[A2k] Extract from official IGF transcript on discussions on IP in the context of "Openness"

Thiru Balasubramaniam thiru@cptech.org
Wed Nov 1 04:26:03 2006


Here below are extracts from the Athens IGF discussions on the theme of
"Openness" (held on October 31) which touched upon issues related to
access to knowledge.  Participants on the panel included:


Session Chairman: Theodoros Roussopoulos, Minister of State of Greece

Moderator: Nik Gowing, Main Presenter, BBC World

* Carlos Afonso, Technical Director of RIT (services and
capacity-building network of ICTs)
* Anriette Esterhuysen, Executive Director, APC
* Hanne Sophie Greve, former judge at the European Court of Human Rights
* Joichi Ito, Creative Commons
* Jamie Love, Director, CPTech
* Senator Paschal Mooney, Government Spokesperson on Foreign Affairs
(Ireland), broadcaster/ journalist
* Andrew Puddephatt, OBE, various human rights organizations
* Art Reilly, Senior Director, Strategic Technology Policy, Cisco Systems
* Richard Sambrook, Director BBC Global News
* Fred Tipson, Senior Policy Counsel , Microsoft,
* Catherine Trautmann, Member of the European Parliament


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http://www.intgovforum.org/IGF-Panel2-311006am.txt


<SNIP>


>> NIK GOWING:  Jamie, quickly, because I want to move on to IP and copyright.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  I think there is sort of a deep hypocrisy of surprise when these
 instruments of surveillance are used as government surveillance or even
 corporate surveillance.  There is this massive development technology that's
 designed to track information, put fingerprints in information, know who does
 what, on a scale that we have never had in the history of mankind. And so then
 people are kind of shocked when people sell those things as products and people
 actually use them in ways that are just completely predictable. I have been in
 discussions with the State Department about digital rights management systems
 where we said don't you think this is going to be used in a certain way?  And
 we have mentioned China, but other countries as well. And how can you, like,
 sort of not -- how can you sort of not sort of think through the consequences
 of developing these kind of monitoring technologies outside your border? And
 the same thing is in the efforts to try to restrict access to encrypted,
 secured communications.  There is sort of an opposite thing to protect
 technologies that actually promote privacy and anonymity and stuff.  A lot of
 it is related to intellectual property rights.  In order to protect
 intellectual property rights we are creating a world that creates opportunity
 for political (inaudible) because it's hard to disconnect the two technologies
 in a way.  And I think that's part of the direction that we are heading.  But
 it's not really -- it's not as if countries in Europe and the United States
 don't have a hell of a lot to do with the way things are going because they
 push things in a certain direction.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Right.  I am going to pause this discussion of at this point,
 otherwise we are not going to cover any of the other issues.  I think what we
 have done is we have mapped out the differences.  Hopefully we have exposed
 some new lines, and we're building on that shopping list from Anriette about
 how we move forward.  Our job here is to at least show the way things are
 moving and help define on openness.  We're not going to agree here.  That --
 that can't be achieved in this. I want to move on to copyright, intellectual
 copyrights. Particularly copyright in IPR. Who would like to intervene on this
 one?  Joichi, how about you, on the challenges of IPR, intellectual property
 rights.

 >>JOICHI ITO:  I think Jamie started out and I tend to agree with most of what
 he said but I think it's very important to understand the repercussions that
 laws and technologies that we are creating to protect assets have on other
 countries. And so I'm not going to go into a long discussion here but in the
 United States, we have -- the United States has a strong lobby both in
 software, for software patents, and also Hollywood in terms of content and
 there are many, many laws and technologies being put in place that will inhibit
 the ability for people to freely share content. And it starts leaning into a
 kind of world where, for instance, if -- for instance, right now, because of
 the U.S. law, if one person -- if two copyrights -- if a copyright holder says
 to another person I would be happy for you to take this DVD and turn it into a
 classroom project, it's illegal to take that information off of a DVD because
 you are circumventing copyright technology.  And that's one of the basic things
 inside of the DMCA for instance.  So it's very important that, back to Jamie's
 point, a lot of the laws that we think of as rational because of the context of
 the United States have severe repercussions when they are implemented in other
 places. And also the identification relates to the copyright as well.  It's
 very difficult in some of these developing countries and emerging democracies
 to have free speech without some level of anonymity and it is very difficult to
 implement digital rights management and copyright without anonymity. This is a
 difficult discussion but I think the key point is to think about the rest of
 the world when thinking about copyright.  And that it encompasses everything.
 It's open source software, it's scientific journals and their availability in
 other developing nations, because journals currently control the copyrights and
 it's very expensive and that hinders science.  Just about every aspect of free
 flow of information is now encumbered by laws, patents, and technology.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Can you see laws catching up with the speed at which things are
 changing?

 >>JOICHI ITO:  The biggest problem I would like to point out is originally
 copyright law primarily was concerned with the business of publishing.  And it
 was about copying.  So whether you read a book, how -- if you slept on a book,
 if you gave a book to somebody else, this was not under copyright. The problem
 that we have with the Internet is that every time you view something, you are
 copying it.  And so when Google scans a book in order to make an index, that's
 a copyright violation.  When you download something to view in your browser,
 that's a copyright violation. Suddenly, the sphere of influence of copyright is
 everywhere.  And so now, for instance, I am not saying this is good or bad but
 Amazon is thinking about selling books by the page.  And eBooks are saying
 books per view.  And publishers in the United States are now saying secondhand
 bookstores don't pay us royalties and we have more control now on the Internet
 over content.  Maybe we should try to get the physical world to act like the
 Internet.  And we see this coming around to more and more control. In many
 businesses, unless somebody puts it in check, it will go to excess, and I think
 we are seeing that. And so the answer is the laws right now, I don't see it in
 any way helping, and in fact, getting worse and worse.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Do you see openness being constrained by the threat of action
 at some point?

 >>JOICHI ITO:  It's already severely constrained, and it's just getting worse.
 The solutions we have, I think there are two fundamental solution directions.
 One is to re-look at copyright law in the context of multimedia and then
 creative commons, which is my non-profit, we are trying to work within the
 constraints of copyright law to at least allow artists to give choice.  And we
 are engaging with people like rights collection agencies.  But it's still very
 difficult because the economic interests of the past push against the economic
 interests of sharing.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Anriette.

 >>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  I would add a third one to that, and that is to
 requesting or challenging the public sector to rethink what is the commons,
 what is the public domain in the world of the Internet.  Most responsible
 governments used to have public libraries where citizens could read the
 newspaper, access box and journals.  And these are absent in many developing
 countries.  But the Internet presents an opportunity where, for example, all
 scientific research that's publicly funded can be made freely available. So I
 think it's about what you said, about rethinking copyright, looking for
 alternatives like creative commons, which gives the owners of content an
 opportunity to decide how they share it. But I think it's more than that.  I
 think we need to make very sure that in terms of access to knowledge and access
 to information, the Internet is conceived of and regulated as a space that can
 provide access to a public -- to a commons.  Information commons.

 >> NIK GOWING:  I've got two interventions here from Francois Pelligrini.
 Could you take the microphone.  And also Divina Frau-Meigs.  Can I go to
 Richard Sambrook of the BBC on the issue of who is pinching our content or who
 is trying to pinch our content given the enormous capacity we have now to
 project globally.  How much is an enormous organization like the BBC concerned
 about this and how can we at least make sure that the copyright of everything
 that is paid for and produced on the net then at least has a value which is
 respected right around the world?

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  Well, two things, I think.  First the public service
 broadcaster probably has a slightly different take on this to a commercial
 organization because public service broadcasters are primarily interested in
 reach rather than generating revenue necessarily. Therefore, if people take use
 of our content, as long as we get some credit for it in some way, I think
 that's fine.  And increasingly with -- YouTube is a classic example, but in
 many other ways, in terms of building participation around content, we are
 actually seeking to  encourage people to take our content and use it and do
 things with it.  And we have a creative archive where people can take our video
 and repurpose it as they wish.  Because again as a public service broadcaster,
 the public have already paid for that content and invested in it so I think our
 position is slightly different from the commercial interests of some other
 organizations.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Yet the BBC has to protect its editorial integrity and you
 don't want people fiddling around with the stuff.  How can you protect it?

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  There are limits to it, clearly. But I think as long as
 there is a link back to the original content on our site, or there is --
 obviously, we would try to take action against anybody who we think was using
 it improperly or inappropriately, if they were using it in an obscene way or in
 some way that was seeking to be harmful or damaging to other groups and so on,
 then we might want to take action against it. But as a broad principle, people
 should have some access to our content and be able to repurpose it. I think
 there's a lot positive about that.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Do you think the BBC has achieved maximum openness for its
 content yet?

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  No. Nothing like it. Francois.

 >> FRANCOIS PELLEGRINI:  Thank you. I'd like to go back to a subject which I
 presented earlier. The way we use our common products in order to allow
 everyone on the Internet to create content themselves. Because there are
 copyright problems. We also have the digital content act which is in use. And I
 would also like to see what the behavior of the various patterns of this in the
 world is. There's a European pattern, Germany's, the American. Access to the
 information is becoming more expensive, and the equipment to avoid pinching
 content is also every day more available. So access to information, to raw
 information, is becoming more difficult. Is it necessary in that case for
 governments to act to make access easier? How can we allow our citizens and the
 citizens of poor countries to have access to information?  'Cause, otherwise,
 we will live in an information -- in a feudalistic information society, where
 only the very rich will have access.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Over there, please, yes.

 >> I'd like to also just endorse what's been said by the previous speaker. And
 certainly we have to think of what's happening in terms of online production on
 the Internet, but also what happened with the actual ownership aspect in terms
 of intellectual property. I think that what we see at the moment is that you
 have a complete closing in vis-a-vis usage, especially for those in education.
 And we don't even have a fair use equivalent here in Europe. And people are
 criminalized in the class, parents in the house, and the children as well. And
 most of the users of Internet and those who actually need to broaden their
 knowledge therefor find themselves where they are running a risk by accessing
 Internet. So let's look at free access and contents and how we can use
 everything that is available and which Internet actually makes available to the
 users. At the university level, we'd like to also look into the resources for
 free access at all universities for noncommercial purposes thereby and to be
 able to have access to the general public in the public domain. There is an
 interoperability problem there. We have to try and identify what the sources
 are. But we have to also make these visible and usable. I think this is
 important for the reader, important for dissemination of information in a
 shared society.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Thank you. The former French minister of culture and now in the
 European parliament. How can you see this contradiction being resolved in the
 immediate future?

 >> CATHERINE TRAUTMANN:  I think that this contradiction is quite difficult to
 resolve, because we do find ourselves in a situation of flux in terms of law.
 We have, of course, the production of intellectual artistic goods which are on
 the Internet. So we have to, I think, actually change our very concept of what
 our rights are. I think that it's important to bear in mind what the public
 domain is on the Internet and you find that user's rights have changed. Often,
 we mix and match and don't actually distinguish what's happening here.
 Obviously, we can have a public domain recognized as such. But we may have,
 perhaps, a paying service. When we talk about a free service, gratis, it may
 not be a matter of the actual source; it may be a matter of the service that is
 provided that is actually furnishing that. So we have to see whether access to
 the service might be financed by publicity. It may be free overall, or you may
 have a sort of pay-as-you-go principle. This might work for certain -- access
 to certain types of information where you would actually pay for the service.
 What about the author? Does the author renounce his rights? Is it a recognized
 freedom here? But the other question is basically to know whether what we are
 doing in terms of pure protection and what we are doing in terms of
 remuneration of the authors. And the authors' rights would seem to be a binding
 obligation, incumbent on us. Are we going to stem any creative or artistic
 production here. That's the first point. The second point is that we must not
 actually keep back or hold back information and access to it. So there are two
 main questions being posed there. I think the European regulation on this is
 only going halfway in terms of resolving this problem. What about the
 patentability of software? That's important. We're talking about total openness
 there. But I don't think we're going to achieve that. We are looking for a
 route which will enable us to recognize in specific cases the possibility of
 protecting patents or protecting the intellectual property, but also developing
 at the same time open sources, open routes, financed by public resources with
 public funds. And this would mean sharing knowledge. And as has been said here
 already, where universities and other educational establishments would have
 access, I think that we ought to perhaps change the law. Protections should
 change here. We ought to agree as to what we mean when we say "pirating."
 Pirating, in a sense, does make us face the issue of intellectual property
 rights. I think that we need to look at the directive that was adopted and is
 in the state of play today. But people aren't fully satisfied with this. And we
 thought that perhaps we just should stop and think about this and see how
 Internet is developed and how the various services on the Internet will develop
 and see how consumers and users are actually serviced.

 >>NIK GOWING:  We're trying to get a balance between openness and rights now
 and moving forward. But protecting that openness. I remind any of you who have
 come in late that you can join this conversation hopefully by sending me a
 piece of paper so at least I can scale stuff around and order it around to make
 sure we're still focusing on this issue. Andrew, you wanted a word.

 >>PASCHAL MOONEY:  I also have been indicating.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Yes, I know, I know. Andrew.

 >>ANDREW PUDDEPHATT:  One of the things that always interests me is that
 copyright's a relatively new invention in human history. I mean, Shakespeare
 never had the copyright over his plays. The copyright belongs to the
 publishers. And no one ever believes that Shakespear's creativity was impaired
 by the lack of owning copyright to his own product. But leaving that aside, we
 are now moving into a different era where, say, in the past, restricted
 information could be much more open and available to people. There have always
 been copyright libraries in the United Kingdom F you're a student at Oxford or
 Cambridge, you have certain privileges at the British library, you can go in
 and read any book published within the United Kingdom. There's no reason why
 countries couldn't take responsibilities for that so their population could use
 it. You have access to the information and sources that have always been
 available to a certain number of scholars and a certain privileged group. We
 need to look at the positive benefits of a the new technology. The danger is we
 will see the growth of the Internet as an excuse to privatize even more
 information. I know professors at the London School of Economics, where I'm
 based, who no longer give out their reading lists to courses to general
 enquirers, because they take the view that if a student pays to come on their
 course, the student should have sole access to the reading list, let alone
 their lectures and the content. And that seems to me to be a terrible
 derogation of responsibility of a university to promote awareness and promote
 knowledge and promote the resources that ought to belong to the commons. Simon
 Qobo, are you out there, still? I'll come to you in a moment on this issue.
 Paschal, you wanted a word.

 >>PASCHAL MOONEY:  Only brief, because the point was made earlier by the two
 speakers and also one of the panelists.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Do you need to repeat it?

 >>PASCHAL MOONEY:  No. But I think there is definitely a need for a wider
 debate on making more available on the Internet, free, free of any copyright
 restrictions, information and material which is already in the public domain.
 And I would have liked Richard to have perhaps expanded a bit more on what I
 understand the BBC has been leading on this in the public service area, which
 is about making available freely archive material on the Internet, because it
 is already in the public domain.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Well, we can get an answer now.

 >>PASCHAL MOONEY:  I'm saying that this is a peculiarly European concept of
 public service broadcasting. There is a vast amount of material that is already
 within the archives of very many broadcasting organizations. And I'm curious to
 know whether, in fact, if there is a wider debate on this issue, because
 certainly I know the BBC has started it. It was only to make the point in
 general that there is a lot of material in the public domain that governments,
 I believe, have a responsibility to ensure is put out into the Internet free of
 any copyright restrictions. Because, primarily, the concept of public service
 libraries, which, again, is unique to Britain and Ireland, that has been there,
 as you know, Nik, since about the 1950s, was essentially to disseminate
 information to those who were not in a position to access it because they
 didn't have the money or resources. And there is nothing changed today.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Can you clarify? The issue -- is it capacity for the BBC or is
 it the rights issue?

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  Well, there are clearly some quite complicated rights
 issues around it. We make available the material to which the BBC owns all of
 the rights. Clearly, a lot of our programming and content has other material
 embedded in it to which we don't have the rights. So we need to sort that out.
 But the principle is that because we are publicly funded, the public is
 effectively already invested in that material, and that the Internet allows us
 to make it more widely available, and, indeed, allows us, under certain terms,
 like in the Creative Commons license, not repurposed for commercial gain and so
 on, for people to reuse that material if they choose to do so. And the
 justification for that, really, is partly the education, if you like, we think
 there's an educational benefit to it. We think there's a creativity and
 innovative benefit to it, that it helps to spark innovation. And, as I said,
 the principle is that we should make this material, which has already been paid
 for by the public, more widely available. But there are rights issues around
 it.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Simon from South Africa.

 >> SIMON QOBO:  Thank you very much, Mr. moderator. In fact, since (inaudible)
 Internet governance for development, I would like to know how we find a right
 balance between intellectual property rights in terms of copyrights, and -- and
 technological advancements subsequent to development. We are in an environment
 where we're not getting a (inaudible) of copyright infringement. It's just more
 than a mouse, so just click and you can get everything. But the how do we find
 the balance. Most of the information is in the form of digital rights
 management systems. And then we have witnessed that all the, if not most of the
 exceptions and limitations (inaudible) reporting, teaching, scholarship,
 research, which are (inaudible) innovation, have been, if not completely
 (inaudible). So I hope we find the right balance. It's a concern for us in the
 developing world. Because information, knowledge, is (inaudible) to our
 development. Or maybe you can look at operating (inaudible) access to knowledge
 (inaudible) something like that. But we need to do something about it. Thank
 you very much.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Thank you. (saying name) are you out there? Still? I can see a
 hand out there. Jamie Love.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  Maybe one practical thing that can come out of this is every one
 of the panel members could express their commitment to the proposal that Simon
 just mentioned about elaboration of a treaty on access to knowledge, to lay
 down a kind of a baseline. This is something that south Africa and more than a
 dozen other countries have put down in the, and it's received a lot of support.
 But there's a lot of influential people on this panel. And perhaps some of the
 other people can express their support for elaboration of a treaty for access
 to knowledge on WIPO.

 >>NIK GOWING:  You have just been nodding your head.

 >>HANNE SOPHIE GREVE:  I would definitely want to endorse it immediately.

 >>NIK GOWING:  How achievable is it?

 >>HANNE SOPHIE GREVE:  I think it is very achievable. But also, I want to raise
 a slightly different issue, but on the same. I think you were asking earlier on
 the bargaining power of corporate entities. I think also when it comes to
 copyright, and, in particular, when it comes to research, there is some
 bargaining power that we might want to look at. I'm thinking of the fact that
 when you use public funding for research, I think it should be an issue that
 this should be made available to everyone and there should be some commitment
 to have this on the Internet and distributed widely. And, second, I think that
 in many -- particularly in many developing countries, people are asked to
 contribute, giving informed consent, say, to medical research. And when the
 study has been carried out, they may not have access to that particular
 research. I think giving informed consent, for instance, to medical research or
 other elements of research should also mean that you would have an impact on
 the copyright that should be made available to those who participate. I think
 we should look at what is the entire content of what's being sort of published
 and presented. Of course, there are rights for the authors. There are
 copyrights, et cetera. But there are rights for many others. And I would very
 much welcome a situation in which it was made accessible on a very, very broad
 basis. I think that is really the way forward for better governance, for
 bettering the situation of people in the world. Thank you.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Arturo (saying name).

 >> Hello. So I would like to ask to Joichi Ito and the European representative,
 how big is the treaty posted to the free flow of information by technologists
 like digital rights management and (inaudible) computing. Of course, we know
 everybody that less privacy doesn't mean more security. Thank you. Bye.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Joichi.

 >>JOICHI ITO:  I'd like to make one small point that relates to this, which is
 --

 >>NIK GOWING:  Pick up on that.

 >>JOICHI ITO:  But I want to make sure that we understand that when you write a
 book or an article and somebody quotes you in length and criticizes you and
 uses it in some way that you don't like, you do not have the right to tell that
 person they can't do that. In our current social discourse, it is allowed for
 somebody to quote you and tear you apart. But in things like music and artistic
 works, we have a lot of more rights that say, well, I don't like -- I wouldn't
 want that person to use it in that way. So many documentary producers are being
 prohibited, for instance, from using videos of the President of the United
 States for copyright reasons because of the intellectual property. And this is
 -- and I would throw some of this -- would like your reaction from the BBC on
 some of this. But now that we can use little personal computers to edit video
 and edit sound, the editing and modifying of multimedia is just as much a part
 of the public discourse as text was. And so I think we have to really
 understand that sometimes we give up rights. We give up the right to be able to
 protect our written work from being used against us, and we need to think about
 what are we doing in terms of the video and so on. And so to get to the point
 of this answer, digital rights management, we really need to understand that
 sometimes you have to give up rights in order to better society. And one really
 key thing that we -- I'd like to tie into the earlier part of this panel is
 that the free speech element of being allowed to share in remix video and audio
 content is really, really important and is separate from just education.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Do you have a strong view yourself?

 >>JOICHI ITO:  I have a strong view that right now, we are -- the youth, the
 young generation, are using music and video in very, very creative ways and
 remixing this in a new culture. And if you look on the Internet, there are many
 interesting political documentaries being done by amateurs which are not legal
 because of the copyright restrictions. And I think we're inhibiting a
 completely new type of free speech that would emerge right now like crazy on
 the Internet if we didn't have digital rights management and we didn't have
 lawyers going around shutting down sites of people who are making these amateur
 videos.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  If I could just add to that. WIPO right now has a proposal
 before it that's been pushed by the European public broadcasters for the WIPO
 broadcasting treaty, which they also want to extend to the cable organization.
 And it has the practical effect of -- in some of the proposal, certainly the
 proposal that Chairman Euklides, that I think is here in this meeting, has
 proposed, to create an intellectual property right over 50 years for
 transmitting information, and to associate technical protection members,
 digital rights, and it's coming right at the time where, just as Joi mentioned,
 there's this explosion of creativity about how people use video for commentary,
 for political reasons, to create new social works. You see this take-down of
 the YouTube site from Comedy Central, where a lot of the downloads are
 political downloads about the Kobe Report, or -- YouTube right now has become a
 huge source of political criticism. And, in fact, it's changing the way media
 works, because media right now, they'll say something on television, then
 they're ridiculed in blogs and people have taken little bits of what they say
 on television and they annotate them and juxtapose them. And it's actually
 improved in some ways the way people report on things. Because there's this
 sort of instant feedback taking place off the Internet. The problem is the
 intellectual property laws, the lawyers are way ahead of in one world, and then
 people are in a different world. And they're like not very close together. WIPO
 has to sort of get the message that, you know, the people are right and the
 lawyers are wrong on some of this stuff and kind of move things back in the
 other direction.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Anriette, you're nodding. [ Applause ]

 >>NIK GOWING:  Vigorously.

 >>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  I agree vigorously. I think that, yes, I think there's
 definitely a new concept, a new right. And I think the right to share, in fact
 ABC has just put in our Internet rights charter the right to share. And I think
 we need to look at how people can do that creatively on the Internet, and not
 just from the point of view of freedom of information, but also new business
 models, new ways of innovating. Piracy creates jobs, but open source and open
 standards create opportunity, create entrepreneurs.  And I think that's the
 challenge for the IGF as well, how to look at it is a public interest forum,
 the Internet is a public space, and how can we facilitate maximum sharing,
 maximum creativity, peer production, new models, innovation. And I have a lot
 of respect for Microsoft's efforts to provide educational content in developing
 countries. But as long as they copyright and limit the right of teachers and
 learners in those countries to reuse and change and share that information,
 then there's very limited value to that. So I think, yes, sharing and openness
 is absolutely essential if we're going to use the Internet for development.

 >>NIK GOWING:  But what about the constraints? Because one of the questions, I
 can't remember quite who it was from, which I noted down at the beginning, is
 about free content and free access. There are several questions about free
 access. That session is tomorrow afternoon, so I won't go down that road this
 morning. But this expectation of free content and free access, those days are
 now numbered?

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  I don't think so. I think the ability of --   Look at what's
 happened with Wikipedia. I mean, okay, you can't get access to -- you used to
 have to worry about could you get a commercial encyclopedia. People just create
 their own encyclopedia.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Yes, but some of us have an experience where what is written in
 Wikipedia --

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  Is often --

 >>NIK GOWING:  Is often wrong, it's inaccurate, and you want to correct it very
 quickly.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  And it's more often to be more contemporary and more
 illuminating than what you get in a published book. I think the quality is
 quite good, myself. But I think the sort of role of people in creating content
 is quite important. That's what the free software movement's about. People are
 concerned about monopolistic problems, lack of transparency in the code, all
 kinds of confusion about the software, the security of software. And what do
 they do? They basically have taken over a very strong position in the mid-tier
 server market by creating their own industrial-strength server. The Internet
 was based on people creating their own applications that they couldn't even get
 from commercial companies in a lot of cases. And it's worked well with
 commercial software. So I think that there will be free content. I wouldn't
 sort of suggest that the public's going to be ruled by -- entirely. But DRM and
 things like that, software patents, they represent threats, threats to this new
 surge of movement of openness and people doing -- creating their own products.
 It tries to kind of legislate out what people are doing. We have a listserve
 that is illegal under the copyright law because we routinely publish
 information. That has meant that developing country negotiators and NGOs and
 citizen groups and people all over the world organized on access to medicine
 issues. It's been a great movement. The glue that holds it together is the
 sharing of information. A lot of it's copyrighted information. If we were to,
 like, abide by the actual law or if companies could put DRMs to prevent us from
 doing it or things like that, then you have to subscribe to these really
 expensive services. You wouldn't be able to keep up with what's going on.
 People would not be as well informed. And a lot of big decisions go wrong when
 people don't have information. It's just -- there's a cost that society plays
 when people do stupid things and do things because they don't have information.
 So I think that there's a lot riding on keeping people informed and promoting
 these norms of access to knowledge.