WG4
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WG 4: Economics Analysis & New Business Paradigms.
Zurich meeting notes
The activities of WG4 formally started at the fourth Communia Workshop in Zurich. The following Communia members took part in the works of WG4: Roland Alton-Scheidl (OS Alliance), Lorenzo Benussi (Univ. of Turin), Federico Morando (NEXA Center; chair), Helmut Schmidt (H-Joanneum Kapfenberg/ASE), Peter Troxler (Waag Society). During the afternoon, we met in the same room as other WGs in order to exchange contacts and opinions with them.
In general, we confirmed that the WG will analyze issues related to the PD both from the point of view of theoretical economic analysis and from the point of view of business administration; however, given the current composition of the work group, we decided to focus on business analysis, remaining open to the possibility of widening the scope of our analysis, in case additional members will joint the work group.write my essay
Business
We committed to create a wiki for business cases (see links below). It will include a list of business models and as much case studies as possible.
- List of business models. It is necessary to ask all the members of the network to help us in listing relevant business models based on the re-use of information in the public domain (in the broad sense given by Communia to this expression).
- A very short description (a couple of lines) may be sufficient and useful in order to be aware (and possibly categorize) existing business models.
- Case studies. Dr. Peter Troxler suggested the use of a template for the description of business model. It will be appropriate to have two versions (and/or different kind of fields) of the template: for people describing the business model from outside and for people working within the analyzed business.
PT has published a chapter on "Open Content in the Creative Industries -- A Source for Service Innovation?" -- will soon be available online from knowledgeboard.com, a preprint is available here: http://klapt.net/owl/download.php?sess=0&parent=22&expand=1&order=name&curview=0&binary=1&id=324
- Some possible examples have to be realized (e.g. Beatpick or Registered Commons).
- Relevant players should be carefully analyzed:
- creators;
- intermediaries (at least Internet service providers... normally much more intermediaries, despite the supposed disintermediation generated by the Internet): e.g. ISP, websites (e.g. Beakpick), intermediate re-users (e.g. movie makers, licensing commercial uses from Beatpick and re-licensing their creations in various ways);
- users (which may be just final users and/or creators of UGC).
- We may start from some specific sector (e.g. the music one), but we will not focus on a specific sector programmatically. Some interesting sectors may include:
- Music
- Museums and Arts
- Literature
- Prepare appropriate questionnaires to deepen some case studies in a systematic way
- E.g. questionnaires for publishers of works in the public domain, in order to map
- obstacles, opportunities, needs/requests
- E.g. questionnaires for publishers of works in the public domain, in order to map
Notice that we will not only analyze for profit business models, however we will focus our attention (at least initially) on projects facing precise budget constraints and seriously taking into account the problem of self-financing. Project which do not take into account any budget constraint are possibly very interesting, but lay outside the scope of our analysis.
Economics
We observed that several relevant issues could be studied, starting - in particular - from Benkler's seminal works. However, for the moment and given the relative small proportion of economists (as opposed to business scholars) in the work group, we just committed to
- analyze, from an economic point of view, Prof. Marco Ricolfi's (NEXA Center for Internet & Society - Turin University, Italy) paper about "Copyright 2.0":
- Copyright Policy for digital libraries in the context of the i2010 strategy:
- "The paper describes in §§ 1-2 the EU policy on digital libraries and the role played within it by the High Level Expert Group (HLG), with special reference to the findings in the Final Report by the Copyright Subgroup of the HLG. In §§ 3-6 it summarizes the analysis and recommendations by the Subgroup in four areas, digital preservation, web harvesting, orphan works and out-of-print works. It further discusses in § 8 four other crucial copyright issues which digital libraries have to face, which, while not addressed by the Report, might belong to a “Second Basket” of policy-making open questions. After examining in § 9 some assumptions of the EU policies in connection with libraries, archives and museums, the paper addesses in § 10 the question whether copyright as we know it still is an appropriate tool in the current digital context or should be displaced by another mechanism. Finally it analyzes the impact of the move towards a new regime (Copyright 2.0) on the costs and benefits of digital libraries."
- investigate the possibility of meeting with the researchers studying the value of the public domain for the EU Commission
- (Please check this reference to Rufus Pollock and to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR): The Value of the Public Domain);
- or, possibly: Rightscom's study Public Domain in Europe;
- London's workshop may offer a good opportunity to do that.
- collect some bibliographic references (even if precedence will be given to the business related aspects of the bibliography); [buy essays]
Policy recommendations
It clearly emerged from the discussion that, before recommending any policies, it would be important to understand which policies are being conducted and whit what kind of purposes. Is there an agenda for the public domain at the level of the EU Commision? Are there specific and possibly incoherent agendas at the level of various DGs?
We also noticed that policy recommendations provided by the WG will not necessarily concern laws or regulations to be changed. It is likely that, in some cases, we will recommend the European Commission to finance new (likely quantitative) studies concerning relevant topics which lack appropriate coverage in the literature.
WG4 meetings
We agreed that it may be appropriate to have specific meetings for WG4, but we decided that no ad hoc meeting may reasonably take place before the London Workshop of Communia in March 2009. If and when these meetings will take place, it could be appropriate to invite external speakers, in particular people involved in the business models we are studying.
Other notes
Suggestion for the website: realize a list of existing members (physical persons) with their pictures... this could help mapping e-mail discussions with real world interaction... Maybe the Wiki could be used to that purpose.
- In the meantime, please notice that several of Communia members' pictures are already available in the book of Joi Ito: "Free Souls - Captured and released". See [http://freesouls.cc/].
WG 4 Activities in Barcelona and Luxembourg (incl. policy meeting in Turin)
Starting during the WG4 (Economics) meeting in Barcelona and continuing during WG ad hoc policy meeting in November in Turin, the activities of the WG focused on three topics, strictly connected with policy recommendations:
1. a policy recommendation template was developed, taking into account the results of the project intermediate review meeting and the experience of some of the participants;
- in general, a policy recommendation was described as a document (ideally about 2.5 pages long) that could provide a briefing paper in the context of European policymaking (e.g. for a Commissioner, MEP, EC Director or DG). This core briefing could be supplemented by one or more shorter (i.e. 1-1.5 pages) fiches on specific domains;
- such a document would include several sections:
- a background section (providing some general background and showing the interests at stake)
- possibly including an approach and principles sub-section (making reference, for instance, to principles such as those described in the Public Domain Manifesto)
- a section containing the main recommendation (typically, this recommendation should be addressed at European legislation level and/or in international treaties)
- possibly including a questions and answers sub-section, detailing and addressing objections and critiques to the recommendation;
- a background section (providing some general background and showing the interests at stake)
- a section containing complementary recommendations (typically, these recommendations can to be addressed by policies at lower levels and/or at least partially implemented by soft law or other inciting mechanisms)
- a section including a bibliography and possibly other references.
2. the WG discussed the available draft of the Public Domain Manifesto, written in the context of WG6, both in order to have a general framework to select the most relevant policy recommendations and in order to collect relevant observations to the Manifesto for its final version:
- in particular, the WG members suggested to WG6 to reword some parts of the Manifesto that seemed to suggest exclude the possibility of a copyright protection term shorter that the author's life;
- more generally, the WG observed that the fact that the Manifesto is compatible with the Berne Convention should be seen as a commendable feature; however, the WG also opposed any view based on the respect of the Berne Convention as a matter of principle.
3. Starting in Barcelona and focusing its activity on this topic in Luxembourg, the WG pinned down some specific high level policy recommendations:
- the WG gave its support to the drafting of the two first policy recommendation pilots, already send to the Commission (SEE ATTACHED FILES).
- A recommendation focusing on various strategies to mainstreaming open licensing
- Background: firms see proprietary and non-proprietary mechanisms for the governance of IP as complementary > knowledge intensive and service based industries use various means to manage their intellectual assests
- > Avoid the discrimination of open licensing schemes, e.g. w.r.to membership in collecting societies, etc.
- Background: firms see proprietary and non-proprietary mechanisms for the governance of IP as complementary > knowledge intensive and service based industries use various means to manage their intellectual assests
- A recommendation concerning the opportunity of putting PSI databases in the public domain.
- In particular, at least the output of publicly funded research should be publicly accessible and (whenever possible) also freely reusable by default. (Dr. Lorenzo Benussi as the process owner for the first draft of this recommendation.)
- WG4 also committed to provide our critical support to any alternative compensation/remuneration mechanism recommendation (proposing WG6 and Dr. Philippe Aigrain as the process owner for this recommendation: in the following plenary meeting, Philippe accepted to coordinate this recommendation).
Links to WG4 pages
WG4 bibliography: list of relevant readings for the activities of WG4.
WG4 business models: list of projects adopting various business models and link to related case studies.
