Committee: WIPO 3 - innovation
Issue: What role should be given to sharing platforms like Creative Commons and Open Source Initiative in the promotion of innovation?
Chair: Jan Hulsebosch
Sharing is a big part of our life. We don’t spend a single day without at least sharing one thing with someone. You can share a story, an idea, a book, a picture and even your emotions with anyone. This phenomenon is one of the many things that make us human and is a pillar of any kind of society. It has been around since the beginning too, starting with fathers sharing the tale of how they killed a boar a couple of days ago to their children, and slowly evolving to us sharing a picture to our friends on social media. The ways of sharing have changed, but the core purpose is still the same.
Now with the ever growing importance of innovation within the professional sector, the law has set up a system to make sure the author of a work is identified and owner of his work. This system is called the copyright system. The copyright system works, but has its limits. This is where the organisations Creative Commons and Open Source Initiative intervene. They provide easy and free copyright licenses, with more features mentioned later in this report. One issue that arises is what role these organisations have in making these innovations known so they can be applied in the business world.
“A new method, idea, product, etc.” -en.oxforddictionaries.com
An innovation is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something or a new technical solution to a problem. However this term is incredibly vast. That is why we are going to narrow it down to know-how. The know-how is the theoretical part of an innovation, and that is what is spread through Creative Commons (CC) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
“Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce.” -wipo.int
IP is a way for people to earn recognition or economical benefits for their inventions. This is done by being protected by the law, thanks to licences such as patents, copyright and trademarks. This is not only profitable for the creator himself, but also for the general public, who may use the inventions, remaining in terms with the licence of course. The matter of IP is quite important, especially in these times of constant innovation and creation.
A patent is an exclusive right granted for an innovation, giving all the rights to the creator. A patent forces other people who would like to use the innovation to demand permission and agree to the terms of the creator. Not only do patents allow protection against plagiarism, but it also expand the general knowledge, since full disclosure must be given on how the innovation works. The innovation needs to be proven useful to be granted a patent. A patent doesn’t last forever, as it expires after a maximum of 20 years and the patent-holder must pay some fees.
Copyright is a legal term used to describe the rights a creator has over their artistic and literary works. This ranges from books, paintings, songs or statues; to films, programs, maps, advertisements and technical drawings. This protection expires in general 50 years after the death of the author. Copyright is applied directly when you lift your pen from the paper, take a picture or save your document. There is no fee for copyright, nor is there any kind of register of copyrighted works in some countries. You can mark your work with the © and your name, although it doesn’t increase the strength of the copyright. All this was set up clearly during the Berne convention of 1886.
http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wct/summary_wct.html
Creative Commons is a non profit organisation focused on providing free and easy copyright licences and share those around the world thanks to the internet. Here is how it works: you demand a copyright license, describing how secure you wish your rights to be; then CC has to agree with your terms, about sharing your work, for example the mentioning of your name. Once your work is under the CC license, they put it on one of their various sharing platforms, where it is accessible for anyone to use. This allows for a fast and easy sharing of the various innovations, while keeping some of the rights you would have with a normal copyright. You can even make money from it.
Open Source Initiative is also a non profit organisation focusing around easy sharing, but this time they are only focused around software. They have an “Open Source” definition, which is ten conditions that the software has to respect to be able to be labeled as such. Once OSI recognizes the software, it is put on one of their various platforms accessible by all. In contrast to CC, OSI allows and even encourages bringing changes to the original product. There is however, no track keeping of the software use, and you can’t put any restrictions on it. It is merely a way to share work with the world. You may know some of these softwares such as Firefox, Openoffice or Gimp. During the report we will use the term open source, by which we mean software whose original code is accessible to all.
Before we start talking about the problems these organisations cause, it is important to explain why this “sharing knowhow” is so important. Of course the applications are vast, so here are a couple of domains where OSI and CC helped in various ways.
Health has always been a world issue, in so many ways that we lose count. This is why many people try to solve these issues in various ways. One of these groups is the OpenMRS community. This group developed an open source program that is a database of patients. This is nothing revolutionary, but what makes this special is that since it is open source, it is free. They created an essential tool for anyone who wants to practice medicine freely. This means small health cabinets can save a considerable amount of money thanks to this program. The OpenMRS Community is a perfect example of how sharing knowhow improves a domain, and propels society forward.
To link back to the other issues which will be discussed in WIPO2, open source may also be applied to green technologies. One of such projects is OBI, standing for Open Building Institute. This program is focused around creating a database of all elements required for ecological house building. This ranges from structures to furniture passing by the materials. The beauty of this concept is that everybody can contribute with ideas or concepts, which are later selected and posted. The reason why this is so special is that it allows for a solid database, while being full of diversity and creativity, and contributing to a great cause.
All of these systems require the Internet to work. It is what makes them unique. We can all agree the Internet is one of the best ways to share: through the Internet it is possible to share pictures, videos, anything really. And although we have made enormous advances in making the world wide web available to everybody, we are not there yet. According to www.internetlivestats.com, Africa had 268 million internet users in 2013. That is only one fourth of its total population. In comparison, Europe has 520 million Internet users, which is around 70% of its total population. But that still means that 30% don’t have access to these platforms, and therefore cannot improve or use them. This is due to the lack of infrastructure in these regions.
The CC and OSI licenses create a new grey area in the copyright system. Where before there were only either “All rights reserved” or “No rights reserved”, there now is also “Some rights reserved”. This sparks up conflicts in most national copyright systems. To fix this, the offices of the organisations must meet agreements with the national patent offices of each country. That way CC and OSI can adapt these licences to the requirements of the state, making their licence viable in the country. In the same context, the various website bans of countries such as China, Pakistan and India make access to some innovations tricky.
http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/copyright/en/educ_cr_im_05/educ_cr_im_05_www_54033.pdf
It goes without saying that the patent industry is very large. During these two past years alone, the European Patent Office has filed 2.5 million patents. This is done by 7 000 employees in 30 countries. With the rise of CC and OSI licenses, these jobs are threatened, among every other job in the other patent offices. With more innovators turning to CC and OSI and the licenses becoming more and more interesting, the patent offices will have less work. One could say that this isn’t that much of a problem, but in these times of economic crisis, these people who will be less useful are at risk of being fired. It is a mere question of market, making sure that there is market for both systems.
Open sourcing has been around for quite some time now. The first open source program called “Linux kernel” was launched in 1991. It has gone through a couple of phases, from being called “cancer” by Microsoft to being essential in the IT business. Here again taking the example of CC, they have gone through four different licence versions, every single one improving from the previous one. Their numbers are also incredible: since its foundation in 2001, CC has reached over a billion licensed items. But Open Source has become so much more than a way to freely access programs. It is expanding, and fast. Just to give an idea, there is a college in the Philippines that gives open source courses. However they have disappeared from the Internet a few years ago, but the simple fact that there was at some point an open source college shows the impact it starts to have on the software industry. Another example the spread of open sourcing is the image these sharing platforms have given themselves for the general public. Two of the top five most visited websites, according to a study done by Alexa, are websites with a CC licence and whose main goal is sharing anything they can get their hands on. And although these aren’t considered the safest sources, the information, and so the innovations, is still accessible.
The achievements already achieved
CERN is a large international research centre, with thousands of researchers working on it around the world. CERN is mostly famous for the discovery of the Higgs Boson, otherwise known as the X particle. With such a large amount of people working around the world, one main challenge is to send all the test results to the respective universities. But since CERN is an international research centre, so industrial spying has no point, they can afford themselves the luxury of just placing their results on the internet. Now they do not simply drop them in the middle of the net. Instead they place a C00 licence on their results, which is the CC licence that allows free use of the content. This is extraordinary because now, anybody, even a 7th grade student, can access these results, with no need of any kind of password or granted access. This allows anybody to exploit the data, and speed up the research process.
The first open source program is probably the most important. The GNU Operating System started in 1983, when founder Richard Stallman wanted to find “a way of bringing back the cooperative spirit that prevailed in the computing community in earlier days—to make cooperation possible once again by removing the obstacles of cooperation imposed by the owners of proprietary software.” (www.gnu.org). What he envisioned was to find a way to work on one project with a group of people without having to worry about the legal limitations of a private project. Sounds familiar? GNU was later fused with the kernel called Linux made by Linus Torvalds. A kernel is a vital part of any operating system; the GNU project missed just that. In the 90’s GNU/Linux launched, and came later known as just Linux. Linux is now one of the three main operating systems alongside IOS from Apple and Windows from Microsoft. The GNU/Linux story is the perfect example of how open source works. Started with a group of liberal programmers, to escalate in a movement that is reshaping the current software industry, all of this with the help of small additions brought by people from all over the world.
Solutions
This revolves around making sure every country is in dialogue with CC and OSI, and comes to an agreement. This may be done by making sure countries who haven’t made the deal yet will be open to the ideas of the organisations. Of course you can’t put a deadline on this or force the countries to make the deals, but encouraging them would be good.
https://opensource.org/
https://creativecommons.org/
http://www.wipo.int/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m5oR8OQfc9kTO3G1m7mGfYpGWwN7IBst6k-rN2h2xis/edit
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/
http://www.internetlivestats.com/
https://www.epo.org/
http://www.iphandbook.org/
www.accesscopyright.ca
www.copyrightinformation.org
www.infojustice.org
www.americanassembly.org
www.oss-watch.ac.uk
www.patentfile.org
www.uspto.gov
http://openbuildinginstitute.org/
https://openmrs.org
http://www.alexa.com/topsites