Value of public DN

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The value of the public domain
11/27/2006 12:54:59 PM, by Nate Anderson


With Beatles songs potentially coming out of copyright soon, the legal team that represents the remnants of the Fab 4 might now be prepared to make their music available online. Both stories raise the question of how much control creators should be granted over their own works, making it the perfect time to revisit some of the broader questions in the debate over the public domain.

The value of "free"
Weather data—it might not be sexy, but it sure is valuable. In the US, much of this data is gathered by the federal government and made available to home users and corporations free of charge. In the UK, though, government weather data is controlled by the Met Office, which charges for access. Which model generates more social and economic benefits? According to an official EU report (PDF), it's the American model. The US government spends only twice as much as the EU on gathering public sector information like weather and mapping data, but generates 10 times the economic value that Europe does by simply giving it away.

Rufus Pollock, who heads the Open Knowledge Foundation, uses this example in a recent essay, "The Value of the Public Domain." His work defends the idea of the public domain as something with tangible social and economic benefits, benefits which need to be taken into account when considering intellectual property reforms.

The essay was written to address what Pollock calls a "form of monomania in which monopoly rights, in the form of intellectual property, displace all else from our thinking on the subject. [The current paradigm] binds us to a narrow, and erroneous, viewpoint in which innovation is central but access is peripheral." But access is important, he argues, because open access can often produce broader social benefits than secrecy. And not just for consumers—businesses can profit, too.

The classic examples are the Internet and the Web, two technologies created by government-funded research programs (DARPA and CERN, respectively). By making technology such as TCP/IP and HTML freely available, these research projects blossomed into the system we've inherited today—a system that has generated billions upon billions of dollars from advertising and direct commerce. In addition, the Web has unleashed a flood of human creativity and now provides access to an astonishing array of knowledge (along with a good deal of misinformation).

Pollock also touches on Google (which relies on indexing "open" content), online file-sharing, and open source software to drive home his main point: "open, 'public domain' approaches can generate commercial as well as societal value." When developing social policy, his paper serves as a reminder that those who argue for a robust public domain need not hate business or want to keep artists from being compensated. The public domain produces its own benefits, which need to be weighed against those offered by patents and copyright; the choice is not a stark one between "producing value" and "producing nothing."

Note: the essay is freely available and only thirteen pages long, making it worth a quick read if you care anything about IP issues.