[cc-community] US Federal sites claiming copyright restrictions
Terry Hancock
hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Tue Feb 12 09:29:23 EST 2008
Chris Watkins wrote:
> Actually, contacting them is my next step. I just wanted to check first if
> there were any insights on this, anything I'd missed. Glad to hear you've
> had good results.
I used to work indirectly for NASA (which is to say, I worked for
institutions under contract to provide services and information products
to NASA), and I've had a lot of cause to explore this problem because I
wanted to use NASA research results myself.
There are a number of conflicting attitudes to be found.
Some people believe that free access to taxpayer-funded works is somehow
"anti-business" and that it is better for one company to have monopoly
control over patents or copyrights on work that they were paid by the
government to produce. (This is basically the same line of reasoning
that led to introducing patents in the first place -- plus a whole lot
of fuzzy and biased thinking).
There is even a whole government program based on this assumption,
innocuously called "Technology Transfer": as if only by transferring
monopoly control of a patent can technology be transferred to the
private sector. It's basically a snowjob, as far as I am concerned. It
would obviously be better to make these technologies available to *any
and all* businesses that can capitalize on the research, rather than
singling one company out on the basis of some kind of application
process (as if government employees were qualified to judge business
plans in the first place!).
Personally, I consider that concept both insane and immoral, but it's
not at all uncommon in the US government. Understandably, it's also very
common in institutions which are under government contract and stand to
gain from such monopolies.
Within government and NPOs, employees are often very clueless about
*actual* business needs, and proceed on the basis of what specific
businesses with specific selfish interests have told them is "good for
business". They defer, because, as public-sector employees, they don't
trust their own understanding of the private sector. They are also often
very idealistic and naive and blissfully unaware of the routine
back-stabbing that marks the private sector ("competition is good",
right?). This makes them very easy marks for scamming.
Also, many of them have been snowed by the "conventional wisdom" that it
is "safer" to imply that everything is copyrighted and unusable, and
that it's "better to be safe than sorry".
The fact that this completely undermines their entire reason for being
funded in the first place is often missed!
I remember rather vividly telling a boss once that I thought it was
really important to do "outreach activities" for the general public
since they were the "ultimate customers" for our work. She gave me a
unbelieving and condescending stare for a moment and then assured me
that the "ultimate customer" was "the government" and that the taxpayers
had nothing to do with it. As if *I* were the naive one.
Uh-huh. The truth is that if the taxpayers are not satisfied with the
results from research programs, they agitate to cut the funding, their
representatives do listen to that, and NASA gets cut, then we lose our
contract, and I lose my job.
Which is actually what happened later that same year,
semi-coincidentally. Oh, it's not that clear-cut, and there is a lot of
twists and turns between taxpayer satisfaction and researchers losing
jobs, but there is a causal relationship, even though a lot of civil
servants seem to insulate themselves from that understanding.
Anyway, publically-funded research exists to enhance the research
results available in the public domain. There is no other rational
reason for taxpayers to pay for it. If it's being sequestered into the
hands of a single company, that is corruption and inefficiency from the
taxpayers' point of view. I don't believe that companies should ever be
able to get any exclusive rights on research that has been funded
publically (because the incentive to promote the public domain has
*already been paid*).
Of course, the trouble is, even if you set such rules (and there are
rules along those lines in many government contracting environments), a
good accountant can still cook the books to make it look like the
research the company wants to keep a monopoly on was funded by them and
not by the government. There's all kinds of ways to do that -- funding
coming out of "overhead" budgets, funding from commercial contracts,
"reasonable profit" allowances, and so on.
You're battling both cluelessness and corruption here. If it's the
former, you stand a good chance of making change by talking to the
organization. If it's the latter, not much will probably result. Still,
you may have good luck as stupidity remains much more common than malice.
Good luck,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
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