There’s just no way around it - patent is broken. I’m writing up a set of docs right now, and it’s clear that trying to tease apart what might have been patented before by other people, what’s common knowledge, and what’s potentially material for a patent pool is just impossible. It’s a question that, in the real world, probably costs $50,000 or $100,000 to answer definitively: patent lawyers and a court case, and whatever’s seen as true at the end of any appeals process is true. For that country.
In short, it’s all a matter of legal opinion, of judicial rather than technical reality.
That way lies madness.
This inherent paradox: that the GPL rests on the control of code given by copyright bites us in the ass hard on patent - patent’s so utterly obnoxious compared to copyright that if you try and base an open IP effort in patent law, the result is so expensive and top heavy that it’s hard to imagine it remaining open in any significant way at the end of the day. Every patch of ground you want to defend as open in a GPL-style fashion costs you $20,000, vs $0 for opening it in a public domain style, which leaves no defense to “parasitic patents” which use the work in the open pool and return nothing to it.
Fundamental problem: copyright doesn’t cover *how* - doesn’t protect ideas, only expressions. Patents (can) protect ideas, but they’re expensive and uncertain: comparing expressions to see if they are equivalent is easier than comparing ideas to see if they are equivalent, and that leads to an entire architecture for trying to formalize the expression of ideas in a way which makes it feasible to crunch them through a legal process that looks for overlaps.
In short, these systems are really unsuited to the rapidly moving open innovation environment in hardware. Copyright just doesn’t reach everything, and patents are too heavy. Without either mechanism applying, all that’s left is public domain and publish as fast as possible to stop some heavy corporate player patenting the hell out of everything around a public disclosure.
The GPL works because of it’s replicating nature: you place your work under it, and everybody who wants to modify your work for their purposes has to abide by your wishes - the rule of copyright is the origin of that power, to require your downstream users to behave a certain way. What we really want for open innovation at the bottom is freedom to continue to innovate, to change the game, without the fear of aggressive patents by corporate entities removing our freedom to continue innovating.
It’s not a big problem now, but if we don’t address it, in the long run we could see the same kind of bloodletting we see in the world of medicine and drug design, where millions of people die because patents empower drug companies to keep prices artificially high.
And how do we protect the capital which allows people to spend years working on a drug, or on a solution? How do we make it profitable to solve humanities basic problems…
I think we need to consider punching a hole in the international patent regime for bottom of the pyramid work - a statement of professional ethics which requires companies not to abuse patents and then we get NGOs and governments to require companies they buy BOP products and services from to be signatories to that agreement. I don’t know what that agreement should say, but without it, this whole field is like juggling knives - we haven’t had a serious crisis yet, but it’s only a matter of time until somebody gets seriously screwed.
As I look at all these rocket scientists struggling to navigate the horrific waters of patent law and worst practices, I’m wondering… why has the Sacred Oath gone out of fashion?
Like, really, what this comes down to is three principles which really ought to be sworn in blood by anybody doing this kind of work.
1> I will not permit any human being to be deprived of live-giving technology by the profit motive.
2> Any works that I patent I will make available to others who are engaged in humanitarian activity for free, except where this would breach other contractual responsibilities.
3> I will not use patent law to slow the pace of innovation or service delivery to the needy under any circumstances.
I think that if I could get everybody I’m doing business with to swear some version of these oaths in a serious fashion, my life would be enormously easier. I think I know a lot of other people who feel the same way.
Maybe this needs to be part of the Global Swadeshi movement, or its own thing, a sort of voluntary code of ethics to guide us where the horrific murk of international law leaves us with little support.
Furthermore, I think that if we got a few hundred people behind this, as a bloc, we could shame companies who were violating fair practices with patent and copyright in the developing world, at least in the burgeoning appropriate infrastructure for the poorest area. The reason we cannot do this with open publishing alone is that things which have not been explicitly published may well become vulnerable to patents - a small innovation becomes patented, and now nobody else in the field can use it without exposing themselves to patent liability.
A large group of allied appropriate technology groups with a common stance on that kind of behavior could probably public-relations-bomb any company trying to leech from the open pool in this way as a way of ensuring that appropriate technology remains Free As In Speech or at least is licensed irrevocably as Free As In Beer for non-profits and small, local commercial enterprises.
The last thing that we want is a patent bloodbath at the bottom of the pyramid: people are going to die if that happens. Possibly hundreds of thousands to tens of millions, given a few years. We need to roundly nip this in the bud, keep the patent trolls off our back, and more importantly, the backs of the poor.
or, how to fix the planet for $60,000,000
First, let’s get clear about this: sixty million dollars is not a lot of money. Let’s think about a few things that cost in that price range.
1> One half of a Eurofighter aeroplane.
2> One half of “Batman and Robin.”
So, here’s what I’m going to spend your notional sixty mil on: television programs for farmers and people who live in slums. I’m going to blow the whole lot on making 200 hours of science telly, and giving them away.
Gupta, you may say, you’ve gone insane. But this is not insane, this is about how to do education in places to poor to have real education. The answer is the Open University model: detailed documentary programming that really, seriously, deeply covers what you need to know, from soup to nuts.
What do you need to know? This is not a trivial question, but remember that we’re making science TV for farmers.
I suspect there would be some brief primary material, covering concepts like decimal notation, percentages, fractions, mathematical operations like area, concepts like volume. I think maybe 20 hours of primary education on things like the existence of atoms, chemistry, evolutionary biology as it applies to farming (pesticide resistance) and so on would not be out of order. These basic concepts are not particularly difficult if you haven’t really been exposed to them before: the implications can be a lot to manage, but anybody who gets that far can walk three days to the nearest internet terminal and do their research on Wikipedia like the rest of the planet’s intellectuals. We need to get the basic language across. Not everybody will get it, but if one in ten get most of it, and one in a thousand gets the whole idea and proceeds to innovate, we’ve saved the world.
But the bulk of this science telly for farmers is the basics of what you need to thrive in the developing world, in four major categories
* how to grow more food?
* how to stay alive? (water, sanitation, basic medicine)
* what is happening in the rest of the world? (physical and economic geography, including things like futures markets)
* what is happening here? (where did television come from? what’s a computer? what’s an antibiotic? what’s science? why did things start to change, what does it mean, and where will it end?)
Because, dear reader, people who farm by hand in the same way their ancestors did in 2500 BC are about to get a cell phone, and the cell phone they get will soon do internet, and, well, they’ll get an email address and be a global citizen, just like the rest of us. This primer (last item) is the orientation package for modernity, for the fact that people living in an ancient, stable ecological niche (”organic farmer”) are being teleported into a new world by the spread of information and communications technologies.
So what kinds of telly are we talking about here? ThinkCOSMOS mixed with This Old House and Sesame Street. This is a series of programs for people who are the first generation of their family to look up and say “the sun is said to be a ball of burning gas - can you imagine it?”. This is television for the wonder and hope of people who realize that their children’s lives may be long and beautiful, free from illness and grinding hardship, because something wonderful has happened - people on the other side of the planet discovered how to understand nature in ways which made it possible to live far, far better and easier lives, and now their wonderful machines bring news from afar. And now they look at the cows crapping into the pond they get their drinking water from, and they want to cry.
We need an option for these people: here’s instructions on how to get clean water right where you are. You can get immediate benefit from this revolution going on around you that you have been left out of until recently.
There are three goals.
1> Reduce the 30 million per year death toll that comes from lack of basic knowledge about agriculture, public health and appropriate technology. Educate people in the skills they require for survival, like hand washing and crop rotation.
2> Cushion and protect from lethal memetic infection. No holocaust deniers, scientologists or similar groups should define reality for the billions coming online, or for any sizable subset of them. Basic truth must be observed.
3> Ease our transition into a planetary culture where all of our concerns are heard.
This third point is subtle: global, cheap-or-free two way communication really changes things in ways we have not yet begun to see fully. A common frame of reference about at least some of what is happening could prevent generations of misunderstandings, possibly even wars.
This is television for the first generation to see the stars and know that somebody out there knows pretty much how they work, to long for that knowledge, and have the need to get oriented in how to find it.
So, what does sixty million dollars buy? A 20 year or more acceleration in the spread of critical, lifesaving knowledge everywhere in the world. It buys production, translation and partial dissemination of the most important television ever produced. Commercial television production is pretty expensive: $300,000 USD per hour for Australian documentaries, which are pretty typical in cost. I figure 200 hours of TV is about what we want to produce - watch one show per working day for a year and you have seen the entire thing, after which, well, you’ve had your eyes opened and welcome to global civilization, mate.
Translation is key. We must make the videos in a format which enables easy dubbing / subtitling. Make a lot of them in Africa, Mexico, India, China, Brazil. Possibly start them all in English, but more likely, shoot pieces in many languages from the beginning, so shows typically are shot in four or five languages, and then what needs to be dubbed is. Translate massively, using fansubbing and fan-voiceover, say 60 global languages for very, very broad population coverage. Even little local colleges can translate the shows they deem most important into their local languages. This is global television - shows to bring the whole human race to a shared basic understanding.
There needs to be follow up too - online resources, modeled on wikis, for subsidiary content like deeper explanations, the full content before the show was cut, discussions, elaborations, fan videos showing local applications, the entire thing. A lot of shows might be very technical: “The Treadle Pump” - one hour, how, why, what, and then detailed instructions online or even jammed into the hour. But no matter how good the content is, people will have questions, and possibly so many questions it’ll take an army of volunteers to even try to answer them.
$300,000 per hour, 200 hours. Making the shows gets shopped out to existing science and technology TV production houses. They produce good product, there is very little risk of a flop or more than the occasional dud show, and they will cooperate through a central hub that helps with mindset and cultural issues, and ferries experience and lessons learned between the production crews. Script advisors from UNESCO, WHO and all the usual suspects, although creative control resides with the commissioning editors, who should be drawn from mainstream TV channels across the world. In-front-of-camera talent should also be globalized - stars and thinkers from every continent to be the Carl Sagan to their generations. Vandana Shiva, Bono, Madonna all take their turn explaining the action.
We need to do this. We need to start now, because as the network spreads, people are going to have hard questions.
When I look around the internet pretending that I’m a dirt poor kid in a Bengali village with a cell phone computer that my parents mortgaged their farm to buy because they knew I was really smart, I see very, very little helpful material. Could I sift the wheat from the chaff quickly enough to get oriented? Could I find material to teach me to read? Could I learn English? Could I get to Appropedia and if I did, could I build things to save my ass?
I think the answer is “probably not.”
But if the computer came with The Programme… then I’d know the search terms, and I’d have already had a chance to learn most of the basic concepts I needed to make tangible change, right where I am today.
We have not even begun to design and build the “internet for the impoverished” - the datasets necessary to empower the five billion people outside of the industrial revolution to pull themselves out of poverty in a single generation or less.
The TV show is a start. It’s the index to the knowledge of the world, and transmits a core set of basic skills (hand washing, solar cooking, water purification) right along side the perspective necessary to cope with the world of dreams which is 21st century scientific-technical reality.
A singularity is coming: the poor are going online, very, very soon. Let’s start building the things they’ll need. I suggest we start with television because it’s a densely proven mass medium, and it can be repurposed into video in all formats, into radio programs, into compressed files crammed into the memory of cheap computers and cell phones in future years - “your new computer, does it have The Program?”
Yes, yes it does. It’s standard with the operating system now, along with The Archive and various other things.
The storage is coming. The hardware is not the problem.
But we need the programs, the pages, the content, and I think that investing sixty million dollars - the price of half of Batman and Robin, or if you prefer, half of a single eurofighter jet - in producing a televised primer on scientific reality and appropriate technology is the best possible investment of human resources today. Ten years from now the hardware will have arrived, driven by the investment of the big manufacturers. But nobody is paying for this kind of content, at these kinds of scales and levels of professionalism. Without it, the gulf between the global reach of the telecommunications grid and the relative absence of content useful to 85% of the human race will be a global crisis within ten years.
There’s one other bonus. For the first time in history, most of the geniuses, most of the real breakthrough minds of the human species will have access to at least some higher education concepts. Up until now, even if you had an IQ of 160, you were still 80% or 90% likely to be born in a hut by a paddy field and never see the light of a library in your life. A fine mind languishing in a landscape without high density ideas.
But by the time cell phones and computers have converged and globalized, and the remaining half of the human race has cell phones, all these hidden geniuses will start to come out. Somewhere, in abject poverty, there’s the kid who’ll cure cancer, or aids, or hunger. There’s an army of human potential waiting to be activated by access to information.
Let’s build an onramp for these kids and their parents, a primer on all they need to know to learn, to grow, to participate, and to change the world.
The raw net is not enough. We need the bridge, and it’s going to cost money to build, but less than half of “Batman & Robin.”
Foundations, won’t you reach into your back pockets, pull out some loose change, and fund this?
Vinay Gupta - hexayurt@gmail.com
Shows roughly how the infrastructure works in a modern society. It’s the “general case” - to really get the detail down requires configuring the diagram for a specific place and time, but I think the rapid overview picture is still extremely useful.
A work in progress.
Five things on the chart.
1> Six Ways To Die (the target in the center.) Each ring is 10x the mortality rate, from 1/10000 to 1/10
2> Status dot showing current mortality for the population at hand.
3> Various things which impact the mortality - things like the water supply, the power grid, the food transportation grid, farms, and so on.
4> Range of those things from the individual level - individual, household, town, regional, national. Helps show what can break if networks are disrupted.
5> Simplified infrastructure interdependencies.
Observations: it’s astonishingly complicated, much more so that I’d thought it would be, and this is just a rough draft.
It’ll also show, very nicely, why the hexayurt infrastructure system is a very good idea, because that version of the graph has *almost no dependencies* on the various grids. And this makes it very, very clear.
Vinay
