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Panel 6: IP and the Knowledge Commons: The politics of new technologies

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Title: Panel 6: IP and the Knowledge Commons: The politics of new technologies


1
Panel 6 IP and the Knowledge Commons The
politics of new technologies
  • Luc Soete
  • UNU-MERIT,
  • University of Maastricht
  • The Netherlands
  • TACD Conference The Politics and Ideology of
    Intellectual Property, Brussels, March 20-12,
    2006.

2
Dramatic creative destruction nature of ICTs
  • A very dynamic area in terms of technology
  • speed of change linked to rolling out of
    broadband, declining prices
  • impression of being on the verge of major change
    no longer associated with IT but CT
  • digital content industry characterized by few
    barriers to entry, continuous renewal of new
    talent
  • on digital distribution and access side, variety
    of new players emerging from other sectors with
    sometimes radically different aims and missions
  • All characteristics of creative destruction
    phase of new technologies past and future mixed,
    involving variety of private-public interactions

3
A different form of creative destruction?
  • Known ICT features of creative destruction
  • Digital infrastructure speed, broadband-led
  • Broadening of opportunities for exchange of
    digital content goods and services (information
    goods)
  • De-(re-)intermediation, reducing transaction
    costs in existing value chains (goods
    information)
  • New features of creative destruction
  • Less capital but more organizational destruction
  • Less of a creative destruction than of a
    creative activation kind
  • Major implications about ownership

4
Creative activation
  • Broadcasting has made consumption of creative
    content a passive, lazy activity a coach potato
    activity
  • Unlocking access, activating users discovery of
    incredible diversity of creativity by activating
    content consumption
  • Goes beyond commercial interests but commercial
    opportunities are not eliminated
  • Creative amateurism contains positive
    externalities of culture consumption associated
    with non-rivalry. Explains readiness to invest so
    much amateur time
  • Remember Tibor Scitovsky and the joyless economy
  • Strong political interest in such activation, can
    go hand in hand with commercial interest

5
Property Rights and physical space
  • Biggest kept economic secret
  • Granting of property rights to what were physical
    public goods (classic example of the fish pond)
    today a condition of sustainable development,
    still relevant in many developing countries
    (McCullagh).
  • Questions about inequality (see e.g. Marx in 1842
    in the Rheinische Zeitung about the new
    inequality of poor people depending for their
    heating on collecting wood in now privatised
    forests).

6
Property Rights and time
  • Second biggest kept economic secret
  • Expansion in the direction of the externalisation
    of household tasks also as a consequence of
    double income earners. Importance of opportunity
    costs of time (Gary Becker), enlargement of
    division of labour to traditional non-commercial
    but nevertheless valuable household activities.
  • New inequality in (in)voluntary nature of work
    and free time.

7
Property Rights and information
  • A new opportunity for monetizing value?
  • Obviously not a new phenomenon. Information and
    communication have been of all times, but thanks
    to ICT there is now a radical increase in
    codification, access and tradability of
    information and communication.
  • Digital divide socialisation of information
    and communication is not the same as
    socialisation of knowledge.

8
But can one...
  • The appropriation of value out of information and
    knowledge depends in the first instance on the
    degree of exclusiveness. There are however
    clear limits to intellectual exclusion
  • Good fences make good neighbours in physical
    property, but much less in time time
    registration illustration of mistrust and even
    much less with respect to information and
    knowledge
  • Free servicing or free offering are much more
    common than free riding in information and
    communication
  • Movement in direction of open science, even open
    innovation (complexity of science, role of users,
    trial and error, open standards)

9
New behavioural economic Insights on
collaboration
  • That most of us assume creativity as necessarily
    individual, private and subject to the creative
    inputs of others only under commercial
    conditions, is a symptom of the conversion from
    knowledge and art to intellectual property (R.
    Ghosh)
  • Homo oeconomicus behaviour seems rather a sign
    of lack of development (the Indian tribe
    Machiguenga in the Peruvian part of the Amazone
    forest)
  • Altruistic behaviour and in particular the
    behaviour of altruistic punishment
    characteristic of economic development and
    increases in welfare
  • From an evolutionary perspective, humans are a
    maladaptation which has succeeeded in developing
    itself more than other species thanks to
    collaborative action and in particular altruistic
    behaviour See Fehr, E en U. Fischerbacher, The
    nature of human altruism, Nature, 425, 2003, pp.
    785-91
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