Monthly Archives: October 2005

The Adelphi Charter

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One of the projects I’ve been working on for a while came to fruition last night with the launch of the Adelphi Charter. Or, to give it its full name, the Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property. It’s an attempt for formulate a sane set of principles to guide law-making on IP in a digital age, and the project was hosted and sponsored by the Royal Society of Arts, which has a 200-year record of concern about intellectual property issues. I was a member of the international Commission which drafted the document.

The Charter was launched at a crowded event at the RSA, during which two of my fellow Commission members, James Boyle (on the left) and John Sulston, gave memorable speeches.

John led the team which decoded the human genome in order to ensure that it remained in the public domain, and in the process put the whole of humanity in his debt (a debt only partly repaid by his being awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize for medicine). At one point in his talk, he invited us to contemplate what would have happened if he’d failed — if the genome (which, after all, is “the book of life”) had been copyrighted by a commercial company. Anyone who wanted to read the book would, firstly, have had to pay a fee, and secondly (and more importantly) would not be able to reveal what they’d discovered as a result of reading it. It would, he said be “like reading a book review and going to a bookshop to buy a copy and being told by the bookseller ‘No — you can’t see it'”.

In his opening declaration, John Howkins, who chaired the Commission, reminded people that the publication of the Charter was, in a way, only the end of the beginning. The real work lies ahead — in persuading governments and the public that we have to think again about the way we grant and regulate intellectual property rights.

Being a member of the Commission has been an exhilarating experience because it brought me into contact with such a range of formidable people — ranging from thinkers like James Boyle, John Sulston, Larry Lessig and Jamie Love, to activists like Cory Doctorow and artists like Gilberto Gil, the remarkable musician who is also Brazil’s Minister of Culture.

Gilberto could not be present at the launch (he was in Paris on government business), but on Tuesday he came to the RSA for lunch — as did James Purnell, the UK ‘Minister for the Creative Industries’ (shown here on the right of the picture. John Howkins is on the left.)

Media reaction:

  • A thoughtful piece in today’s Economist.
  • Nice profile of Gilberto Gil in the Guardian.
  • An elegant piece by James Boyle in the Guardian.

    • The battle for control

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    Forceful piece in today’s International Herald Tribune by Carl Biltd, former Prime Minister of Sweden. Sample:

    Beyond the headlines, a critically important battle for control of the Internet is being played out.

    On the one side is the United States, which wants to retain supervision of the Internet and has managed to get the reluctant support of most of the global Internet community, which sees America as the least bad of the possible ultimate guardians of the system.

    On the other side is a collection of states keen on getting as much as control as possible in order to curtail the Internet’s power to undermine their regimes. With the theocracy of Iran as the standard-bearer, this group brings together Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba and Venezuela. North Korea is probably keen to join in as well.

    The European Union seems to be in the middle, wavering back and forth – and in its wavering it has recently come down with a position that has brought it enthusiastic applause from Tehran, Beijing and Havana.

    Bildt thinks that the European Commission doesn’t know what it’s doing here, and I agree with him. In the end, the Americans will block this, and, for once, we may have reason to be grateful for their obduracy.

    Thanks to Gerard for the link.

    Hedgehogs and foxes

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    Freeman Dyson, writing about Richard Feynman in the current issue of the New York Review of Books opens with this paragraph:

    Great scientists come in two varieties, which Isiah Berlin, quoting the seventh-century-BC poet Archilochus, called hedgehogs and foxes. Foxes know many tricks, hedgehogs only one. Hedgehogs are interested only in a few problems which they consider fundamental, and stick with the same problems for years or decades. Most of the great discoveries are made by hedgehogs, most of the little discoveries by foxes. Science needs both hedgehogs and foxes for its healthy growth, hedgehogs to dig deep into the nature of things, foxes to explore the complicated details of our marvelous universe. Albert Einstein was a hedgehog; Richard Feynman was a fox.

    Well, I’m not a scientist, but I’m definitely a fox.

    Signs of the Google times

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    Email from Pete…

    Just typed in ‘to be or not to be’ in the Google search box, looking for the Hamlet speech – and guess what the first entry to appear is? Hot or Not?. Imagining some poor sod, on the verge of suicide, deciding to take counsel from the great Bard, and instead confronted with one of the outposts of 21st century voyeurism and vanity…Ye gods.

    Settled!

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    Apropos my musings about the twinning of Sawtry with Weimar (as evidenced here)…

    … James Miller wrote to point out that the Weimar in question was not the great cultural centre. Now he’s provided photographic evidence! This doesn’t look like a sign for a major city, does it?

    Why home printing is a racket

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    From today’s New York Times…

    It does not take an advanced business degree for those consumers to see how printer manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard and Canon make their money. They use the “razor blade” business model. It is named from the marketing innovation of King C. Gillette, who in the early years of the last century sold razors for a low price but made all his money on the high-margin disposable razor blades. Printer manufacturers also use this tied-product strategy.

    Printers return relatively low profit margins. But the ink, ounce for ounce, is four times the cost of Krug Clos du Mesnil Champagne, which sells for around $425 a bottle. Ink is about the same price as Joy perfume, considered to be one of the more pricey fragrances, at $158 for a 2.5-ounce bottle.

    Kodak’s bid to own your pictures

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    You couldn’t make this up. But I’ll let Dan Bricklin (a keen digital photographer) tell the story…

    The idea of a “Wi-Fi” camera seems exciting but in trying to understand it I found that it comes with a big boat anchor — the photos are uploaded to Kodak’s site. But you don’t really own the pictures. If you ask they will sell your photos to you and deliver them to you on a CD (no downloads!) which contains your entire collection of pictures! According to their site you can’t even specify which photos — you have to pay according to how many photos are in your account!

    Since the site and rules may change there’s what KodakGallery (formerly Ofoto) currently says: “When you order an Archive CD, your entire photo collection will be preserved on CD. Photos are saved as full-sized JPEGs in their original resolution. Archive CDs are priced according to the total number of photos in your account.”

    While the idea of having your photos automatically moved from your camera to the Internet sounds wonderful, you lose ownership of your own pictures. Or maybe you shouldn’t think of them as yours — they effectively belong to Kodak and you get only controlled access. As much as Kodak seems to want to leave their silver-halide heritage behind they seem to be stuck in the old business model of making money when you process the picture, when you print the picture and whenever you want to print it again. It’s another example of how hard it is for a company to change its basic nature.

    This is part of the larger trend that is fighting to keep control. The record industry doesn’t want to let you have any control over the bits you buy and Tellywood wants to wrap everything in a very tight DRM straightjacket. These are a business premised on control and they seem unable to change their basic nature. For them it makes a lot of sense to fight the future as long as they can. They have no better option and if they are smart they are taking cash out so when their business evaporates they can retire.

    What if VisiCalc had been patented…

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    One of my proudest possessions is a copy of the original version of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program which Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston wrote for the Apple II (and which was the reason that machine began to sell like hot cakes: people wanted the software and, when told they needed an Apple machine to run it, bought one of those too). If you look at Excel (and, before that, Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft’s first effort at a spreadsheet, Multiplan) you’ll see that each was essentially just an attempt to do a better VisiCalc. And of course they were able to do it because VisiCalc wasn’t patented. Dan Bricklin has been musing about this on his Blog.

    Daily life in Iraq

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    From Slate…

    One contractor bid $70,000 to fill a few potholes. Maj. Benjamin Busch of College Park, Md., working with the Civil Affairs Group in Ramadi, estimated that the work should cost $5,000. The contractor protested that he had to buy his own cement trucks because no one was willing to rent to him if it meant entering Ramadi. He then had to hire guards who insisted on driving their own vehicles. He paid local officials for “licenses,” he paid the sheik in charge of the local tribe where he was to work. He then had to persuade the insurgents on each street where he was working to accept a payment in exchange for leaving him alone. And his work crew and guards insisted on driving back and forth from Baghdad each day, resulting in about three hours of actual work per day. Busch told him to forget it, but he agreed that such a maze of payoffs and arrangements was typical. It was almost impossible for an outside contractor to work in the city, and local contractors spent more time negotiating with the complex power structure than doing actual work. Hence, $70,000 for a $5,000 job.

    Determined to complete at least one job on the streets, Busch brought in two tanks to guard a work detail. Insurgents (without guns) walked around the tanks, gathered the workers together, and told them they had one hour to get out of town. The workers left.