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IP and the Trend towards Openness
October 10, 2007
RSA HOSTS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND THE TREND TOWARDS OPENNESS
CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS – October 10, 2007
At the second RSA US conference on IP, keynote speakers Ian Fletcher, Chief Executive of the United Kingdom’s Office for Intellectual Property, and Pam Samuelson, Pam Samuelson, Chancellor's Professor of Information Management and of Law at the University of California at Berkeley and visiting professor at Harvard, examined some of the hot-button issues.
Leading the panel on academic, research and traditional publisher perspectives, Samuelson predicts the healthy coexistence of proprietary and open models will offer greater opportunities for innovation and creativity. “People actually like to create for many reasons, sometimes having to do with self-actualization, sometimes having to do with altruism. So intellectual property rights aren't necessary in order to bring all innovation into being”. Read full transcript of Pam's keynote. Leading the discussion of the business aspect, Fletcher acknowledges that technology is changing access and blurring boundaries and new legislation needs to focus on a framework for the future rather than protecting old business models. “If you prohibit things, you tend to drive it underground, criminalize it and drive the price up. So getting the language of copyright to move from enforcement to participation is as important in the software world as it is in the music and film and publishing worlds”. Read full transcript of Ian's keynote.
In his summing up, Matthew Lowrie, Adjunct Professor at Suffolk University Law School and patent litigator with Lowrie, Lando & Anastasi suggested that the trend to openness was arguably guided by the invisible hand as much as by any altruistic motive. He questions the validity of the Adelphi Charter: “It's very interesting to think that there is a trend towards openness in the face of what the Adelphi Charter has found to be 30 years of overblown growth and stifling of competition or innovation”.
The panelists also included: MacKenzie Smith, Associate Director for Technologies of MIT Libraries and project director at MIT for DSpace, a collaboration with HP Labs to develop an open source digital repository for scholarly research material in digital formats; Marc Ehrlich, IBM Group IP Counsel for Global Engineering Solutions; John Taylor Williams, Senior Counsel, Fish & Richardson P.C.; Karen Copenhaver , Director of IP Strategies, Linux, and Partner, Choate, Hall and Stewart; , Palle Pedersen, Chief Technology Officer, Black Duck Software, who presented Openness in Software 2007; and Donald McCubbrey, professor at Denver University, and co-founder of the Global Text project, a program to provide free textbooks online to third world students.
The program was co-sponsored by The British Consulate-General of Boston , by Lowrie, Lando & Anastasi, LLP, by The Center for Advanced Legal Studies, Intellectual Property Law and Technology, Suffolk University Law School and by The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
The UK Intellectual Property Office is sponsoring the production of an RSA publication on current issues surrounding IP legislation.
For pictures from the event Click Here.
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