John Buckman of Magnatune, Gene Hoffman founder of eMusic, Edward Klaris of New Yorker, Adam Toll of Big Champagne, Sam Yagan of MetaMachine (eDonkey), Tor Hansen of Yep Roc, Roger McGuinn and hosted by Koleman Strumpf, economist.
Quite a variety of voices here as you might guess from the affiliations.
In the audience, Cory Doctorow, Robert Kaye, Chris DiBona, Scott Adams, David Bollier, Marybeth Peters, Roy Kaufman, Chris Evans, Laurie Racine, Jocelyn Neal, Stephanie McGarrah (see this page for ids).
Day: November 1, 2005
Michael Tiemann of Red Hat chairing. With Marshall Phelps of Microsoft, Chris DiBona of Google and David Hustace of open NMS.
Active audience discusses how to measure innovation. Robert Kaye says innovation should not be patents but patents and discoveries that are actually used and built on. Southhampton guy working on openNMS points beyond R&D budgets as does Sam Jelinek of College of William and Mary (who actually kicked on this line of discussion). Gene Hoffman founder of eMusic talks about not only the rate of change but how change accelerates and then stablizes.
Phelps and DiBona and Tiemann discuss the iPod as an innovation. What is the diff from orginal mp3 players and the iPod? How does innovation fit in here? Is business model the innovation or the design or what?
MT Try to access the option equation of the internet say. Cites: Massive Change.
David Bollier talks about making things free. MT says that more stuff is free now or is it?
Does capital serve society or does society serve capital? Bollier and Phelps and Hoffman are now into it over commerciality. David B talks about the changes in the market. David H talks about innovation in a smaller project and the relationship to his contributors and customers. (sorta the Eric von Hippel talk)
Next topic Google as a word and an innovation. Is the principle meaning of Google a noun or a verb? (MT) Innovation principally a property to be managed or as an activity?
DiBona says working at Google we have an idea about this. Engineers can take their 20% for innovation to scratch their itches. Surprises of innovation by not managing
Marshall says innovation can be directed and companies do that with R&D budgets. Serendipitousness (ouch i can’t spell) is not the only
David H says innovation might not be finding a new molecule but in finding new ways to find new molecules.
Marshall discusses innovation of Microsoft and says the experimental
John Buckman asks about how innovation works at MSFT. Do they use the same metheods as Open Source. Phelps talks about the culture of MSFT. MT talks about the 2 new open source-ish licenses. (not every once agrees that those licenses). End of Certainty (cited by MT). What draws the line between determinism and choice?
Robert Kaye – the good chaos of open source won’t work within a corp
Hoffman – says well known companies are structure models for successful open source projects
MT – customer satisfaction? what happens when enablement is a necessary component of customer satisfaction.
Andy Oram – Open Source is never finished. But windows is expected to be solid.
Wales – what is the danger of closed with protection
Hoffman – some business men would rather beat to market than to patent.
Phelps – hasn’t sued anyone but is defending 40+ suits against MSFT. why can we innovate despite IBM patents? MSFT wasn’t stopped from innovating by that.
Wales – open source cannot license in the same way
MT – space ship one vs the nasa shuttle. space ship one doesn’t explode thanks to fuel design.
MT – cites Montessori: The Genius behind the Science
MP – on software patents. some are good and some bad. he thinks that some things should definitely no patentable. Would MSFT be better off without software patents? Better than trade secrets. Great IP theft by employee story about IBM disk patents.
Having trouble keeping writing here. Discussion getting hot on software patents. Codec research should be patented says Hoffman. He also wants crypto patents. MT says that GH missing the third leg (ouch michael) how to include the community and the relationship in distributed colaborative models.
MP says there is a romantic vision of software about software development.
CDiB – is not happy with codec patents.
Chris Evans – talks about his companies and their experiences with patents. He was earlier on and dodged the IP bullets. Now he’s leary of patent holders who might come in on him.
James Besson – attacks the property model. that you can’t find who owns what is the barrier.
MP – 50% of all patents are overturned on appeal
Sam J – asks where is the failure point?
Shift from patent quality to quality of software says MT
Dan Bricklin – how to make software last 200 years.
Software postmortems mentioned.
What should happen in the next 6 months at the Center? (Center at the Law School)? Dubai’s innovation is a race over their wells going dry. They needed to transform their future without oil and to have it thrive.
Intro by Lolly Gasaway. Four ways to ruin a technological revolution. Jamie say he now has 7 ways. Three more for free. First it’s hard to ruin a revolution in tech. Law is particularly good at ruining tech advancement. Decentralized nature of innovation is fueled by copyright, patent, and trademark in the marketplace (when it works well). To do so the Public Domain must be protected. Patents are about disclosure. Copyrights used to expire (in the old days). This refuels the pubic domain.
IP Law distorted not only kills innovation but also once distorted also kills the relationship between public domain and ownership.
US law has always been atuned to balancing the rights and the public. Jefferson writes about that and especially the Isaac McPherson (spelling) letter.
1) policy should always be made without empirical evidence. before or after implimentation. don’t compare copyright in different countries for successes. without database protection, the US out performs Europe (which has strong protection) in the market.
public information policies. all public info in the USA from the government, is open and free creating a secondary market. in Europe tries to recoup public expences. US gets 39:1 and Europe gets 9:1
patents. better than trade secrets.
2) we must adopt a world view in which overprotection. totally abolishing protection would also kill the revolution. BTW. raising cost of outputs raises the cost of inputs. software copyrights worked well to screw up the recolution, but judges took them down.
a) impose the logic of control. whereever possible close things up. VCRs are a failure of this. Silicon Valley vs. Boston area. Weaker worker rights in Boston actually killed knowledge circulation whilst SV with more allowable employee mobility actually grew.
b) confusing IP vs physicial property.
c) 20-20 downside vision.
d) prejudice against destablizing technologies
3) the real number 3. don’t revise the copyright law to allow for new tech. have the current holders write the law.
4) vital to ditch the tech of the internet and go instead to “trusted computing.” open platforms are nothing but rights violating devices, spam sources and security holes. clamp down controls and hand controls to a monopolist. get back to minitel!
5) always make policy in international venues and harmonize upwards. WIPO is great for this as it closes out other voices in the policy formation.
6) critics should be apathetic. activists should be selfdestructive. screaming, not washing, no alternatives, etc.
7) avoid the creation of a broad environmental like movement.
Matthew Szulik talks about Facebook and IM, podcasts and wikis. The global instances of differences in education and access. After a much more tentative approach to IP law by NC First Lady, Mary Easley, Matthew takes a stronger support of Open Source. Matthew is wondering why there is more reception of openness internationally than say in the USA.
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