EU-NSF Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and Economic
Issues
by Christos Nikolaou
The first of the two meetings of the IPR and Economic Issues Working
Group took place 27-29 August at IEI-CNR (Institute for Information Processing
of the Italian National Research Council) in Pisa, Italy. The purpose for
these meetings is to generate topics for further research in Intellectual
Property Rights and Economics with respect to Digital Libraries. At the
end of the two meetings the working group will have defined a research
agenda in the area.
The group includes American and European researchers. The European participants
are Costis Dallas, Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with interest in
computational archaeology, Museum Information Systems, and IPR issues for
on-line cultural objects; Christine Vanoirbeek, SGFI (Ecole Polytechnique
Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland) with interest in electronic publishing
and commerce; Sebastien Steinmetz, Econometrics Lab of Ecole Polytechnique;
P. Bernt Hugenholtz, Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam,
and Christos Nikolaou (chair), University of Crete and Institute of Computer
Science, FORTH, with interests in microeconomic algorithms for resource
management of distributed systems and transaction processing systems. The
U.S. participants are Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, U. of Michigan Ann Arbor, information/internet
economies, pricing; Jakka Sairamesh, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, microeconomic
algorithms for load balancing, performance management, distributed systems;
Ann Okerson, Yale University, policy issues for libraries; Pamela Samuelson,
U. of California, Berkeley, policy/legal issues for information society,
electronic commerce; Bernard Rous, ACM, electronic publishing, and Mike
Wellman (chair) U. of Michigan Ann Arbor, AI, with interests in information/
agent economies.
As can be seen from the participants list, the IPR and economics WG
is a very diverse group. It was therefore deemed necessary that during
our first day of the meeting, each one of us had a chance to introduce
himself/herself to the group, present recent work in the area and discuss
briefly what the open research issues are that in his/her mind are the
most important ones. We started with the WG members who work with content
providers. Ann Okerson discussed several issues, related to the delivery
and pricing of information to end users, mostly from the perspective of
a large academic library. Costis Dallas talked about recent research on
Museum Information Systems and the emergence of Internet Archaeology. Bernard
Rous presented ACM's efforts to transform to the electronic world, creating
digital libraries of its own collections, and trying to reinvent itself
as a digital community. Next, we discussed legal issues. T. Bernt Hugenholtz's
institute investigates information law as such. The issues covered include
property rights and legislation, public information law (information access),
private information law (press law), information infrastructure and copyright
law. Pam Samuelson works on issues of the Information Society, particularly
the role of copyright law. Pam talked about the tension between the desire
to maximize information commodities and social order/objectives, such as
authors' rights, education, etc. Economic issues were next. Sebastien Steinmetz
has been working on the development of Internet technology in France. Jeffrey
MacKie-Mason discussed issues in Economics of and Economics for Multiple
Quality of Service Networks. He also presented his work on Contents Economics.
Last we moved to architectural and system issues. Christine Vanoirbeek
discussed document-based technology and how it interacts with IPR and economics.
Jakka Sairamesh and Christos Nikolaou talked about recent developments
in microeconomic algorithms for resource management in distributed systems
and proposed new architectures that could handle open electronic markets.
Mike Wellman presented his work with economic agents and discussed various
new services and functionalities, such as auction services, that will become
necessary as digital libraries evolve.
The second day of the meeting was dedicated to brainstorming on several
potential research questions. A partial list of those discussed includes
the need to reconceptualize the networked information environment, given
the IPR and economic requirements and constraints; the need to study the
cost of making and delivering 'first copy' of digital resources in a networked
environment; the need to measure (and specify measures for) use of digital
information and use data to help determine 'value' of information; the
need to study the changing needs, behaviours, of information creators and
users in a networked environment, and finally the need to build the basic
building blocks of an open network-centric infrastructure, capable of supporting
digital library economies and to experiment with economic and electronic
commerce models and 'what if' questions.
The group agreed to continue discussing these questions over the net
and through the creation of a research agenda report. This report will
also include a survey of the current state of the art. Mike Wellman will
plan and organize the agenda for the next meeting (Ann Arbor, MI -Spring
1998).
The public web page of the working group is at http://www.si.umich.edu/~jperkins/Grant/ipe/ipe.htm
Please contact either of the WG coordinators:
Christos Nikolaou University of Crete and ICS-FORTH
E-mail: nikolaou@ics.forth.gr
Mike Wellman University of Michigan Ann Arbor
E-mail: wellman@umich.edu
