The Future of Scientific Knowledge Discovery in Open Networked Environments: Summary of a Workshop by Paul F. Uhlir

Author:Paul F. Uhlir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: The National Academies Press
Published: 2014-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

Policy and Legal Factors

Session Chair: Michael Carroll

-Washington College of Law, American University-

There was a comment made earlier about how researchers think of themselves as hunter-gatherers. This goes to the philosopher John Locke’s labor theory: I did it, and therefore I own it, and I have a property right in it.

Lawyers think of property in different ways, but I want to highlight the fact that there is a “there” there, even though the words “intellectual property” are being imprecisely used in this context. The way that an intellectual property lawyer might think about ownership and rights over the data is in terms of the rights over the first copy of the zeroes and ones. In a way, this is almost like tangible property in the sense that when there is only one copy, these zeroes and ones might be owned insofar as I have the medium on which these zeroes and ones sit, and you cannot have it unless I say so. This is a claim of ownership over a form of property.

Intellectual property rights are a layer above the zeroes and ones. They are entirely intangible, and these are rights that tell us what uses are acceptable. May we access the zeroes and ones? May we copy them? May we change the order of the zeroes and ones? These are use regulations.

Think about intellectual property law as access and use regulations that apply to the zeroes and ones rather than being embedded directly in the zeroes and ones. Once we make this conceptual separation, when we think about the policy issues, we are thinking about the regulations over data acquisition, data reuse, and the like.

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