Panel Three

Legal & Economic Frameworks for Global Knowledge.
Which is easier to solve: the technical issues or the ones related to finance, asks Professor Pedro Hernandez-Ramos in his introduction.

The stage is set with a coffee table, two side tables with flowers and water glasses, and four very comfortable armchairs.

Paul David. Building instittutional infrastructures for e-science (a British term): a multi-disciplinary challenge. He came to this topic through his research in the economics of networks, esp. computer mediated networks and their potential role in promoting creative production in geo-distributed communities. He did studies as an economic historian where open science as a social practice started in the 17th century.

"The potential of e-science will have a new generation of info/com infratructures. It's about global collaboration in key areas of sicence and the next generation of infrastrucute that iwll enable it." to fulfill this dream you will need more ingenious hardware and software and a more sophisticated system design of new tools, and appropriate institutional contexts. The GRID is one such example which might be developed as a P2P architecture, but they are not the same.  There is a comparfative interoperability project that has three projects: GEON, LTER, Ocean Informatics. also a description of eDiaMoND, a diagnotic digital mammography project.

He said that the lawyers slowed down the project because they considered all the possible harm and losses associated with the property and privacy issues of this project.  Can we foster a mode through which this soft part of collaboration can be solved. 

Frank Tansey, IMS Global Learning Consortium. It was part of the national learning infrastructure initiative. Systems were proprietary and content could not be shared. Global issues were not addressed: the lack of good (or any) connections, learning styles. He hopes the next system will help him realize the sweet dream he had six or seven years ago.

Roberto Verzola: Towards Global Knowledge-Sharing.  Intellectual property rights are becoming a liability to sharing science. Pr. David's arguments apply to other fields. Current IPR regimes tilt too much toward the producers (less IPR).  Many are monopolistic and we need no IPR. this is the 'information wants to be free' arguement.   Under the TRIPS agreement under WTO the owners have been favored.  Users are spread out in many countries and have little voice in decision-making.  Moving and storing info is approaching near-zero cost. this should increase sharing but can also yield very high profits. This might be the core conflict in the information economy.  He calls these rent-seekers the "landlords of cyberspace" or cyberlords.

for low cost deployment if development countries: FLOSS, low power radio, video CD player than can access html, work out systems of community ownership. However, the ICTs have built-in biases: English, automation (replacing people with machines), technofix, and globalization (local subsidy for the global players). The new jobs created will be temporary and may be replaced by automation.

It is argued that without IPRs there will be stagnation. However, there are other ways of rewarding the creator without giving a absolute right to the person.

Bowker: even if you make info available you still have a package of attitudes, cultures, etc. that must travel with the information. How do we move that around together? That's what consultants say they can do!

Verzola said that cumpulsory licensing was weakened by the WTO but that it offered a non-monopolistic way of compensating creators.

Comments

[Steve Cisler]

The discourse embedded in the rhetoric of 'digital divide or digital commons' appears to be burdened by the fetish and hyperbole of a technological determinism. Why does there appear to be so much resistance toward a dialog, especially in the mainstream media, about the cultural practice and ritual of technologies in society? How can the media and educators better understand how new technologies influence self and social identity?

I am a student at scu.edu and have extensively studied grid tech at the graduate level. Why doesn't the eDiamond group, in order to protect patient privacy, simply remove the name and give them a numerical value for reference to the certain data?

Grid tech's purpose is to ultimately have scientists share their data globally to other scientists. If a scientist is concerned with their IPR, then don't share your data! Grid tech is a data collaboration tool; whether scientists use it or not is up to them.