How do we get the general public to pressure governments to open up research results so that other people can more easily build on it?

Paul D. Fernhout’s text is a reaction to a proposal for a research funding proposal for green research around the concept of dual licensing, to which we may return.

But his contribution can be read on its own, as a call to restore the now privatized research commons (at least in the U.S.).

Paul D. Fernhout:

“We now have a situation where universities and other government contractors in the USA can keep as proprietary all the patents and copyrights that results of government paid for research (paid for in whole or in part). Many tens of billions of public US dollars a year in the USA are poured into this research system to produce proprietary results. The same is true in Europe to some degree.

Proponents of this say the government and charitable dollars are “extended” by the private dollars thus producing more proprietary research; I see the charitable dollars as “contaminated”, and so producing less public research. Proponents claim that ideas won’t be developed further without monopolies, whereas I suggest that peers will never get a chance to build easily on the research results unless they are open.

It seems like peers are trying to remedy a huge failure of government, even while we are already paying lots of taxes supposedly for that function of research.

One way to address this issue is to encourage funders (government, foundations, individuals) to hold the groups they may fund more accountable to a post-scarcity model of abundance for all by sharing research results.

Here is something I wrote on that.

But that is just theorizing and pontificating. How does one take this to the grassroots level? How does one get most people to care about the freedom of the information produced using their tax dollars and other contributions to non-profits working towards larger social goals?

For example, in the USA, about US$70 billion was just allocated supposedly mostly towards green energy.

Should not the results of that pooled investment be available to all the “investors” (that is, every person in the country or even the globe)? But it won’t be under the dominant non-p2p ideology.

As I see it, these charitable and government dollars are already “post-scarcity” dollars. But, because of *ideology* these trillions of post-scarcity dollars are every year being turned back into scarcity dollars by things like the Bayh-Dole act or likely these latest funding efforts.

I don’t know if all European countries have similar policies? I know, for example, Germany often funds proprietary research, like from the history of the MP3 file, which as a proprietary format has created all sorts of issues with developing free audio players under GNU/Linux, but was developed by a German non-profit subsidized organization.

But how did such an organization come to be?

As they acknowledge:

“After the difficulties of the early years when financial resources were persistently tight, the breakthrough came in the 1970s through institutional funding from the federal and Land governments.”

There you have it — citizens are paying taxes to have their audio files locked up in proprietary formats they then need to pay to legally access. That makes no sense from a p2p perspective. Patents are proprietary (though they do expire in about twenty years). Copyrights for software or documents or artworks effectively never expire.

So, how do we get the general public to pressure governments to open up research results so that other people can more easily build on it?

There are literally trillions of US dollars worth of funds sloshing through supposedly non-profit organizations every year globally, and getting that money directed to open ends seems like a big win, if we could do it. Peers would get farther building on that research than trying to duplicate what is already being done with their tax dollars but made proprietary. Look at how much energy in the GNU/Linux community had to go into dealing with the proprietary MP3 standard, and the issue still is not completely resolved after years.

Should we be seeing the same proprietary research thing happen with renewable energy, too? Should people like Austin have to fight an uphill battle against tax-funded proprietary research, doing open innovation at the edges of a proprietary core? If it is not all open, should it not at least be the other way around — proprietary innovation at the edges of an open core?

As I see it, the best success will come from some positive synergy of the grass roots p2p meshwork and the organizational hierarchies we have built around us for other reasons (Manuel de Landa talks about that). Government initiatives that put a lot of people together with fancy equipment all in one place can produce some useful results. So, ideally, I’d like to see people like Austin able to build on a core of free research, however people like Austin wanted to fund the work at the edges of the core. But right now, it is often the edges that are being freed, not the core. The same is true in the pharmaceutical industry, with that industry building on top of decades of publicly funded research. And that is all very frustrating, to many people for many reasons.

Now, I understand that sitting around and waiting for big government to act is really not part of the peer-to-peer concept. And I don’t want to discourage anyone from going out and doing research on their own, raising funds on their own, and making open things. So, I don’t know how to relate this issue to p2p, including in terms of peer activism. Any ideas to approach this in a positive way?”