The debate, as presented in the article "The IP Ownership Conundrum" (Canada Research Horizons, Fall 2002, P13), is between two possible parties retaining exclusive rights. Historically the Government of Canada retained rights, and now the suggestion is that with few exceptions that the Industry should receive these rights.
I offer a third option: neither the government of Canada, nor a single industrial partner, should be granted exclusive rights.
The assumption to the exclusive rights argument is that the best way to maximize return on R&D resources is to grant exclusive rights. What this fails to remember is that most innovation is a derivative work on other works, and that more innovation is possible with a large public domain from which to create innovative commercial and non-commercial derivative works.
From the perspective of citizens and other industrial players, they pay taxes towards any government spending on R&D or other government funded project. Given this, they should equally receive the rewards of this work as well as not having to pay for the research twice (once in taxes, and again in royalty fees to a government or private sector rights holder).
I will use two examples where feeding an information commons was the most effective use of R&D and project spending in the hopes that similar methods will be adopted, where appropriate, for any other public-private projects.
The concept of an innovation commons is not all that novel as a very widely known innovations commons is quite familiar to us: The Internet. The predominant software tools used to create the Internet are also licensed in a way to create an innovation commons: Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). The Internet and FLOSS are said to be co-dependant disruptive technologies - neithor could exist in their current form without the other.
While both have considerable commercial spinoffs, including a quickly growing FLOSS support sector, much of the origins of the Internet and FLOSS are publicly funded government and educational institutions. These commercial spinoffs also involve some of the largest transnational corporations, as well as the smallest self-employed home-based businesses.
The Internet was designed in what is termed 'end-to-end' in which the intellegence of the network exists on the fringes. This required a relinquishing of proprietary/centralized control that was the nature of communications networks prior to the Internet. No royalty or permission is currently required from anyone to create a new service, just agreement between relevant parties on the fringes. This allowed for the creation of innovative new services (such as the Web) that were not even dreamed of during the design of TCP/IP.
The Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement also recognized early that more software innovation can happen quickly when people release exclusive rights in exchange for the extremely simplified ability to create derivative works based on previous works. No royalties or permission are required to create derivative works, and in fact this is one of the things specifically protected by Free Software and Open Source software licenses.
The idea of exchanging knowledge, specifically software, within government is also not a novel one. The Knowledge Exchange Service (KES, previously the Software Exchange Service - site currently unavailable) is part of Public Works and Government Services Canada. From their website they state:
KES is building on 15 years of facilitating government software reuse. Extending this knowledge exchange to facilitating knowledge sharing with non-governmental entities such as the private sector and the general public would require change to their current mandate.The Knowledge Exchange Service is . . .
A free service aimed at knowledge professionals at all levels of government who want to share software, best practices, research and information to be more effective in their work, to leverage resources, and to stimulate cooperative effort in the government community.
We recognize that this is a new way for Governments to be looking at knowledge development, even if it is only ever used for software. To help facilitate knowledge exchange about these ideas with government, we have started up a new group called the GOSLING community. GOSLING is an acronym for Getting Open Source Logic INto Governments, where the logic is intended to extend beyond simply software to including knowledge sharing methods and business models. The GOSLING community is made up of individual citizens, separate from their public or private sector employment, exchanging ideas and best practises with each other.
As KES says: "Knowledge shared, knowledge gained."
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