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Jan Hylen reports back from:
The Future Digital Economy – Digital Content Creation, Distribution and Access
Rome, Italy 30-31st January
The conference was jointly organised by OECD’s Department for Science, Technology and Industry and the Italian Ministry for Innovation and Technology. Some 350 people from industry, academia and government attended.
There were a few messages that kept coming back in several speeches, regarding current trends in this area. The first was that the bandwidth keeps growing – more and more people are getting better and better access. The most advanced country at the moment is Korea where the current plans are that the whole population should have 100 Mbit/sek by 2010. There are Korean companies already offering wireless access of 20-30 Mbit/sek to small handheld devices such as mobile phones or PDA’s.
With more broadband to more people, the centre of gravity is shifting from infrastructure towards content of different kind.
There was a clear consensus that one of the most important trends is that “everything goes digital” and “everything goes IP” – meaning that all kind of media to an increasing extent will be transmitted through Internet – not only text, images and sound in general but also radio, TV and moving pictures. The broadcasting era where a few broadcasted to the many is soon only a memory – with growing bandwidth, and declining prices for advanced equipment for filming, recording, mixing, etc. anyone can do and deliver their own “content” (peer-to-peer exchange was said to represent 60% of all IP traffic today). A number of other conditions have also made the entry barriers lower: lower distribution costs (almost zero), lower user costs, and more diversity (more titles) because “shelf space” is almost infinite.
This holds a number of implications. The growing difficulties to defend intellectual property rights are among the most well known. Others are implications for national media policies, when governments no longer control the distribution channel. Terry Fischer from Harvard discussed two more implications which he meant governments soon will have to deal with as a consequence of the above mentioned trends. One is the rise of a new “amateurism” and the other the growing possibilities of differentiated pricing. Although it is generally looked upon as a positive trend that more and more people are not only consumers but also creators and participators in culture and research (according to one speaker 44% of all internet users have provided some form of content) this may cause some concern to governments, according to Fischer, when there is no quality control and if “amateur content” threatens to overwhelm users. Regarding differentiated pricing Fischer meant that this is something today most used by air lines, but the digital technology makes it increasingly easy to differentiate both products and pricing between different individuals. The question is what social consequences this may have, if it is a desirable development and to what extent governments will accept it to happen.
One session was devoted to issues around scientific publishing and open access (OA). One of the definitions of OA was: “free unrestricted access to literature that scholars give to the world without expectations of payment”. David Prosser from SPARC argued that most countries have the following research agenda:
• To create a knowledge environment
• To encourage technological transfer
• To develop empowered citizens and
• To support development
In his view OA supports this agenda better than today’s regime, and therefore it is a public good.
Charles Oppenheimer from Loughborough UK argued that scientists use different forms of OA for three reasons: speed, economic access and distribution. At the moment their articles are published quicker, they become economically accessible to more people and they are spread to more people by using open publishing compared to traditional scientific journals. In his view OA is an important invention, but it will probably not kill all traditional journals. He also argued that there are still some issues around OA that in many cases are unclear such as who actually owns the results of the research – the individual researcher, the university or the organisation financing the research? Also if the financier lay down conditions that results must be published in OA format, can a researcher actually be forced to do that? Sally Morris from an organisation of non-profit publishers of journals said that a majority of the publishers are happy to allow researchers to publish both in their journals and in OA journals. She also made the point that it is important to distinguish between access to data sets and access to databases. No publisher believes that raw data should be under copyright and they are happy to help people getting access to databases. Representatives from Elsevier in the audience made some interventions which made the tensions between them and the advocates for OA very clear.
Another session discussed how to build the right environment for innovative content creation. A long discussion might be summarised as this: the role of governments is to make sure that the regulatory framework is the right one (what ever that means). To achieve this it is important to think through what one wants to achieve through the regulations. Governments should not try to pick winners or try to predict what will be the best business model; government actions should be technology, platform and business neutral. The role in procurement is important. Governments can affect the market for example when commissioning production or buying on the market. Governments should take measures to bridge the digital divide. They also have an important role in facilitating dialogue and bringing different actors and stakeholders together to discuss among other this digital rights management.
The conference website with the final conference programme, presentations and streaming video recordings of all conference sessions are available here:
www.oecd.org/sti/digitalcontent/conference
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