[Discuss] Economic value of OSH work

Fri Oct 17 15:26:10 UTC 2014

The idea of an Open Source Dividend is really interesting in a number of
ways:

1) it would incentivise those people sharing knowledge for the
advancement of the global commons, so a positive contribution.

2) it would imply a tax on the sale of products. This is interesting as
it channels funds from the market to pay for commodities (which in many
ways are based on the knowledge commons) to the commons, thereby helping
to establish a healthier equilibrium between commons and markets.

3) it can be done within the current legal system. Breaking down or
reforming the copyright, design right, patent and other related
regulations has shown to be hard and takes much time, in particular
because the IPR lobby is strong and has installed worldwide regulatory
systems. Instead implementing public policies to incentivise sharing
could be started at a local or national level.

Are you aware of relevant initiatives in this direction?

best,

Wouter

On 10/17/2014 04:56 PM, Matt Maier wrote:
> The discussion is cold, but it seems like the logical place to share
> this link
> http://www.managingip.com/Blog/3390962/The-value-of-an-open-source-dividend.html
> 
> "Sir John Sulston, a joint winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology
> or Medicine, once told KEI that research that is open to everyone is at
> least nine times more valuable to society than research that is closed."
> 
> <p>In 2007, during work by MSF on a new innovation inducement
>     prize for low-cost point-of-care diagnostics for tuberculosis,
>     concerns about the negative impact of inducement prizes on
>     secrecy were addressed by a proposal for an open source
>     dividend (OSD). The initial proposal was for a percentage of
>     inducement prize money to be allocated to persons who openly
>     shared knowledge, data, materials and technology that was
>     considered significant and useful in the development of the
>     winning diagnostic test. This proposal was later incorporated
>     in a series of legislative proposals by Senator Bernie Sanders
>     for innovation inducement prize funds, and in several <a
>    
> href="http://healthresearchpolicy.org/content/open-source-dividend-prizes">
>     developing country and NGO proposals for delinking R&D
>     costs from product price at the WHO</a>. More recently the US
>     Senate and the National Academies have expressed interest in
>     further evaluating the OSD idea.</p>
> 
>     <p>The concept of the OSD has more general application than
>     innovation inducement prizes. One could implement the OSD as
>     part of more traditional business models for drug or software
>     development. For example, if even 1% of patented drug sales in
>     the United States were set aside into a fund for the OSD, there
>     would be about $2.5 billion each year in rewards to persons who
>     openly shared knowledge, data, materials and technology to drug
>     developers. At 2% of sales, it would be almost $5 billion each
>     year. The availability of the OSD would revolutionize
>     university licensing policies, and also the policies of
>     businesses that were holding as secrets research that was no
>     longer under development. It would become a business decision
>     to go open or closed.</p>
> 
> 
> On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 5:37 AM, Javier Serrano <Javier.Serrano at cern.ch
> <mailto:Javier.Serrano at cern.ch>> wrote:
> 
>     On 09/06/2014 05:51 PM, Joshua Pearce wrote:
>     > Thank you to everyone with your good suggestions, references and thoughts.
>     >
>     > I have a much better understanding now and you brought up some
>     > interesting points (which I will attribute)  I had not considered and
>     > now will include in the paper in order to make an economic case for
>     > government funding of FOSH development.
>     >
>     > The paper in the works - I will share with you when I have finished
>     > running all the numbers and it is ready.
> 
>     Joshua, I think this is very important work and look forward to reading
>     the paper when it's published. Going quantitative is indeed very hard
>     but decision makers often face situations where they have to decide
>     on subjects they don't fully master. Quantification is perceived to add
>     objectivity, and I think funding agencies will be happy to get some
>     numbers and an explanation, at least as a basis for discussion.
> 
>     I may be misguided, but I think one of the factors which may have pushed
>     many governments to ask their publicly-financed universities to patent
>     as many of their inventions as possible is that the patent world is easy
>     to quantify. So if you buy the argument that more patents means more
>     innovation and ultimately more welfare for your citizens, which some
>     governments seem to believe, then it's easy to assess your success by
>     counting patents and royalties from those patents. And there might be a
>     temptation to be a bit sloppy with logic and promote easy
>     quantifiability from an important feature that will allow evaluation of
>     the success of a given course of action -- which has independently been
>     deemed appropriate -- to an implicit reason supporting the
>     appropriateness of that course of action itself.
> 
>     I don't have a clue about how to go quantitative with FOSH. At CERN, we
>     know most of the people and companies who manufacture, distribute and
>     support the hardware we design and publish, but the process of
>     evaluating economic impact by regularly polling them seems cumbersome,
>     error-prone and non-scalable. Maybe there are things to be learned from
>     Google and other such companies, who succeed in convincing their clients
>     to pay them because they are able to give a reasonably accurate
>     estimation of the impact their services have on the sales of their
>     clients. My understanding is that they do this through a combination of
>     technology, societal models which are continuously validated and very
>     powerful statistics artillery.
> 
>     Many thanks for your work. Cheers,
> 
>     Javier
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> 
> 
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