for generativity in science we have to deal with infrastructure. “We used to produce data faster than humans could structure it. Now we produce data faster than computers can structure it.” — Bruce Sterling (I strongly disagree; I’ve seen some great work in structuring and dealing with Big Data and the night is too young to declare defeat.) We can only hope for one of two paths, Wilbanks says:
- Make data reuseful — CC involved with Sage to that end (slide 89) making data more reuseful through format standarization and plug and play with standard models
- Making computers smarter — semantic web is one thing, but we’re essentially not closer to smarter machines
… and only the first path is realistic, and even the end of the second path is more likely to be reached through the first path.
in RDF, law is code and code is law
ccREL — Creative Commons Rights Expression Language
John’s larger point: we cannot deal with just one part of this problem, we need to step through all 5 layers and deal with it systematically. To be generative we must be all five of: leveraged, adaptable, accessible, simple, and transferable. He cites the failure of the International HapMap Project, inspired by GPL and “free” software to address this type of problem.
DIY Biology — that science is in the earliest days of its democratization. DIY Genetic Engineering is here, too with standard biological parts which you can download freely.
Is biology about to undergo computer science’s revolution of the 1980s? Will it be an iPhone or a PC? Something safe and entertaining but locked, disabled or something we can all make our own and with which we can change the world and ourselves, if it is less attractive?
Generativity offers us an innovation-based chance of success.
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Cameron Neylon 04:18 on 28 March, 2010 Permalink |
Definitely feel that we should do better on explicit copyright notices on these kinds of things. I am sure the Microsoft guys and all speakers would be happy with CC-BY but we need to make that clear and explicit. Will see if I can get something like that added. And thanks for putting the effort in! You’ve reminded me that I said I would try to do something about that and I forgot entirely..!
Jean-Claude Bradley 12:09 on 27 March, 2010 Permalink |
Mike – the audio came out great – thanks! It is indeed ironic that there was not a clear copyright notice on the videos. I think the speakers themselves would have intended CC-BY
Brian Glanz 22:24 on 26 March, 2010 Permalink |
You tweeted Am I a helpful volunteer or an evil PIRATE? and I will go with helpful pirate. Many laws need changing to favor productivity. In the U.S. and much of the world, as in Australia full copyright is implied without a statement otherwise.
I sampled your MP3 and it sounds great, thank you. The format is more mobile and increases the likelihood I revisit it.
One reason I posted links to WMV files: this blog is an open medium, while links had previously been shared in email, a closed medium (graciously shared, mind you I am grateful). I see from the bit.ly info that the videos have been downloaded hundreds of times. That proves demand well enough but each is hundreds of MB, expensive for some.
I would like to see the videos embedded and viewable here via Flash or HTML 5. It was good of them, already to share in both Microsoft Silverlight with additional interaction and as a Microsoft Windows Media Video, WMV. There is Moonlight (an open source Silverlight), but from what I heard then confirmed on one of my installs, Moonlight could not grok these bits.
Adding formats — to share still more openly and to be more productive — is right and ought to be lawful.
Graham Steel 12:23 on 27 March, 2010 Permalink |
Mike. You are as they say in the US of A “da bomb”. I just wish that I had found out about you YEARS ago.
Dude, keep up the great work that you do !!!