If you’re not already a Hearsay Culture listener, the KZSU-FM (Stanford University) show is aired locally and podcast globally from the website. Each hour-long episode features a scholar working in the areas of technology and communications talking about their recent work.

The show routinely features much bigger fish than myself, and is definitely worth tuning in regularly.

It’s a great school and I’m delighted to be joining the faculty. The move also brings us back to our home town of Indianapolis.

In honor of the move, I wanted to share with you a clip from Louis Armstrong’s rendition of “Back Home Again in Indiana.”

I was willing to pay $25 to obtain rights to share a thirty-second clip through this online licensing clearinghouse. But they wouldn’t even accept a bid lower than $4690.

I guess you’ll have to google “Armstrong Back Home Again in Indiana” and watch the infringing video on Youtube instead. The bootleg music video is much more entertaining than a 30-second audio clip anyway.

And won’t cost you $4690.

This twenty-minute recording offers a glimpse of the project, through the lens of Mark Lemley’s patent racing theory:

Illuminating Innovation – SEALS

An abstract is also available at SSRN, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1658643, to be followed by a public draft in due course.

This is my first year attending the SEALS conference, and I’m completely sold on coming back next year. I’ve seen a number of great panels, but what really stands out in my mind is the feel of the conference… informal, accessible, and welcoming.

They also have a truly outstanding system not just for helping brand new scholars navigate the conference, but for really catering to our needs. They reserve speaking spots for the newbies, host a special lunch, and assign you a mentor… I got very lucky in being matched with Dennis Cargill.

I also appreciated that there has been a substantial set of programming around teaching. Last summer I attended the AALS Workshop for New Law Teachers in Washington D.C., which was fantastic. But I feel like I’m getting a second wave of good new ideas here, which is great.

Thanks to Zetson for the CC-licensed image, via Flickr

More than a century after its introduction, the light bulb remains the defining icon of invention.

Justifiably so, in my opinion, because this widget almost single-handedly drove the demand for electrification.

The light bulb was the “killer app” for electric power, which in turn brought about a new era of technological innovation.

Contrary to popular wisdom, however, Edison’s team was merely one of dozens that co-invented electric light bulb.

Scientifically speaking, his team’s discoveries were neither the first, nor the most important.

What Edison did better than all the other inventors took place not in the laboratory, but in the law office.

His lawyers pursued, obtained, asserted, and litigated key patents on light bulb technology in order to run competing bulb manufacturers out of business or buy them up.

Image provided by the National Archives at http://www.ourdocuments.gov

Scientists had already published instructions for producing a glowing electric bulb in 1709. The more discerning biographers claim not that Edison invented the bulb, but that his laboratory developed improvements that made it commercially viable.

Conflicting sources indicate, however, that the technology was already commercially viable in 1876. A few years later, London’s Savoy Theatre switched from gas lighting to electric bulbs supplied by Joseph Swan.

It was at this point, in 1879, that Edison filed for his first patent on “an improvement in Electric Lamps and in the method of manufacturing the same.” The improvement Edison claimed was the use of a certain type of filament inside the bulb.

Edison then leveraged his monopoly on bulbs to corner the market in electricity service as well. Over a century later, General Electric is the longest-running member of the Dow Jones industrial average.

For example, Thomas Swan had light bulb patents of his own, the first predating Edison’s by 19 years. He had even been granted a patent in England claiming the same discovery Edison’s team claimed to have made.

But he was unable to retain the legal upper hand. Even though it was never legally established that Swan’s bulbs infringed on Edison’s patents, the shadow of IP law made it too risky for Swan to continue competing. The two companies merged.

In the process, competition in the light bulb market – and therefore the race to roll out improvements and cut prices – was severely curtailed. And a half century would pass before ordinary Americans could afford electric lights.

In theory, patents promote innovation by providing greater incentives to invention. But it can also work the other way, by erecting legal barriers to follow-on innovation.

The result is a paradoxical delay in scientific advancement, widespread access to new technologies, and opportunities for new businesses and opportunities that build upon that technology.

The effort to discern whether patent protection is a net positive or negative for innovation and economic growth continues to confound economic and legal scholars.

Economists have sought to address the question through cross-national empirical studies correlating patent terms with macroeconomic results, with little in the way of conclusive results.

Methodologically, I suggest that case studies of the impact of patent law on innovation and growth with respect to a particular technology or sector – such as electricity – can be more illuminating.

These closer examinations permit researchers to tease out the complicated effects of intellectual property law, in ways that can inform later quantitative research.

Although much has been written about what the Internet has to teach us about intellectual property and innovation, the story of the lightbulb – a similarly revolutionary technological development – so far remains in the shadows.

For more on these ideas, check out an earlier post at the blog of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, my speech at the Yale ISP’s spring 2010 conference on Access to Knowledge and Human Rights or my article from the Wisconsin Law Review entitled The Right to Science and Culture.

I’ve had the privilege to be involved with all four of Yale’s A2K conferences, first as an ISP student fellow, and now as the director of its access to knowledge research program.

This year’s conference, however, is particularly close to my heart. For the first time, we’re approaching access to knowledge from the perspective of a particular theme: its intersection with human rights, the focus of two of my recent articles.

For the full agenda of the conference, as well as links to blog posts, archived video, and additional resources for each panel, please visit http://yaleisp.org/2010/02/a2k4main.

Below the jump, a summary of the opening remarks I will make on Friday morning…

Welcome to A2K4: Access to Knowledge and Human Rights.

For those who may be new to access to knowledge issues, a few words on what we mean by “A2K.”

The access to knowledge movement emerged as a reaction to the 1994 TRIPs Agreement, which dramatically changed the way that intellectual property is regulated internationally.

The philosophy that TRIPs embodied may be described as “IP maximalism” — the belief that the more strongly intellectual property is protected, the better. The A2K movement emerged out of organizations that criticized that approach, pointing out a number of ways in which stronger IP protection was harmful to the public interest.

The best-known area of activism is around access to essential medicines, such as treatments for HIV, that was endangered by new patent rules. But the A2K movement is much broader; concerned also with the ways that IP rules limit access to educational materials, seeds, cultural works, and IT software and hardware.

The concerns of the A2K movement also extend beyond intellectual property. They encompass Internet governance, innovation and technology policy, and competition regulation. The unifying feature is a concern to preserve, protect, and advance the quality of knowledge as a public good all should enjoy access to.

“Knowledge” here refers not only or primarily to luxury goods like a Yale education, access to fine literature, or a high-speed Internet connection. The A2K movement is particularly concerned with the ways in which access to knowledge impacts the lives of the poor and vulnerable. For example: control over crop seeds, affordable medicines, and primary textbooks.

In this light, it’s natural to draw a connection to human rights. As we’ll see over the next two days, access to knowledge impacts civil liberties such as freedom of expression and privacy. As well as issues of distributive justice such as access to education, health care, and science and culture.

Just because A2K concerns can be articulated in terms of human rights, however, does not compel the conclusion that they should. Indeed, there are very much two sides to this debate.

On the one hand, human rights offers an international normative and legal framework from which to critique the recent approach to IP. Because rights-based arguments have some qualities of a “trump” to them, they may open up new avenues for advocacy and legal challenge.

It is far from clear, however, that such efforts will be effective in shifting the dynamics of existing struggles over IP. Many in the A2K community are highly skeptical of rights-based approaches, having heard many times the claim that intellectual property rights are human rights.

In the words of scholar Kal Raustiala, “It remains to be seen whether the marriage of human rights and IP will make international IP rights more socially just, or just more powerful.” Kal Raustiala, Commentary: Density and Conflict in International Intellectual Property Law, 40 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1021, 1037 (2007).

The very dual-edged nature of this dilemma only reinforces the conclusion that the A2K community cannot afford to ignore the human rights debate, any more than the human rights community can afford to ignore access to knowledge concerns.

This weekend’s conference is an opportunity to explore in depth the issues encountered at the intersection of access to knowledge and human rights. Our esteemed panelists will be addressing three central questions:

In what ways do intellectual property, Internet governance, technological regulation and innovation systems impact human rights — both civil liberties as well as socioeconomic rights?

How can leveraging rights-based methodologies, arguments, and institutions advance A2K goals? What new risks might these strategies carry?

As we move toward greater collaboration between the human rights and A2K communities, wherein lie the greatest opportunities and challenges, and how can we rise to meet them?

I feel privileged to join such a wonderful community of colleagues, and am looking forward to teaching a package of intellectual property courses and continuing my research on access to knowledge.

One of the stories I’m intrigued by is the democratization of electricity during the New Deal. All of the scientific discoveries necessary to make home lighting work were in place by the 1880s. Yet almost half a century later, very few American households had it.

Diego Rivera, "Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future" (1934)

It was just too expensive. And the story of why it was expensive has everything to do with monopolies. Edison’s patents were aggressively litigated, so there was no competition in the lightbulb market. And since there was generally only one (private) utility company per city, there was no incentive to bring down costs.

So here’s the really neat part I just read about today, and that I never would have guessed. Even before FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority program, there was actually a popular movement in America to demand access to electricity. Historian David Nye writes about it in Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, from MIT Press, at page 349.

Between 1930 and 1934, the citizens of Muncie, Indian mobilized for the public purchase of the private utility company. Courts had to intervene to enjoin a special election. In 1935, the mayor of Huntington, Indiana defied a court order and went ahead setting up a public service to compete with the private utility. He went to jail.

Our conventional account of technological progress makes it seem like science just happens. Somebody invents electricity, and then a few years later everybody has it. My article tries to challenge that conception and reveal the hidden role of law in shaping access to technology.

But the idea that people had to actually go to jail in America to win access to electricity–a technology whose wide diffusion was necessary groundwork for the radio, the television and the personal computer–it’s so hard to fit in to our conventional picture. It makes you look at the human rights text in a whole new way:

Article 27(1), Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948):

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts, and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

Update: I just came upon this very timely related news item:

DOJ Opens Review of Telecom Industry

By AMOL SHARMA

JULY 6, 2009, 12:42 P.M. ET

The Department of Justice has begun an initial review to determine
whether large U.S. telecom companies such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon
Communications Inc. have abused the market power they’ve amassed in
recent years, according to people familiar with the matter.

The review of potential anti-competitive practices is in its very
early stages, and it isn’t a formal investigation of any specific
company at this point, the people said. It isn’t clear whether the
agency intends to launch an official inquiry.

Among the areas the Justice Department could explore is whether
wireless carriers are hurting smaller competitors by locking up
popular phones through exclusive agreements with handset makers,
according to the people. In recent weeks lawmakers and regulators have
raised questions about deals such as AT&T’s exclusive right to provide
service for Apple Inc.’s popular iPhone in the U.S.

The Justice Department may also review whether telecom carriers are
unduly restricting the types of services other companies can offer on
their networks, one person familiar with the situation said.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124689740762401297.html

The group, convened by Joseph Stiglitz, met to workshop chapters for a book that will bring together law and economics perspectives on intellectual property in international perspective.

If you work in this field, you’ll want to check out the working papers now posted online right away. I’ll be adding at least two of these as foundational readings for my students: an essential review of the economics literature on IP and innovation by Adam Jaffe and Albert Hu, and a great discussion of IP and development by Leonardo Burlamqui and Mario Cimoli.

Other highlights: proposals for pharmaceutical innovation prizes by Jamie Love and Tim Hubbard and exceptions and limitations for scientific research by Jerry Reichman and Ruth Okediji.

The full set of papers is available here.

"Xeni Jardin -- BoingBoing TV" from Roy Blumenthal's Open Video Conference series, Creative Commons licensed

The Open Video Conference, co-organized by the Yale ISP, has been an exciting two days.

Registration topped 800, and I have it from a reliable source that 4000 people watched remotely. My own contribution to the conference was a presentation as part of a panel entitled “Human Rights and Indigenous Video: Dilemmas, Challenges and Opportunities.

I drew on examples from the recent protests in Iran to demonstrate how Internet video can be a powerful tool for promoting human rights, and why open video is particularly important to realizing this potential.

Video footage of our workshop is now available here. My presentation runs from 2:15 to 8:50. My slides are also available at the ISP’s blog. Below, a partial transcript.

This talk focused mostly on how open video can help people defend their human rights. But I’ve also written about how open video more directly supports the right to take part in cultural life in this short thought piece.

Open Video and Human Rights, by Lea Shaver

Presentation to the Open Video Conference, New York City, 19 June 2009

The big news story this week are the mass protests in Iran, where a dissatisfied public demands accountability for what appears to be massive election fraud.

Digital technologies have played a crucial role in the popular mobilization, as user-generated media circumvents the official censorship.

Here, the BBC’s website features extensive, detailed videos recorded by ordinary Iranian citizens from their cell phones.

It used to be that big media institutions made the news, and then the bloggers commented on it. Now those roles have been reversed.

Here, the New York Times gathers video from around the Internet, asking readers to help verify its contents, and commenting on its reliability and context.

The opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has a Facebook page linking supporters to various ways to help and sources of information, including YouTube videos.

Now Mousavi’s team would like this particular video to reach  English-speaking audiences as well. But they couldn’t provide the subtitles themselves, whether for lack of linguistic or technical skills, resources, time, or maybe even security.

So they invited the public to remix their video, adding in the English subtitles for them. The call went out to Mousavi’s 60,000 Facebook supporters at 7:47am yesterday.

Less than two hours later, Nico Pitney, writing for the Huffington Post, passed on that subtitling request to a much wider audience. You see, according to the Internet statistics source Alexa.com, yesterday Pitney’s ”Live Blogging the Uprising” was the 11th most popular website in the world.

So, hundreds of thousands of people received this subtitling request almost instantly. And if you’re familiar with the amazing speed of digital networks, flashmobs, and crowd-sourcing, you might think it would take only an hour or two for some volunteer to put these subtitles together.

But you’d be wrong.

See, this is where the openness of the Internet reaches its limits in the world of video. You can’t just cut, paste, and edit Internet video the way you can text.

I had planned at this point to have the video playing silently in the background as I spoke. I found a hack enabling me to download it from YouTube. But then my slideshow software wouldn’t accept the file in FLASH format. And none of my desktop tools would let me extract 30 seconds from the video, remove the audio track, and compress the file to fit on my flash drive.

Why not?

"Eirik Solheim -- NRK" from Roy Blumenthal's Open Video Conference series

What makes video “open” or “closed”?

CLOSED
Technology allows playback only
Licensing fees make it pay-to-play
Advanced editing tools are hard to use & expensive

OPEN
Technology enables copy, cut, paste, edit
Open standards allow costless interactivity
Tools are accessible to an average Iranian teenager

Technology is not an accident and it is not neutral; it is designed by someone, and that design process inevitably promote certain values at the expense of others.

The first generation of digital video technology was not closed by accident. It was designed that way by companies that wanted you to be able to purchase and view their videos, but not to save them, share them, or change them.

Closed video is good for protecting intellectual property. But it’s bad for protecting human rights.

The next generation of video technology will not open by accident. It’s being designed that way by individuals and organizations that believe empowering ordinary people to speak in video is a good thing for freedom of expression, democratic empowerment, and cultural participation.

Open video promotes human rights in two ways, and here I’m making reference to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in 1945 and adopted by every nation in the world as sort of an international bill of rights.

First, open video standards empower freedom of expression.

They make it possible for video – as a form of documentation, truth-telling, journalism, expression, partication and dissent – to travel across software, across machines, across borders and languages. For people to translate, adapt, and remix, to utilize crowd-sourcing and rapid response.

Open video makes those who would speak truth to power stronger.

Second, open video enables broader participation and inclusion.

Access to culture shouldn’t just mean that we all get to see movies and watch the news. We should all be able to create them. Open software, open standards, and open content enable that.

"Amy Goodman -- Democracy Now" from Roy Blumenthal's Open Video Conference Series

Open video is about democratic culture.

Access has dimensions of equality as well. When you upload video, how do you make sure you’re not excluding people who speak a different language? Or those with disabilities of sight or hearing?

When you use open video technologies, you enable others to build on your work. So your how-to video can be dubbed into Spanish. Your documentary film can be captioned for the deaf. Your political footage can be transcribed for the blind.

You create culture that everyone can access.

In conclusion…

Open video technologies amplify and empower freedom of expression, enabling people to better demand respect for all their human rights, whether it’s the right to education or the right to have their votes counted.

Open video technologies engender broader cultural participation, making culture accessible to those with limited financial resources, and those with disabilities that require adaptive video content, and allowing for translation and cross-cultural conversations.

For this reason, governments should use open video for content that is publicly funded or of public importance.

And if you care about human rights, you should be supporting open video too.