OR09: Keynote by John Wilbanks

Open Repositories 2009, day 1, keynote.

Locks and Gears: Digital Repositories and the Digital Commons - John Wilbanks, Vice President of Science, Creative Commons

Great presentation - in content as well in format. Worth looking at the slides [slideshare - of a similar presentation two weeks earlier]. [Which was good, because it was awkwardly scheduled at the end of the afternoon, that's great with a fresh jetlag, straight after the previous panel session without as much as a toilet break.]

The unfortunately familiar story of journals on the internet, scholars' rights eroding, which causes interlocking problems that prevent the network effect.

Choice quotes:
“20 years ago, we would have rather believed there be a worldwide web of free research knowledge, than Wikipedia.”
"The great irony is that the web was designed for scientific data, and now it works really well for porn and shoes."

The CC licenses are a way of making it happen with journals. However, for data even CC-BY is making it hard to do useful integration of different datasets. Survey of 1000 bio databases: >250 different licenses! Opposite law of open source software: the most conservative license wins.

Example of what can happen if data is set free: Proteomecommons.org: bittorent for genomes. Thanks to CC Zero.

What can we do?
Solve locally, share globally.
Use standards. And don’t fork them.
Lead by example.


Q: opinion on wolfram alfa? Or Google Squared?
A: pretty cool, doubts about scaling. It may be this or something else, rather open source than ‘magic technology’. But it’s a sign that the web is about to crack.
“The only thing that’s proven to scale is distributed networks.”

(my comment - with an estimated 500.000 servers, that is precisely what Google is...)

Yet another danger of the current state of copyright...

Techcrunch reports on the launch of Attributor, a startup company that monitors copyright infringement on the web. The timing is interesting: just now there is a mild uproar in some blog circles in the Netherlands about Cozzmozz. Where Attributor only monitors, and leaves it to the copyrightholders to decide whether and which action to take, this company takes it a significant step further: they also takes legal action on behalf of the authors (in exchange for a nice cut of course).

This blog quoted a short article in full. Dutch copyright law allows for a kind of 'fair use', which is vaguely formulated though, making this a borderline case. The full article was quoted, a no-no, but it was so short it would have been difficult to leave out something in the context of the argument made against the stance of the interview. This took place a while ago. Then out of the blue, several days ago Cozzmozz threatened to sue but offered a deal, first 240 then 160 euro instead of 600, which the blogger in case chose to pay. Though offers of support were flooding in, as an ME patient, her energy is limited and she decided that she could not afford a long story.

The real danger here is that when copyright holders transfer their rights to outifits, which exploit them in exchange for a cut, the grey area between the legal and the moral right disappears. Would the freelance journalist who wrote the article have chosen to sue this blogger herself?

What's legally right may not differ from what's morally right. Yet another reason to clear up copyright laws.

(edited 6/12, 20.20 - made the difference between attributor and cozzmozz clearer).