At the Italian Internet Governance Forum, I met Rick Falkvinge:

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If we believe (as did our Constitutional founders) that the purpose of copyright is to provide a sufficient incentive for the creation of works that would then enter the public domain at the earliest possible moment — because that’s how works have lasting value — then why can’t we figure out the proper length of copyright with a little science?

What is the curve of sales for most books? How many years do books sell more than a handful of copies? Where are most the authorss reward and compensation coming from with regard to sales? How much of our culture do we have to sacrifice in order to support the 0.0001% of authors whose book sell anything worth a damn after ten years?

Of course, I made up that 0.0001% figure for rhetorical purposes, but getting the actual figure is exactly what I’m asking for. Is this info available somewhere?

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Luca de Biase explains a new power about to be claimed by AGCOM, the Italian telecommunications regulatory agency, that would permit it to “remove content from Italian websites or to block access to foreign websites accused by copyright holders to break their rights.” The proposed powers implement a requirement from the Italian government that the agency take action to prevent piracy. The decision about the proposed AGCOM powers is due on July 6.

The Obama administration is backing the law, and perhaps the specific implementation. Writes Luca:

FIMI (association of music publishers) has circulated a mail about Obama’s administration support to AGCOM, quoting this US document: “The United States encourages Italy to ensure that the AGCOM regulations are swiftly promulgated and implemented, that these regulations create an effective mechanism against copyright piracy over the Internet, and that they address all types of piracy that takes place online.”

The quote comes from an April 2011 global roundup from the U.S. Trade Representative. Here’s the paragraph on Italy:

Italy remains on the Watch List with an Out-of-Cycle review to be conducted this year. Italy continued to make progress in improving its IPR protection and enforcement in 2010, including by increased cooperation among law enforcement officials and improved enforcement actions against certain types of IPR violations. The United States remains concerned that, overall enforcement against copyright piracy continues to be inadequate and that piracy over the Internet continues to grow, severely damaging the legitimate market for distribution of copyrighted works. The United States welcomes recent efforts to address piracy over the Internet, and looks forward to measures to help ameliorate this problem. Specifically, proposed regulations by the Italian Communications Authority (AGCOM) could provide rights holders with an avenue to curb IPR violations online in an effective manner. The United States encourages Italy to ensure that the AGCOM regulations are swiftly promulgated and implemented, that these regulations create an effective mechanism against copyright piracy over the Internet, and that they address all types of piracy that takes place online. The United States also encourages Italy to address other IPR issues, including a troubling Data Protection Agency ruling prohibiting the monitoring of peer-to-peer networks. While rights holders report good efforts by the Finance Police and the Customs Police, few cases reach final sentencing and courts still fail to impose deterrent level sentences. The United States will continue to work with Italy to address these and other matters.

It’s not clear that this an endorsement of what seems like over-reaching by AGCOM, but it ain’t pretty.

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Culture does not exist simply to enlighten us.

Culture’s far more common role is to give us something to talk about.

If we have nothing to talk about, nations divide over unreasonable differences, communities reduce to parking regulations, and marriages end in dinnertime squabbles.

To talk about things in a depth that binds requires freely accessing, citing, quoting, pointing, and linking.

Therefore, for the sake of our nation, communities, and marriages, we need to loosen copyright’s hold.

QED

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MacKenzie Smith of MIT and Creative Commons talks about the new 4-star rating system for open licenses for metadata from cultural institutions:

The draft is up on the LOD-LAM site.

Here are some comments on the system from open access guru Peter Suber.

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Some facts and stats, compiled at PoeticEconomics:

# of open access journals : over 6,000. Growth rate: 4 per day.

# of freely available journals: over 28,000. Growth rate: 10 per day.

# of open access repositories: close to 2,000 . Growth rate: 1 per day.

# of documents freely available: 25 million. Growth rate: 6,000 per day.

# of open access mandate policies: 271. Growth rate: 1 per week or 5 per month.

% of world’s scholarly literature that is freely available: 20%

The sources are here.

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Google’s educational copyright cartoon is amusing in a Ren and Stimpy sort of way

But it’s disturbing that the cartoon purposefully makes the Fair Use “explanation” unintelligible. Presumably that’s because Fair Use is so complex and so difficult to defend that Google doesn’t even want to raise it as a possibility. Nevertheless, it seems like a missed opportunity to do some education. Worse, it’s a sign that we’ve pretty much given up on Fair Use.

Likewise, many of us were disappointed when Google Books dropped its Fair Use defense and instead came up with a settlement (since overturned) with the authors and publishers. It was another lost opportunity to provide Fair Use with some clarity and oomph.

Fair Use doesn’t need just a posse (Lord bless it). It could use a bigtime hero with some guts.

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The Association for Learning Technology has published a detailed and highly practical guide, based on its own experience, for journals moving toward an Open Access model. Indeed, the guide is of even broader utility than that, since it considers the practicalities of moving from an existing contract with publishers for any reason.

ALT’s journal has been renamed Research in Learning Technology, and it will be fully Open Access as of January 2012. (Thanks to Seb Schmoller for the tip.)

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I’m at an education conference put on by CET in Tel Aviv. This is the second day of the conference. The opening session is on business models for supporting the webification of the educational system.

Eli Hurvitz (former deputy director of the Rothschild Foundation, the funder of CET) is the moderator. The speakers are Michael Jon Jensen (Dir of Strategic Web Communications, National Academies Press), Eric Frank (co-founder of Flat World Knowledge) and Sheizaf Rafaelli (Dir. of the Sagy Center for Internet Research at Haifa Univ.)

Michael Jensen says he began with computers in 1980, thinking that books would be online within 5 yrs. He spent three yearsat Project Muse (1995-8), but left because they were spending half their money on keeping people away from their content. He went to the National Academies Press (part of the National Academy of Science). The National Academies does about 200 reports a year, the result of studies by about 20 experts focused on some question. While there are many wonderful things about crowd-sourcing, he says, “I’m in favor of expertise. Facts and opinions on the Web are cheap…but expertise, expert perspective and sound analysis are costly.” E.g., that humans are responsible for climate change is not in doubt, should not be presented as if it were in doubt, and should not be crowd-sourced, he says.

The National Academy has 4,800 books online, all available to be read on line for free. (This includes an algorithmic skimmer that extacts the most important two-sentence chunk from every page.) [Now that should be crowd-sourced!] Since 2005, 65% are free for download in PDF. They get 1.4M visitors/month, each reading 7 page on average. But only 0.2% buy anything.

The National Academy Press’ goal is access and sustainability. In 2001, they did an experiment: When people were buying a book, they were offered a download of a PDF for 80% of the price, then 60%, then 40%, then for free. 42% took the free PDF. But it would have been too expensive to make all PDF’s free. The 65% that are now free PDFs are the “long tail” of books. “We are going to be in transition for the next 20 yrs.” Book sales have gone from 450,00/yr in 2002 to 175,000 in 2010. But, as they have given away more, they are disseminating about 850,000 units per year. “That means we’re fulfilling our publishing mission.” 260,000 people have opted in for getting notified of new books.

Michael goes through the available business options. NAP’s offerings are too broad for subscriptions. They will continue selling products. Authors fund some of the dissemination. And booksellers provide some revenue. There are different models for long-form content vs. articles vs. news vs. databases. Further, NAP has to provide multiple and new forms of content.

General lessons: Understand your mission. Make sure your strategy supports your mission. But digital strategies are a series of tactics. Design fot the future. and “The highest resolution is never enough…Never dumb down.” “The print-based mindset will work for the next few years, but is a long-term dead end.” “‘Free’ of some kind is required.” Understand your readers, and develop relationships with them. Go where the audiences are. “Continue experimenting.” There is no single best model. “We are living in content hyperabundance, and must compete with everything else in the world.”

Eric Frank of Flat World Knowledge (“the largest commercial publisher of” open source textbooks) says that old business models are holding us back from achieving what’s possible with the Net. He points to a “value gap” in the marketplace. Many college textbooks are $200. The pain is not evenly distributed. Half of college students are in 2 yr colleges, where the cost of textbooks can be close to their tuition costs. The Net is disrupting the text book market already, e.g.,through the online sale of used books, or text book rental models, or “piracy.” So, publishers are selling fewer units per year, and are raising pricves to protect their revenues. There’s a “vicious downward spiral,” making everyone more and more unhappy.

Flat World Knowledge has two business models. First, it puts textbooks through an editorial process, and publishes them under open licenses. They vet their authors, and peer review the books. They publish their books under a Creative Commons license (attribution, non-commercial, share-alike); they retain the copyright, but allow users to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute them. They provide a customization platform that looks quite slick: re-order the table of content, add content, edit the content. It then generates multiple formats, including html, pdf, ePub, .mobi, digital Braille, .mp3. Students can choose the format that works best for them. The Web-based and versions for students with disabilities are free. They sell softwcover books ($35 fofr b&w, $70 for color) and the other formats. They also sell study guides, online quizzes, and flashcards. 44% read for free online. 66% purchase something: 33% print, 3% audiobooks, 17% print it yourself, 3% ebooks.

Second business model: They license all of their intellectual property to an institution that buys a site license at $20/student, who then get access to the material in every format. Paper publishers’ unit sales tend to zero out over just a few semesters as students turn to other ways of getting the book. Free World Knowledge’s unit sales tend to be steady. They pay authors 20% royalty (as opposed to a standard 13%), which results in higher cumulative revenues for the authors.

They currently have 112 authors (they launched in 2007 and published their first book in Spring 2009). 36 titles published; 42 in pipeline. Their costs are about a third of the industry and declining. Their time to market is about half of the traditionals (18 months vs. 40 months). 1,600 faculty have formally adopted their books, in 44 countries. Sales are growing at 320%. Their conversion rate of free to paid is currently at 61% and growing. They’ve raised $30M in venture capital. Bertelsmann has put in $15M. Random House today invested.

He ends by citing Kevin Kelly: The Net is a giant copy machine. When copies are super-abundant, and worthless. So, you need to seel stuff that can’t be copied. Kevin lists 8 things that can’t be copied: immediacy, personalization, interpretation (study aids), authenticity (what the prof wants you to read), accessibility, embodiment (print copy), patronage (people want to pay creators), findability. Future for FWK: p2p tutoring, user-generated marketplace, self-assessment embedded within the books, data sales. “Knowledge is the black gold of the 21st century.”

[Sheizaf Rafaelli’s talk was excellent — primarily about what happens when books lose bindings — but he spoke very quickly, and the talk itself did not lend itself to livebloggery, in part because I was hearing it in translation, which required more listening and less typing. Sorry. His slides are here. ]

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Having written in opposition to the Google Books Settlement (1 2 3), I was pleased with Judge Chin’s decision overall. The GBS (which, a couple of generations ago would have unambiguously referred to George Bernard Shaw) was worked out by Google, the publishers, and the Authors Guild without schools, libraries, or readers at the table. The problems with it were legion, although over time it had gotten somewhat less obnoxious.

Yet, I find myself slightly disappointed. We so desperately need what Google was building, even though it shouldn’t have been Google (or any single private company) that is building it. In particular, the GBS offered a way forward on the “orphaned works” problem: works that are still in copyright but the owners of the copyright can’t be found and often are probably long dead. So, you come across some obscure 1932 piece of music that hasn’t been recorded since 1933. You can’t find the person who wrote it because, let’s face it, his bone sack has been mouldering since Milton Berle got his own TV show, and the publishers of the score went out of business before FDR started the Lend-Lease program. You want to include 10 seconds of it in your YouTube ode to the silk worm. You can’t because some dead guy and his defunct company can’t be exhumed to nod permission. Multiply this times millions, and you’ve got an orphaned works problem that has locked up millions of books and songs in a way that only a teensy dose of common sense could undo. The GBS applied that common sense — royalties would be escrowed for some period in case the rights owner staggered forth from the grave to claim them.. Of course the GBS then divvied up the unclaimed profits in non-common-sensical ways. But at least it broke the log jam.

Now it seems it’ll be up to Congress to address the orphaned works problem. But given Congress’ maniacal death-grip on copyright, it seems unlikely that common sense will have any effect and our culture will continue to be locked up for seventy years beyond the grave in order to protect the 0.0001 percent of publishers’ catalogs that continue to sell after fourteen years. (All numbers entirely made up for your reading pleasure.)

As Bob Darnton points out, this is one of the issues that a Digital Public Library of America could address.

James Grimmelmann has an excellent and thorough explanation of the settlement, and a prediction for its future.

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