The Role of Scientific and Technical Data and Information in the Public Domain Proceedings of a Symposium (2003) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Session 3: Potential Effects of a Diminishing Public Domain -
Session 3: Potential Effects of a Diminishing Public Domain -
16. Discussion Framework
Pages 117-124
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 119... ...
For example, a private data producer typically markets highly refined data products to end users in relatively small quantities, whereas basic research, particularly in the observational sciences, generally requires raw or less commercially refined data in voluminous quantities. On the whole, overzealous privatization of the government's data produc1For information on these data flows, please refer to Chapter 1 of these Proceedings, "Session 1 Discussion Framework," by Paul Uhlir.
|
From page 120... ...
This is particularly true in those cases where the data that need to be collected are for a basic research function or serve a key statutory mission of the agency. A classic example of what can go wrong was the privatization of the Landsat earth remote sensing program in the mid-1980s.
|
From page 121... ...
Once databases attract an exclusive property right valid against the world, the legal duty of scientists publishing research results to disclose the underlying data would depend on codified exceptions permitting use for verification and for certain "reasonable" nonprofit research and educational purposes. We recognize that this new proprietary default rule must ultimately be reconciled in practice with the disclosure obligations of the federal funding agencies.
|
From page 122... ...
Much of what has been said about the effects of the new legal and technological pressures on the formal academic zone thus applies with even greater force to the informal zone because the impetus to commercialize data will encounter fewer regulatory constraints. The changing mores likely to undermine disclosure and open access in the formal zone will make it ever harder to organize cooperative networks in the less structured and more unruly informal domain.
|
From page 123... ...
In contrast, an exclusive IPR in the contents of databases breaks existing markets for downstream aggregates of information, which were formed around inputs of information largely available from the public domain. In effect, the sui generis database regimes create new and potentially serious barriers to entry to all existing markets for intellectual goods owing to the multiplicity of new owners of upstream information in whom they vest exclusive rights, any one of whom can hold out and all of whom can impose onerous transaction costs analogous to the problem of multimedia transactions under copyright law.
|
From page 124... ...
In contrast, critics fear that an exclusive property right in noncopyrightable collections of data, coupled with the proprietors' unlimited power to impose adhesion contracts in the course of online delivery, will compromise the operations of the national system of innovation, which depend on the relatively free flow of upstream data and information. In place of the explosive production of new databases that proponents envision, opponents of a strong database right predict a steep rise in the costs across the information economy and a progressive balkanization of that economy, in which fewer knowledge goods may be produced as more tithes have to be paid to more information rent seekers along the way.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.