WASHINGTON, May 10 (UPI) -- The Internet-powered explosion of easily available data, while spawning the Information Age, has also spawned a backlash of copyright and patent activity that threatens information in the public domain, speakers at a conference said Friday.
The groups Public Knowledge and the New America Foundation hosted the event to look into methods for preserving public interest access to the "information commons," today's version of a village square.
Older media such as television and radio have had rules for public affairs programming, equal time for political candidates and so on, said David Bollier, director of NAF's Information Commons Project. The Internet and deregulation, however, have thoroughly scrambled the concepts of free markets and the public interest, he said.
"If the champions of the market are likely to talk about profitability and efficiency, the commons helps us talk about ... democratic representation, access, openness, social equity and diversity," Bollier told the conference. "These values don't have adequate articulation in a lot of public policy debate."
The commons idea applies to scientific research and the public airwaves as well as the Internet, Bollier said, but the old guard of media and software companies, along with other content providers, is trying to encircle the commons and control its use.
One often-used method of controlling information today involves patents, said Arti Rai, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Scientists or companies try to lock up basic information and investigation methods with broad patent descriptions, a process that is especially troubling in biotechnology, Rai said. Such patents can prevent other researchers from building on or even confirming important work, she said.
For example, the University of Wisconsin patented much of the technology used in the laboratory cultivation of stem cells, a very promising avenue for regenerative medicine. The school's technology transfer arm gave a company exclusive rights to work on particular types of stem cells, but the company was very reluctant to license the technology any further.
"A basic research platform like embryonic stem cells is very difficult to 'invent around,'" Rai told the conference. "Biology is a given, it's not man-made, and as far as we can tell there's no substitute for stem cells."
Companies also discovered they could patent fragments of DNA, even if they did not know what uses the fragments had, Rai said. Recent court decisions in this area offer some hope of curbing the trend toward patenting basic information. The courts rejected attempts to patent entire genes based on the fragments, she said, but current discoveries of how viruses and other organisms gain entrance into cells could start a new and similar round of patent attempts.
The computer/Internet realm also uses patent and copyrights tools, Rai explained, adding the problem is even more complicated. Even if an overly broad patent was struck down by the courts, it could exist long enough to set a standard the industry could be reluctant to abandon.
Copyright in the digital world has changed from a basically friendly set of protocols to very strict, punitive controls, said Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of culture and communication at New York University. The concept of information has been morphed into "property" or "contraband" for many copyright holders, he said.
Legislators are not blind to the problems raised by the information commons, said Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., who gave the conference's keynote speech. A 1998 law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, includes provisions that criminalize any attempt to break copyright protection, even for academic research and other "fair use" activities, he said.
Boucher intends to introduce a bill specifically allowing these activities, which many cover part of the information commons. He will rely on court decisions to define what a fair use activity is, however.
"There are some gray areas," Boucher said. "The problem with trying to (list proper activities) is that you'll inevitably leave something out. Then it won't be a matter of a month until another application you didn't even think of comes into popular use ... that might be declared not a fair use."
