Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

« The Great Mosque of Kairouan | Main | Sisule Musungu on the A2K Movement »

April 21, 2006

Access to Knowledge as a Demand for Justice

Jack Balkin of Yale kicked of the Access to Knowledge (a2k) conference in New Haven today with a presentation about knowledge access as a demand for justice, development and liberty. Here are some notes from his session. These aren't exact quotes, as the man spoke as fast as Robin Williams on a coke binge.

note: a2k=access to knowledge; IP=intellectual property.

Access to knowledge is a demand of justice It's an access of econ development and human liberty/participation It's about more than intellectual property

A demand for justice:

Info is not just a thing in itself; it's a set of relationships between persons and groups. Some people control it; some people don't -and law helps regulate it. But not all citizens enjoy the benefits of the info economy.

Access to knowledge includes:

Human knowledge
Information (news, data, etc)
Knowledge embedded goods (drugs, electronic hardware, software, etc)
Tools for the production of knowledge embedded goods

The goals of a2k is to improve access to all four of these components of the knowledge economy. A2k is a question of distributional justice - within a society and between societies.

What does justice require?

If you can produce these components and spread them equitably, justice demands this.
If you can spur additional innovation in areas that current markets don't serve, justice demands this as well.

The right policies for knowledge production can increase the total production of knowledge and distribute it more equitably.

It's not just a tradeoff between equity and efficiency. It's not about how to divide the pie; it's making a bigger pie - and giving people the skills to make their own pies.

It's an issue of econ development, individual participation and human liberty.

The best information policies and knowledge policies lower barriers to access to knowledge. They help distribute knowledge more broadly and more effectively. A more balanced set of IP policies would distribute wealth more fairly and more successfully than a stratified IP policy.

It's a debate over information production being centralized and proprietary, or decentralized and participatory.

It's not about doing just one thing. You could just reform IP or promote literacy - or you could do both.

Using the rhetoric of human rights can be risky, though; some people argue that intellectual property is a human right. (A later speaker , Davinia Ovett, would say that the UN Declaration on Human Rights guarantees protection for *individual* people wanting to make a living by creating original works (art, writings, etc) but it doesn't apply to publishers.) A lot of good info policy comes from freeing up the private sector to innovate.

Is there a human right that the govt spends more money on IT research or network neutrality? Perhaps so, but it may be the wrong rhetoric for arguing it. Instead, it's an issue of justice, development and human participation

No matter how restrictive IP laws are, they may not be the biggest limiter of knowledge sharing. Bad telecom policy or censorship could be contributing to it. Or limited literacy.

A functioning public sphere, free press and govt transparency may be necessary to reduce govt corruption.

Universal telecom access, free computers, telecentres, libraries, etc may be some of the most important things a country can do to promote knowledge to a large portion of its population. All of these serve the goals of justice, development and human participation.

Posted by acarvin at April 21, 2006 10:45 PM

Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article