We've noted before the odd fact that various transit authorities around the globe have been trying to stop people from making useful transit apps, with things like schedules and whatnot. The argument from those transit authorities is incredibly short-sighted. It usually has something to do with claims about how the scheduling data is "proprietary" and the authority's "intellectual property." The key point, of course, is that they're hoping to make money licensing the data. But that's really short-sighted. As some new studies are showing, better apps and technology make it much easier and enjoyable for people to use public transit. In other words, by allowing people to use the data to make better apps, they could get a lot more long-term riders. You would think that would be the goal...

One of the more pernicious areas of locking up knowledge that we've seen and discussed involves academic journals. These tend to involve private publishers who get a tremendous amount of completely free labor in terms of content submissions and even reviewers/editors... and then demand the copyrights of the research, while charging universities ridiculously high fees. Those publishers have also gone to great lengths to try to block the US government from trying to make federally funded research available to the public at no cost after a limited amount of time. And, of course, the journals often rely on secrecy to get the most money -- including requiring universities to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that forbid them from revealing how much they're paying for a journal.

It's nice to see some universities really starting to push back, and it's even nicer when it's a university that I attended and from which I received two degrees. My sister informs me that Cornell University has decided to take a stand and is refusing to sign any NDAs from various journals, and will make the prices they're being charged for such journals public. As the University made clear in a statement about this policy, it feels these agreements go against the basic nature of openness and fairness:

It has become apparent to the library community that the anticompetitive conduct engaged in by some publishing firms is in part a result of the inclusion of nondisclosure agreements in contracts. As Robert Darnton recently noted, by "keeping the terms secret, ... one library cannot negotiate for cheaper rates by citing an advantage obtained by another library." For this reason, the International Coalition of Library Consortia's "Statement of Current Perspective and Preferred Practices for the Selection and Purchase of Electronic Information" states that "Non-disclosure language should not be required for any licensing agreement, particularly language that would preclude library consortia from sharing pricing and other significant terms and conditions with other consortia." The more that libraries are able to communicate with one another about vendor offers, the better they are able to weigh the costs and benefits of any individual offer. An open market will result in better licensing terms.

Additionally, nondisclosure agreements conflict with the needs of CUL librarians and staff to work openly, collaboratively, and transparently. This conflict increases the likelihood that the terms of a nondisclosure agreement would be inadvertently violated, posing a threat to the university

The next step is focusing more and more on truly open journals and increasing their acceptance in academia.

This is a bit of a surprise. As many are claiming that the end result of Wikileaks will be that governments try to be even more secretive, the UK's information commissioner, Christopher Graham, is apparently urging governments to take a different lesson, and that it shows they should be a lot more open in the first place:

"We are strongly of the view that things should be published. Where you're open things will not be WikiLeaked. Whatever view you take about WikiLeaks -- right or wrong -- it means that things will now get out. It has changed things. I'm saying government and authorities need to factor it in. Be more proactive, [by] publishing more stuff, because quite a lot of this is only exciting because we didn't know it. You can't un-invent WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is part of the phenomenon of the online, empowered citizen ... these are facts that aren't going to go away. Government and authorities need to wise up to that."

He also suggests that becoming more secretive would be a mistake. Specifically, he calls it nonsense:

"One response is that they will clam up and not write anything down, which is nonsense, you can't run any organisation that way. The other is to be even more open. The best form of defence is transparency -- much more proactive publication of what organisations do. It's an attitude of 'OK. You want to know? Here it is'."

It would be nice if anyone listened to him, though I'm not convinced anyone in power actually will...

As we still wait for the details of the FCC's net neutrality ruling, some have noticed that the FCC's justification for not caring much about wireless networks is somewhat baffling. Specifically, the FCC used the openness of the Android operating system as evidence that things are open in the mobile networking world:

Further, we recognize that there have been meaningful recent moves toward openness, including the introduction of open operating systems like Android.

Now, whether or not you agree with the FCC's plans, or with the idea of "net neutrality" regulations in general, this statement is a bit of a head scratcher. It's kind of like saying "because cars use gasoline, we see no reason to set speed limits." I mean, the two are kinda sorta related in that they both involve cars (or mobile computing), but they're not the same thing at all. Just because Android is a more open operating system has nothing to do with network discrimination or questions about the end-to-end principle of networks. Making such a statement suggests that the FCC doesn't understand the difference between an operating system and a mobile network... and that's just scary.

We've already talked about how the FCC was going to approve heavily watered down (and written in conjunction with AT&T) "net neutrality" rules today -- which it did. However, one aspect of all this that is particularly ridiculous is the fact that the FCC voted on rules which it has not released, and which it claims may be adjusted before they are released. Considering that these rules are supposed to be about internet openness it seems pretty ironic that the rules are secret. Jeff Jarvis noted this irony in asking if he needed to file a Freedom of Information Act request just to find out what was voted on. He followed it up by filing just such a request that seeks not just the rules, but also details of correspondences and meeting notes leading up to the creation of the rules. We'll see what the FCC comes back with.

With all the talk about how the whole Wikileaks/domain name seizures issue is about a centralized vs. decentralized internet and even talk of a more decentralized DNS system, IP Watch raises an interesting question. With ICANN's plans to allow just about any TLD, what would happen if Wikileaks were to apply for its very own TLD?

Given ICANN's official statement that it does not take down domain names and has no technical or legal authority to participate in such forms of censorship (and, in fact, we've noted in the past that ICANN has refused to meet with IP Czar Victoria Espinel about this, noting that it would not be appropriate), would it allow such a TLD to be created, and then take a hands off approach?

What if it wasn't even a .wikileaks (or just .leaks) TLD, but a more general .open DNS, managed by an organization that agreed not to censor anything, no matter what the cause?

Michael Marcus is noting that the Practicing Law Institute is holding a Telco and Policy Regulation "Institute," that will include a Q&A with "FCC commissioners and other senior officials." It looks like three commissioners will be there, along with four other senior officials including the heads of "wireline competition," "wireless telecommunications," and "engineering and technology." The issue, Marcus points out, is that this Q&A with key regulators costs $1,595 to attend. Affordable for lobbyists, but not so much for anyone else.

But Marcus' bigger concern is that the public won't find out what was said at the event without ponying up for the recording -- where previous recordings cost $797 for audio and $1,595 for video. As he notes:

Now I do not disagree that it is useful for public officials to meet in fine hotels with industry moguls, brief them on upcoming policy issues and answer questions. The key question is whether the rest of us will find out in a reasonably timely what was said. (Some of us might like to ask questions also, but that is getting off subject.) I have previously proposed to the the FCC's reboot.fcc.gov site that asks about "What are ways in which the FCC can better engage the public in open proceedings?" that videos of such presentations be made available to the public at the normal FCC terms - free online, nominal charge for copying - within a few days of such an event. As with the other many suggestions received from the public via this site, this has not been resolved.

Again, it's understandable that it costs money to attend such events. It's costly to put them on, and events are a big business. But it gets a little troubling when public policy may be influenced at such events and the details of what was said are not revealed.

While I've still been linking to NY Times articles for Techdirt posts, if there are decent stories on the same subject elsewhere, I've been starting to use those other sources instead. That's because I know we're getting closer and closer to 2011 -- when the NY Times has promised to lock up its content behind a paywall. The company still keeps pretending that it can have the best of both worlds, and is apparently insisting that the paywall won't remove it from the wider conversation because it will allow a "first click free" sort of program, whereby you'll be able to read an article once if you click through from another site, before being asked to pay. While that might make the NY Times comfortable, it doesn't make me comfortable at all. If there are no other options, I may still link to NY Times content, but I'm certainly going to be a lot more cautious linking to it. Why would I even risk pissing off my readers by a lockout when I can point them to another site that actually wants that traffic?

This is a point that we've been making for years (and often highlighting the research that proves this), but innovation and good ideas tend not to come from the proverbial "spark of genius." Study after study after study has shown that's almost never the case. Almost all good ideas come from people building on the works of others, with a minor tweak here or there, or a random decision based on a suggestion from someone new, after an idea percolates for months or years. The more open systems are to sharing ideas and spreading information and allowing those collisions to happen, the more likely that new good ideas and new innovations occur. That's why it's so harmful that today's intellectual property systems are built on the false assumption that innovation really does happen through that "spark of genius."

Entrepreneur and author Steven Johnson is about to come out with a new book on this particular topic, Where Good Ideas Come From and has been writing and speaking about some of what's in the book -- which highlights these same points. People have been submitting both his recent TED talk and his recent WSJ piece that makes these points clear: As he says at one point in the video:

The key thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches. That's what often happens. You have half of an idea and someone else has the other half, and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So, in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property. You know, building barricades, having secretive R&D labs, patenting everything that we have, so that those ideas will 'remain valuable' and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas. But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them.

In the WSJ piece, he highlights an example of this in action:

Earlier this year, Nike announced a new Web-based marketplace it calls the GreenXchange, where it has publicly released more than 400 of its patents that involve environmentally friendly materials or technologies. The marketplace is a kind of hybrid of commercial self-interest and civic good. This makes it possible for outside firms to improve on those innovations, creating new value that Nike might ultimately be able to put to use itself in its own products.

In a sense, Nike is widening the network of minds who are actively thinking about how to make its ideas more useful, without adding any more employees. But some of its innovations might well turn out to be advantageous to industries or markets in which it has no competitive involvement whatsoever. By keeping its eco-friendly ideas behind a veil of secrecy, Nike was holding back ideas that might, in another context, contribute to a sustainable future--without any real commercial justification.

Of course, I think an even better example is the recent research on Alzheimer's that really only took off when everyone involved opened up their data and agreed to avoid patents. Or, how about the research on the human genome that compared patented and public domain gene research, and showed that the patents limited commercial viability. But when the genes were opened up to the public, much more value came out of it. The more you look, the more you find these results pretty much everywhere you look. And it's nearly impossible to find any evidence to support the idea of a "flash of genius" for key innovations in history. In fact, almost every key innovation in history has been shown to have come about to multiple people at once, as ideas are shared and the general progress of knowledge and innovation pushes forward.

This is important if you believe and support innovation. The fact that our entire regulatory system for innovation is based on a disproved theory that makes innovation more difficult should be seen as a serious problem and one worth fixing as quickly as possible.

There's been some well-deserved buzz lately about the new upstart search engine Blekko, which I've been playing around with a bit. Most of the attention has been focused on the concept of "slashtags" that allow very quick and dirty targeted search, or added parameters in a format that builds off of user suggested groupings of sites. It's a neat feature, but so far I have to admit I haven't found in that useful in my testing. What has struck me as significantly more interesting about Blekko is that it -- unlike just about every other search engine out there -- lets you dig in on the data the site used to determine the results rankings. This is the type of stuff that is a closely guarded secret at Google, in large part because revealing the data might make it easier to game.

And while Blekko founder/CEO Rich Skrenta (who, I should disclose, I've known for many, many years) has been clear from the very beginning that the goal is not to take down Google, but rather to carve out a decent, but highly profitable, niche in the search engine space, I do find this rather interesting. By opening up the details in a way that lets users dig in and find out how a site's ranking is determined, Blekko is doing something that Google can't easily copy. I always find this quite fascinating. We end up talking quite a bit on this site about the idea that some insist upon, that if you come up with something disruptive, big companies will just come along and copy the idea, killing off the small company. However, as we've detailed over and over again, this happens a lot less than you would think, in part because "copying" the innovation often will seriously upset an existing line of business or an existing way of doing things. That's what's so disruptive about disruptive innovation.

I have no idea if Blekko really will turn out to be disruptive in any way. But I find it quite fascinating that a big part of its attack on Google's marketshare is to enable a feature that would totally turn Google upside down in terms of how secretive it is about its algorithm and ranking. Google is often seen as a leader in the "open" technology world, but as we've pointed out before, while the company works hard to encourage others to be open, it can be incredibly closed itself. So it seems only fitting that its potential achilles' heel may be in the part of its business that it has kept quite closed.