RUFUS POLLOCK
Dr Rufus Pollock is a researcher, technologist and entrepreneur. He has
been a pioneer in the global Open Data movement, advising national
governments, international organisations and industry on how to succeedin the digital world. He is the founder of Open Knowledge, a leading
NGO which is present in over 35 countries, empowering people andorganizations with access to information so they can create insight anddrive change. Formerly, he was the Mead Fellow in Economics at
Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. He has been the recipientof a $1m Shuttleworth Fellowship and is currently an Ashoka Fellow and
Fellow of the RSA. He holds a PhD in Economics and a double first in
Mathematics from the University of Cambridge.

RUFUS POLLOCKTHE OPENREVOLUTION

A/E/T PRESSCopyright © 2018 Rufus Pollock
published by a/e/t press – https://artearthtech.com/
https://openrevolution.net© 2018 Rufus Pollock, Licensed openly under a Creative Commons
Attribution ShareAlike license v4 (BY-SA)
First printing, August 2018. v1.1.0

Thank-you for reading. Please share this book and its ideas. We
will only realise an Open world when more people are present to
its potential. This book is itself openly licensed so you are free toshare and reuse it however you wish! The latest digital versions
can always be found on https://openrevolution.net/

I’d love to hear what you think of the book. You can share yourthoughts via any of the routes listed on
https://openrevolution.net/contact

If you got value from the book and have not already purchased a
copy, I invite you to make a contribution via
https://openrevolution.net/pay-what-feels-right – remunerationrights don’t yet exist and your contribution helps us sustain our
work.

To my parents

Contents

1

Prologue: Monopolies of Attention

2

An Open World

3

Defining Information and Openness

4

Patents and Copyright as “Intellectual Property”

5Face to Face with Power

6

Triumph over Closed Minds: The Internet

7

Music to our Ears

8

How the Secret of Life Almost Stayed Secret

9

Meet Jamie Love

7
11

27
31

41

71

10 Openness: The Best Medicine
11 Making an Open World

91

12 Help us Make it Happen

103

13 Coda: The Original Copyfight14 Acknowledgements

1

113

79

109

53

21

He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself
without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives
light without darkening me.
— Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 13 Aug 1813.

Dante: “How can it be that a good when shared, shall make thegreater number of possessors richer in it, than if it is possessed bya few?”
Virgil: “Because thou does again fix thy mind merely on things ofearth, thou drawest darkness from true light . . . The more peopleon high who comprehend each other, the more there are to love
well, and the more love is there, and like a mirror one giveth backto the other.”— Purgatory XV.

This book is about enlightenment.

1
Prologue: Monopolies of Attention

In March 2018, when the scandal broke around the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, the Guardian in
London quoted a former director of the consultancy:
Corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, all of theselarge companies, are making tens or hundreds of billionsof dollars [from] monetising people’s data . . . I’ve been
telling companies and governments for years that data isprobably your most valuable asset. Individuals should be
able to monetise their own data – that’s their own humanvalue, not to be exploited.
Other commentators agreed: the problem with these internet
giants is their control of our personal data. But this diagnosis isfundamentally mistaken, and, just as in medicine, misdiagnosis
matters.
It is not your data that Google and Facebook are exploiting:it is your attention. It is your eyes, glued to the screen, that makethem all the money; it is because when we want to search forsomething, or make contact with friends and find out what’s goingon, billions of us turn to these sites. And it is this overwhelming
dominance that is so powerful.
We all know that these companies use our personal data totarget ads at us, and yes, that is part of the business model, buteven if they had no access to data about us they would continue tomake huge amounts of money, just as television networks made2the open revolution

fortunes before ad-targeting was even invented, simply from thesheer size of their audiences.
It is the monopoly of your attention that matters. And so, todiagnose the true problem to which these businesses present, wemust ask how they have become such incredible monopolies. The
answer is that they operate where three different phenomena
converge:
1. “Platform” effects
2. Costless digital copying
3. “Intellectual property” rights
It is only when we understand all three of these and theirinteraction that we have a true diagnosis of the problem – andhence a suitable treatment.

1.1 Platform effects
Twitter, eBay and the others such as Google and Facebook operate as what economists call “platforms”, places where different
participants connect. This is an ancient phenomenon: the fishmarket in the town square is a platform, where sellers and buyers
congregate. Amazon does the same, for a wider range of goods
and without the smell and noise. Facebook is also a platform,
originally designed to connect one user with another to exchange
content, though it soon evolved to attract advertisers as well, because they want to connect with the users too. Google is anotherplatform, connecting users with content-providers and advertisers(just as newspapers, for instance, have always done).
All platform businesses have a strong tendency to converge
on a single winner. This because the more customers there are,the more suppliers are attracted, and vice versa. For instance, it isstrongly in the interests of both buyers and sellers that eBay be aslarge as possible, so that everyone knows it’s the place to come tofind what you want. And this mutually reinforcing effect meansthat rivals are excluded, either deliberately by the company orsimply by the logic of platforms working itself out. New entrants

prologue: monopolies of attention

3

cannot compete on equal terms, and so small initial advantages
lead to entrenched monopolies. The market converges on a single
or a small number of platforms. It worked over centuries forfish-markets and stock-exchanges, and now it works for Google
and Facebook as well as Microsoft, Uber and Airbnb.

1.2 Costless copying
The owners of fish-markets and stock-exchanges make very goodlivings. But the owners of the vast online platforms are in adifferent league because of one of the fundamental characteristicsof the digital age: infinite, costless copying. When you start toglimpse the extraordinary ramifications of this simple fact, you
begin to understand the modern world.
Once I have a single copy of a piece of digital information –whether it’s software, a set of statistics or a symphony – I canmake as many copies as I wish, effectively at no cost, at the touchof a button. This is unprecedented. Each new copy costs nothing,since there is no need continually to buy raw materials or new
shops from which to sell things. Expansion is free, with infinite
economies of scale. So Microsoft, Facebook, Google and the others
have been able to scale up their services at an unprecedented rate,and have made unprecedented profits.

1.3 “Intellectual property” rights
But costless copying would not be so profitable if it were truly
unlimited. If anyone receiving a copy of Microsoft Windows
could make as many copies as they wanted and share them
then Microsoft would not be able to charge very much. Or if
the algorithms that run Google and Facebook were available foranyone to use and modify then other firms could easily competewith them. So the final element that makes these businesses such
powerful monopolies is their exclusive right to make the copies.
Thanks to “intellectual property” in the form of patents andcopyrights, they have exclusive control of the digital information

4

the open revolution

at the heart of their businesses: the software and algorithms thatpower their products and platforms.
Microsoft Windows is an operating system platform usedby much of the world. As an industry standard, it was for along time effectively a monopoly. But it is only one of the biggest
money-spinners of all time because patents and copyrights prevent
anyone else from offering its proprietary software for sale. Even
though the bits that make up its software and protocols can becopied at no cost, each customer pays tens or hundreds of dollars
for the privilege of getting a copy – and this privilege is now
almost a requirement for involvement in the digital world. So
Microsoft effectively charges each of us a fee to use our computersand for entry to the internet.
It is our framework of “intellectual property” that gives asingle company the exclusive right to do this. Yet this monopoly
doesn’t exist in a state of nature: it is the result of copyrights andpatents which we as a society have created. Of course, there isa logic to intellectual property monopolies. Even if subsequent
copies are cheap, the initial creation of a new movie, a new app
or a medicine can be hugely expensive. Intellectual property is
one way to pay for this first instance. But, as we shall see, there
are other ways to fund innovation, ways to replace patents andcopyrights with remuneration rights, preserving the incentives toinnovate but without creating monopolies.

1.4 Old Rules in a New World
And the result of running the information economy by the oldrules of intellectual monopoly rights is spiralling inequality. In
2016, the eight richest people in the world had as much moneyas the bottom 50 per cent of humanity – that’s three-and-a-halfbillion people. And of those eight, six were tech billionaires. Thisis a political timebomb. It is essential we understand the truecauses of this unsustainable concentration of wealth and power:
the exclusive ownership of digital information in combination
with platform effects and costless copying.

prologue: monopolies of attention

5

We must see the cost in stunted growth and lost opportunities. By nature, monopolists fear any competition that threatens
their position and are driven to neutralize potential rivals either
by destroying them or by devouring them. Why, other than toprotect its monopoly position, would Facebook pay $22 billion
for WhatsApp in 2014 (when WhatsApp’s sales were just $10
million)? Although the price paid by Facebook is publicly known,
the cost in lost innovation and stunted competition is incalculable.
It is the consumer, future innovators and society that lose out.
We need new rules for this new digital world. Taking the oldrules of the physical economy and applying them in this new
digital one makes no sense. Old property worked, but transplanted into this new world as intellectual property it does not.
In this new world, intellectual property is intellectual monopoly.
Monopolies that are unjustified and unjust, dangerous both toour economies and our societies. We need new rules suited to
our new information economy; rules that provide ways to reward
innovators and creators whilst preserving fairness and freedom,
and which give everyone a stake in our digital future.
Most simply, we need an Open world. A world where all
digital information is open, free for everyone to use, build on
and share; and where innovators and creators are recognized andrewarded.
Here’s how.

2
An Open World

Today, in a digital age, who owns information owns the future. In
this digital world, we face a fundamental choice between Openand Closed. In an Open world information is shared by all –freely available to everyone. In a Closed world information is
exclusively “owned” and controlled.
Today, we live in a Closed world. A world of extraordinary and growing concentrations in power and wealth. A world
where innovation is held back and distorted by the dead hand ofmonopoly; where essential medicines are affordable only to therich; where freedom is threatened by manipulation, exclusion andexploitation; and each click you make, every step you take, they’ll
be watching you.
By contrast, in an Open world all of us would be enriched by
the freedom to use, enjoy and build on everything from statistics
and research to newspaper stories and books, from softwareand films to music and medical formulae. In an Open world
we would pay innovators and creators more and more fairly,
using market-driven remuneration rights in place of intellectual
property monopoly rights.

As they have improved, digital technologies have taken on evermore of the tasks that humans used to do, from manufacturingcars to scheduling appointments. And in the next few decades“AI” (artificial intelligence) may well be not only driving our cars

8

the open revolution

for us but drafting legal contracts and performing surgery. On
the face of it, we have much to gain if machines can spare us
tedious or routine tasks, and perform them with greater accuracy.
In future, there is the prospect of our each having more time
to devote to things that matter to us individually, whether it’sbringing up our children, learning languages or deep-sea diving.
The danger, though, is that robots run on information – software, data algorithms – and at present the “ownership” of thissort of information is very unequal. And because it is protected by
our Closed system of intellectual property rights, it is becoming
ever more so thanks to costless copying and platform effects. With
the overwhelming and ever-growing importance of information
technology in the modern world, the balance of wealth and poweris tipping further and further towards an exclusive club. But
by choosing Openness we can make sure the future works foreveryone, not just the one percent.
Already, the world’s principal industry is the production andmanagement of information. And control and the wealth of those
processes is dangerously concentrated, and is becoming more so.
The five richest companies on the globe are all infotech-based,
and they themselves exhibit some of the most unequal ownership
structures in the world, with tiny groups of founders and investors
owning a great proportion of their equity.
As technology accelerates, new kinds of applications and experiences are being born which are likely to have a significant
place in our everyday lives, as well as in our economies. Virtual
reality, for instance, can now replicate many of our sensations
and impressions of the world, and has huge scope in future forrecreation, as it has already for various forms of training. It would
compromise our freedom if virtual reality were to become thesame kind of near-monopoly as, for instance, Facebook. Likewise,
the so-called internet of things is quickly growing. Already many
appliances such as baby monitors, lighting systems and central
heating are connected to the internet, but this is only the start.
Over the next few years, as billions more devices are connected,
we may see machine-to-machine data outstripping human usage
to become the principal traffic on the internet. It would be deeply

an open world9

worrying to have control of this fall to a single corporate monolith.
At its most extreme, the current situation threatens the normsof a free society. Free enterprise and free markets are disintegrating in the face of international monopolies, free choice means little
when there is only one to choose between, and even our political
freedom and freedom of thought are threatened by powers thathave the capacity to shape how we think and act. We should all
be concerned by this, and the evidence from recent scandals suchas Cambridge Analytica show that these concerns are increasingly
shared.
Yet if we were to open up to everyone all the information thatis being produced – the software that now runs the world, all theriches and the Closed materials, the world’s literature and art andalgorithms – then we could democratise the infotech revolution.
Remember the plan that Google once had of putting every bookin the world online? Even Google couldn’t do it because it fell
foul of copyright. But the Open model would do this not only
for all the books, but for all the music, the news, the astronomy
and oceanography, market prices, poetry, drug formulae, classicalscholarship – all the knowledge and riches of the world that can bedigitized. The value generated by our advances would be sharedby all humanity, rather than concentrated in the hands of the few.
Openness would solve the problem of these monopolies of information power, promoting competition, providing transparency
and increasing the possibilities and incentives for innovation. This
new approach would make all patented or copyright materials
freely available – whilst also paying their creators more and more
equitably.
The opportunity and the danger are both great. Choosing
optimism and Openness is one of the most important policy
opportunities of the 21st century. It is a chance to transform oursocieties, to create a future beyond the politics of capitalism andsocialism, combining the enterprise of the former with the latter’s
ideal of fairness: a genuine chance to build a better world foreverybody. And the entire, unprecedented opportunity is basedon one unique characteristic of our extraordinary new digitaltechnology: cost-free copying.

10

the open revolution

Physical things have an unfortunate limitation: they can beused for only one thing at a time. A bicycle is a bicycle, and if
I am riding it to work, you cannot be riding it to the shops at
the same time. Physical things, as economists say, are “rival” inuse. This fact is so obvious that we barely notice it, but it is of
profound importance. It means the world of physical goods is
one of scarcity: all too often there is not enough to go round.
Most societies in the world today have systems of private
property based upon this physical fact of single-use. We make thesocial control of physical things exclusive because that aligns withthe fact of exclusive use. If you own a house you decide who lives
in it, and the law is built upon the realities of the world’s limited
and rival physical resources.
On the whole, this has worked well up to now – usually muchbetter than other systems that have been tried. Because our wayof thinking has physical property at its heart, we have sought toinclude information in the same category, where it doesn’t belong,under the banner of “intellectual property”. In truth, information
is fundamentally different. Its unusual and essential characteristic
is its boundlessness, its non-rivalry, its capacity to replicate. Whenyou share a joke with friends around a dinner-table they each havetheir own “copy”. As such, information is not like and should not
be treated like tangible property.
Digital technology takes this property of information to another level. Once digitized – whether it is a photograph, an app ora symphony – information can be copied as often as we want andshared with anyone at practically no cost. Unlike physical things
information can be reproduced miraculously to meet demand,
making it different from the entire traditional basis of our economy. In this changed world, we need changed rules. Exclusive
property rights made sense for physical property because of theirscarce and rival nature: with one user, one owner. But digital
information is different and its abundant and non-rival naturemeans it needn’t be exclusive, it can be Open.
Welcome to the Open Revolution.

3
Defining Information and Openness

On the edge of the Gobi desert in north-west China is the town of
Dunhuang. For hundreds of years it was a major stopping place
for travellers on the silk road from Europe to China. Carved intoa cliff outside the city is a hidden cave, part of ancient holy site
called the Caves of a Thousand Buddhas. The cave was sealed
up around 1000 AD when Dunhuang was threatened by the HsiHsia kingdom to the north. Forgotten, it lay undisturbed for thebest part of a millennium. Then one day in 1900, a young monk
exploring the cliffs accidentally discovered the sealed entrance.
Inside was a treasure trove: more than forty thousand silk andpaper scrolls and manuscripts, all perfectly preserved over the
centuries by the dry desert air. One of the most precious of theseis a paper scroll nearly five metres long, made of seven strips ofyellowing paper. On the scroll is a copy of the Diamond Sutra,
one of the most important texts of the Buddhist faith. Having
been obtained in 1907 by the explorer Sir Marc Aurel Stein on
his expedition across the Gobi desert, it lives today in the British
Library, and can be viewed online.
The scroll is precious not because of its content but because of
its form. Rather than written by hand, the text is printed, using
the wood-block printing technique which the Chinese invented
a thousand years before Gutenberg. Remarkably, the scroll evengives the date of the printing: 10 May 868. This makes thescroll the oldest printed text we have, and a unique testament
to our distinctive human desire to record, preserve and share

12

the open revolution

information.
There is one further important feature of this scroll, found in
the dedication at the end: the statement that it is “for universal
free distribution”. That is, the scroll’s text can and should befreely copied and shared. Here then, more than a thousand years
ago, on the earliest printed text known to man, we have plainly
stated the basic idea of free and open sharing of information. The
idea of openness, then, was present as far back as the printed
records will take us.
It is also likely that the urge to keep information closed – either
secret or otherwise restricted – is equally old, especially when
the information has commercial value. “Knowledge is power”,
the old saying goes, and some of our oldest texts, from Homer’s
Odyssey to the Hebrew Old Testament, provide ample evidenceof the power of keeping information closed – after all, the Trojan
horse would have been of little use to the Greeks if the Trojans
had discerned its purpose.
But when we talk about “information”, do we include every
thought in our heads and every word we say? Or do we meansomething more restricted: only words and thoughts and ideas
recorded in a permanent form?
And what is openness? Is it just the opposite of secret? Must
open information be cost-free to the user? What about authorshipand credit – can works that are “open” nevertheless require thatthe creators be acknowledged? And finally what about intellectual
property such as copyright and patents? How do these relate toopen and closed information?

3.1 What is Information?
When we speak generally about “information”, we mean knowledge, news, instructions, factual details, formulae and so on. We
would not include, for instance, a tune or a poem. For the purposes of this book, though, “information” has a wider meaning. It
is taken to include everything recorded in a digital form or in an
enduring form that could be digitized (such as books in a library).

defining information and openness

13

In short, everything that is or could be written in any language,
including equations, musical notes, Morse code or machine code.
So as well as the wiring diagram of an airliner, and databases
ranging from the human genome to the location of stars in thesky, it includes everything that can be copyrighted – imaginative
works such as music, images and stories – and every invention
that can be patented.
This book is about making as much as possible of that information available to as many people as we can, since wealth,information and the opportunity to create them are now profoundly entwined. First, though, an important distinction needs
to be made between information that is private by nature and thatwhich is non-private. “Revenge porn”, to take an extreme example, can be posted online but the material remains intrinsicallyprivate. The same is true of, for instance, personal emails and ourholiday photos. And privacy extends beyond information we havecreated ourselves: it includes things such as our health records,
our bank statements, and what we bought at the supermarket.
Nor is it only individuals who have information that is legitimately private: governments and corporations have such information too. A company’s internal planning and management would
not usually be legitimately or legally available to outsiders, andthe same is true, though perhaps more restrictively, of government
documents. Sometimes a spy or discontented employee steals
private information to sell or publish, but that does not mean that
it is legitimately public.
On the other hand, all published books, all Hollywood films,
all released recordings are non-private, and they are available
to everyone for a price. All drug formulae, all research and all
inventions are available to anyone for a price – and are therefore
non-private information.
How we manage our private information is an importantphilosophical, technical, political and legal topic, but it is not
the focus of this book. This book is concerned with non-private
information, information that could be legally or legitimately soldor transferred to any third party. So in this book, “information”
means non-private information – which encompasses almost all

14

the open revolutionof our commercially and culturally important information, frommovies to medicines and software to statistics.
Today, much of this information is in practice tightly controlled, even though it could be legally and legitimately sharedwith all. It is restricted by copyright and patent law, which limits use and hinders innovation by artificially raising prices or
denying access altogether. It is the contention of this book that all
non-private information can and should be Open information, with
innovators and creators paid by mechanisms that are compatible
with Openness, such as remuneration rights, rather than by thesystem of intellectual property monopoly rights we have today.
Consider an academic publisher such as Elsevier, the custodian of thousands of new pages of information every year, most of
it generated in publicly-funded institutions, which it keeps rigorously closed, behind paywalls thousands of pounds high.1 Cleverly, Elsevier has inserted itself as an intermediary – a platform– between academic authors and academic readers, controlling
many journals which are mini-monopolies in their fields. Increasingly, publishers like Elsevier are exploiting the very academic
community they should serve, using monopoly power to hikeprices year after year. Meanwhile, they depend for their content
and much of the editorial work on the same scholars, who offer
their publicly-funded labour (and their copyrights) for free. And
since academics have little choice, because they are obliged to
publish in “reputable journals”, they are held to ransom as surely
as the libraries that are obliged to subscribe to the journals.
These monopoly practices are bringing academic publishinginto disrepute, and the dam seems likely to break simply because
Open publishing provides a flexible, modern, non-monopoly alternative, with the advantage that articles can be readily updated.
Meanwhile, consider not only the total of £20 billion global rev1 The annual library subscription to a single online journal (usually quarterly) can run to tens of thousand pounds. When Stephen Buranyi wrote
an authoritative survey of the field in the Guardian (27 June 2017), Elsivier
told him that they published 420,000 articles a year, and that “14 million
scientists entrust Elsevier to publish their results, and 800,000 scientists
donate their time to help them with editing and peer-review”.

defining information and openness

15

enues generated by science publishing, but the opportunity costs
that result from this mass of information not being Openly available for all to build upon. Think of the papers not written and thebreakthroughs missed or delayed because scientists are forced to
publish their work in journals that lock it away.

3.2 What is Openness? Freedom to use, build on
and share
What, then, does “Open” mean? Well, Open information has
to be more than merely available. It is information that can beuniversally and freely used, built upon and shared.
All three of these stipulations are essential. For information
to be regarded as Open, it must first be accessible to all of us to
use without payment. Secondly, we must be free, both technicallyand legally, to build upon it without restriction for our own
purposes. And finally, we must be able to share the information,
and anything we have built upon it, with everyone else.2
Building upon information to make something new is fundamental to our entire culture. Almost no one ever makes anything
truly from scratch. Every writer uses techniques learnt from otherwriters (not to mention his components, the words bequeathed
to us by countless generations). All painters learn from otherpainters – whether imitating or reacting against them. Learning
how to do something means learning to adapt existing ideas in
new ways. Practically everything we use in everyday life has
been designed and made by someone else, and they too werecollaborating. Entirely original and independent creations areastonishingly rare. As Isaac Newton stated, “If I have seen further
it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Technology is the same, but with the dependency even more
apparent. Smartphones, for instance, combine thousands, even
hundreds of thousands of ideas and innovations, big, small andmicroscopic, accumulated over decades and even centuries. As
2 Use, reuse and redistribution are the three core features of openness as
set out in the Open Definition https://opendefinition.org/

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the open revolution

each is incorporated, the technology advances, allowing them toconnect to a cellular network and transmit data thanks to cellular
network towers dotted around the landscape and connected byfibre optic cables. The ideas combined in all this have been contributed by people with all sorts of different skills and knowledge.
How many innovations are involved in smartphone technology is impossible to say (how far back do you go?), but we could
add up the number of patents involved. To make the implementation of patents practical when so many are used at once, they
are aggregated into what are called patent pools, which enable
a manufacturer to pay a single licence fee which is then sharedout. Naturally, patent-holders are keen to have their patents inthe pool, while those with patents already in it tend to oppose
new entrants, because more patents may mean a smaller fee foreach individually, or make a project too expensive to proceedwith. So after this jostling, how many patents are there in thepatent pool for 3G? More than 7,500. That is, 3G combines morethan seven and a half thousand technological innovations that still
have active patents, and which are therefore less than 20 years old.
If we were to include older patents and inventions, the numeric
keypad, for instance, or the production of the many kinds ofplastic, the number of innovations used by 3G technology would
be incalculable.
To be Open, information such as that covered by all thesepatents must be freely and universally available to use, build on
and share. The two qualities of freedom and universality go
together, each reinforcing and expanding the other. The freedoms
to use, build upon and share must be available to all, irrespectiveof borders, wealth or purpose. For example, information is not
Open if it is available only to those in the United States, or if
it may not be used to make a profit – or even used for military
purposes. Distasteful though it may sometimes be, universality is
especially important to the idea of Openness. An inventor may
not want his speech-recognition software to be used to power
drones that bomb people. However, rather as if Apple issued an
edict that its computers were not to be used for trolling on theinternet or posting terrorist videos, this would be impractical anddefining information and openness

17

unpoliceable. The power of Openness, like that of freedom ofspeech, lies in its being available, whatever people wish to do with
it. To allow a myriad of restrictions would be to make the systemunwieldy and the accumulation of specific conditions would behighly detrimental to creativity.

3.3 Attribution, Integrity and Share-Alike
While Open information must be available for everyone to use,build upon and share, three important provisos can apply: attribution, integrity and an insistence that what is shared must be
shared alike.
A creator may insist upon attribution. This simply meansthat credit must be given in an appropriate way to the author or
authors of a work, be it a song or a piece of software. We arefamiliar with this: novelists, composers and photographers are
all credited, and patents list their inventors. Nor is authorshipthe only kind of credit. Film credits tell us not only the author of
the original book, but the names of the director, the actors, andthe many others who have contributed (sometimes down to theintern who made the tea). Newspapers attribute the statistics theyuse, not only for legal reasons but because readers want to know
the authority being cited. Listing creators and giving sources, inother words, is a way of accrediting material. Most elaborately,in published papers academics go to great lengths to cite andcredit previous researchers and sources, and usually include abibliography to help others to trace and check them.
Attribution serves several purposes. It offers verification andvalidation – where did this information come from? where canI see it in its original context? – but it is also a kind of moral
recognition: this was made by X, or builds on the work of Y.
Credits of this sort, and the reputation that flows from them,are psychologically important and have a practical importance,
because jobs and resources are frequently assigned on the basis ofachievements and reputation. This factor is even more importantwhen the creator earns little or nothing directly from his work, as

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the open revolution

in the case of a mathematical breakthrough or a scholarly paper
newly attributing a sketch to Constable for the first time. This isparticularly true in the case of Open materials, freely distributed,
as increasingly they are on the internet. The requirement for
attribution usually places little or no burden on those who use,reuse or redistribute information.
The second stipulation that Openness permits is a requirement
to respect integrity. “Integrity” is a current legal term in theregulation of information, and refers to the control that creators
may exert over the way their work is used or altered (whether it
has been freely obtained or paid for). Integrity arguments were
deployed in 2006, for example, in an attempt to prevent female
actors taking the leading parts in an Italian production of SamuelBeckett’s Waiting for Godot. But since this right can be used toblock new uses of a work, it is at odds with the freedom anduniversality that are at the heart of the philosophy of Openness,and they will be more narrowly interpreted in the Open world. If
information is to count as Open, the integrity requirement must
not grant the original creator a veto power over changes by reusers.
Others must be free to use the work for their own purposes. Theremay, however, legitimately be a requirement both to declare andto explain the relation to and differences from the parent.
The third stipulation that Openness permits is for share-alike,requiring that those who reuse work that has been freely shared
must in turn share their own work Openly in the same way – andwith a share-alike requirement in turn. In this way Openness
cascades down the generations of creativity.
Share-alike is most significant in areas where reuse is common.
The concept of “share-alike” originated in the 1980s with the workof Richard Stallman in the building of software, where reuse isubiquitous. His concern was that if he shared his work freely andOpenly, others might take it and copyright it rather than sharing
in their turn. Share-alike requirements solve this problem, andthe beauty of the system is that it imposes no burden on those
who are sharing. But it has a ratchet effect that can bring more
and more material into the Open realm. Everyone who uses thismaterial must adopt the share-alike system, and so on unto thedefining information and openness

19

third and fourth generations. And share-alike is already requiredby many major Open information projects such as Wikipedia,
OpenStreetMap, GNU/Linux and Android.
None of this, however, means that Open publication is sheer
altruism, giving away one’s work for nothing. There are mechanisms by which Open publication can be rewarded – and in fairer
and more socially beneficial ways than it is at present. This too ispart of the vision of Openness. But first, where do we stand now?

4
Patents and Copyright as “Intellectual
Property”

Of the two major kinds of monopoly rights over information,patents are regarded as the broader, covering more of the idea or
approach of an invention, whereas copyright focuses on exact, or
close to exact, duplication. Originally concerned with the copyingof printed books, the scope of copyright has grown to include
almost all material that has a precise linguistic or symbolic formand can therefore be copied. This now includes not only cultural
works such as music and films but commercial information such assoftware. And the distinction from patents has become somewhat
blurred as copyright has been extended to cover, say, fictional
characters and the design of software interfaces. Whereas patents
and copyright were originally distinct, they are now classified as
branches of the same tree of information-related monopoly rights,“intellectual property”.
Nevertheless, distinctions remain. For example, patents are
relatively short: even if extended, they rarely run for more than 20
years. Copyright, by contrast, is now very long: often amounting
to a monopoly for seventy years or more beyond the life of theauthor, so that it is common for the works of authors long deadto remain under the control of descendants or trustees, or of
corporations which have bought the rights.
There are, in addition to copyrights and patents, other information rights under the heading of “intellectual property”. The
most significant are trademarks – which are essentially rights to22

the open revolution

control branding – but there are also laws about trade secrets andsome much newer rights such as those to do with databases.
Yet even with all of these forms of “intellectual property”, therewards for inventiveness are not comprehensive, fair or proportionate. Most obviously, the inventors of many everyday things
receive no rewards at all because they are concepts rather than
products, means of solving problems or even forms of behaviour
which may benefit billions of people but have no financial value.
If, for instance, had you been the first to invent the roundabout, so
easing congestion all over the world, you would have had nothing
to patent. If you had solved a conundrum in mathematics orphysics, you would not have monopoly control over the solution,
nor immediate financial rewards from it. If you write the words
to a song, you have a copyright. If you write the music, you havea copyright. But if you invent the strobe effects that go with them,
you have nothing.

Although the history of patents and copyrights is long andtangled, generally involving extensions of both their scope andtheir duration, they were from the first designed as monopolies,
and neither was initially construed as property in the way thatthe modern term “intellectual property” invites us to do. Yet in
the past few decades, advocates for patents and copyright haveincreasingly sought to free them from any negative association
with monopolies, and to replace this with a positive association
with the much more palatable idea of private property.
The adoption of the language of “intellectual property rights”
to designate legal exclusivities regulating the flow of information
is not innocent. This branding has associated these restrictions
with traditional rights in tangible property, which are generally
respected because of custom and experience (and perhaps especially the experience of the past hundred years, during which
private property has so often been catastrophically violated). Thisdeliberate confusion amounts to a rhetorical hijacking.
Information is not the same as tangible property, since it is notrival or exclusive in use. Information is not naturally property atpatents and copyright as “intellectual property”

23

all. You cannot possess Mozart’s last symphony or Fermat’s last
theorem or the rules of chess: once created, they float free. They
belong to us all.
The same is intrinsically true of a new tune, a furniture design,or a novel. But not in law, where these are initially subject tothe monopolies of copyrights and patents, which offer creatorsand investors a means of profiting from their efforts and risktaking, and so give an incentive for further production. These
restrictions, however, work by limiting people’s access artificially,
inflating prices, and curtailing the scope for third parties to reuse
the information in their own work. We should not bamboozle
ourselves by confusing the rival nature of tangible property withthe deliberately imposed monopolies that restrict our access toand use of information.
In his novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil writes
that “fire does not become less when other fires kindle from it”.
The same is true of information: it does not become less whenothers Kindle from it. The formula for Ibuprofen and the sourcecode for Linux aren’t threatened by over-use. And given the nonexclusive, non-rival nature of information, the natural way to treat
it is the Open model – a collective commons to which all haveaccess. In fact, there are times when a good portion of humanity
is enjoying the same information at once, such as when we allwatch the final of the World Cup or the Olympic 100 metres, andthe sharing is itself a vital and enriching part of the experience.
As well as being in accord with the nature of information, freesharing is the only way for society as a whole to realize its full
benefits. But if there were no commercial incentive to create suchinformational goods, we might not develop them in the first place.
Once made, a Hollywood blockbuster can be copied across theinternet in seconds for almost nothing, but creating the mastervideo file may take years of effort and tens or hundreds of millionsof dollars. So there is a tension between allowing the Open sharing
of information and the need to pay for that expensive original. If
the film had no copyright protection and were free to copy, wherewould we find the resources to make it in the first place? And
who would fund our billions of dollars’ of medical research if the24

the open revolutioncures that eventually emerge were not protected with monopoly
rights over them as “intellectual property”? Huge interests are atstake, and so are reputations and livelihoods.
Of course creativity and innovation should be recognized andrewarded, but exclusive rights are not the only way this can be
done. Until the mid 18th century, for instance, many writers andcomposers were rewarded by the patronage of royalty and thearistocracy. Nowadays, many branches of the arts and sciences
are fostered by patronage of other kinds, whether it be throughcommercial sponsorship, university funding, the Arts Council, or,particularly in America, great trusts and foundations. Creators areoften rewarded indirectly by the recognition of their achievements,
and being sought-after for their celebrity. Einstein didn’t haveexclusive rights over his ideas. People do not pay to use the theoryof relativity or the formula E=mc2. He published them Openly foreveryone to read, analyse and build upon. Most of his career was
paid for by universities, whether publicly or privately funded.
Patronage has the disadvantages that you may back the wrong
horse and that it creates dependency upon the rich. Market mechanisms, on the other hand, provide opportunities for everyone,and specifically reward innovations according to take-up. Thisin itself has disadvantages – particularly, as we have seen, if thecreator has a monopoly. But there are better ways to fund the creation of information than by imposing exclusionary monopolies.
By banding together – usually through our taxes – we can raise
the money to pay for information goods as they are created, muchas we raise money to pay for national defence or roads. Moreover,
we can do this, if we want, without removing any choice fromconsumers or freedom from the market. The state can coordinate
the raising of money but leave the market and entrepreneurs todecide what information is created and consumed: which movies
are made, which lines of medical research are pursued, whichsoftware is written.
No one wants to see a government committee deciding whichauthors to support or what software should be written, but traditional, demand-driven market mechanisms can be used to allocate
all or part of the money collected. Rather than the patent andpatents and copyright as “intellectual property”

25

copyright monopolies they have today, innovators and creators
can be given “remuneration rights”. These would entitle the owners to payment from a remuneration rights fund, according to thevalue that the information generates – for example, how much
impact a specific medicine has on improving health or how manytimes a song is played.

So is an Open Revolution possible? Yes, and it is based onsolid experience and statistics. More and more of the world’s
software is Open. Four out of five smartphones run on an operating system that is Open and free, developed by thousandsof organizations and individuals over more than forty years andfreely shared. And this has occurred without the sort of systematic public funding that exists, for example, in science. It has also
happened without the supposed financial advantages of proprietary software. Almost every aspect of the Open approach has
been tried successfully in one area or another.
1. The internet itself, for instance, is an amazing example of anOpen platform that can be used by everyone. On it, you canalready find huge amounts of Open-source material available
not only to use but to build upon.
2. We already use our taxes to pay for some of our information.
The BBC, for instance, is paid for by a licence fee by all who
watch television, but it is not a monopoly, and is legally obliged
to commission a proportion of its production elsewhere. Close
to half of all medical R&D in the United States is funded
directly by taxpayers.
3. Mechanisms such as collecting societies already distribute revenues from recorded music according to air-plays and downloads. The Spotify and Netflix approach of a fixed fee andunlimited access has much in common with an Open approach.
4. From different countries at different times, we have examplesof what happens to, for instance, the medical market in theabsence of provision for drug patents.

5Face to Face with Power

Although the platform monopolies Google, Facebook and Microsoft each consist of a single firm, this need not be so. It is
possible for a platform to be neutral, either not owned by anyone or owned by all of those who use it. For its computing andcommunication needs, the world has converged on a single network and single set of protocols, yet the internet is not owned orcontrolled by any one firm. As long as you adhere to the technicalities of the internet protocols and certain legal rules excluding
anti-social content, you can connect to the internet and to otherusers. The internet is a platform that mediates between all of its
users impartially.
Contrast this with Facebook and you can see how different
things could be: Facebook provides media sharing, communication, identification and spam-management services, but its protocols and platform are largely proprietary and controlled by thecompany, which ultimately determines who uses them and forwhat. The difference between these two kinds of platform wasmade starkly clear in spring 2018 by the Cambridge Analytica
scandal. Facebook took a large share of the blame for misuse of
personal information; no one blamed the internet itself.
There is no reason, though, why Facebook could not have been
like the internet, with its protocols being Open and universally
accessible. Instead of a proprietary social network controlled
by one corporation, we could have had an Open social network,
owned and controlled by its users – just like the internet itself.

28

the open revolution

In an Open social network, anyone – suitably identified – could
connect and innovate on the platform. However, as things stand(and although we may not realize it), Facebook is able to exclude
anything that might impinge upon or threaten it. You would not,for instance, be able to use it to build your own social network, orto introduce a plugin that blocked Facebook ads.
And Facebook’s power extends far beyond its own web pages.
On 2 November 2010, the day of the US Congressional elections,
Facebook placed on the newsfeed of its 61 million American users
an informational message about voting, together with an “I Voted”
button, allowing friends to signal to one another. Facebook’s
intention was innocent and involved no deliberate partisanship.
Nevertheless, the results were striking. Analysis reported in2012 showed that Facebook’s move accounted for probably atleast an additional 340,000 votes. This was 25% of the entire
increase in turnout, making Facebook the biggest single factor
affecting increased turnout. Whilst this change may not soundvery significant, additional turnout can be crucial. For example,
the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was
ultimately decided in Florida by a margin of 537 votes – less than
0.001% of all voters. In 2016 a shift of a mere 100,000 votes overall
from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, Michigan
and Wisconsin would have made Clinton President. Facebook’s
interventions in 2010 were very small, just a single message anda button. More concerted or targeted efforts such as those by
Cambridge Analytica can have a much larger impact.
Facebook repeated its experiment in 2012, but the results havenot been published. Facebook is probably wary of sharing its
work publicly following the reaction in 2014 to the publicationof the results of its “emotional states” experiment, in which it
found that adding more negative or more positive items to someusers’ newsfeeds appeared to affect their emotions. Facebook has
also investigated how prominent inclusion of “hard” news might
influence voter turnout, but has not published the results. One
need not question Facebook’s present intentions to find this acause for concern. The huge potential power of such platforms
is now undeniable, and this power could be used deliberately forface to face with power

29

political ends.
And it is not just Facebook. A study published in 2015 in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showedthat Google has the power to shift elections through its ability toshape the search results it delivered for a politician or politicalparty. In a simple experiment with real-world voters, researchers
demonstrated that manipulating searches to provide more positiveor negative results had a significant impact, especially among theundecided. Furthermore, they showed that this effect would be
sufficient to change the results of many elections around the world
including recent close elections such as the US presidential contest
between Trump and Clinton.
While advanced democracies generally take measures to ensure that media ownership does not become too concentrated –Germany, for example, has explicit limits on the percentage ofreaders or viewers that any one company may have – platforms
such as Facebook or Google have achieved a dominance of users’attention far greater than almost any newspaper or broadcasterin history. This near-monopoly power in social media is greaterfor being less explicit and obvious, with scant transparency oroversight, and it has the potential to limit our freedom of speech,
enquiry and even thought.
Action is clearly needed. But what exactly can and should we
do? Simple regulation seems both insufficient and unsustainable –what happens when the next Facebook appears? Moreover, regulation risks entrenching these monopolies further: well-meaningoversight can rapidly turn into rigid rules that form an insurmountable barrier to new competitors whilst little impeding themonopolist (see below for the example of the FCC and AT&T).
In addition, traditional regulation entails bureaucratic oversightwhich may struggle to keep pace with innovation. Fortunately,
the Open model provides an alternative way forward. It offers asolution to the problem of monopolies that avoids heavy-handed
regulation and fosters sustainable innovation and free competition.
By using remuneration rights to pay innovators, we can combine
the power and discipline of the market with the openness of theinternet.

6
Triumph over Closed Minds: The Internet

The internet is the infrastructure of the information age. It is theroad and rail of the modern era – an information superhighway.
It is also the greatest example of an Open system that we have,created to an Open design to provide freedom and possibilities
to all. The freedom it gives has allowed the global community tocreate new uses unimagined by its original architects. It was on
the internet that Google and Amazon were launched; it was on
the internet that a billion websites bloomed; it was on the internetthat the digital economy took off.
Openness was central to this prolific activity, but it was by nomeans inevitable – in fact, it is an anomaly. Other telecommunications networks have almost all been Closed, having both arestricted series of connections and specific, limited forms of data.
Permission to connect was closely guarded by network owners –think of national telephone monopolies – and the uses to which
they were put were predetermined.
In 1992 it cost $5,000 to buy the Blue Book, the manual containing standards for the world’s telephone systems (published by the
ITU in Geneva). When it came to mobile telephony, the principal
standard from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s was GSM, and if
you wanted to build your own GSM system – for example, a basestation for receiving signals from your own handsets – you would
need to understand how GSM worked and have permission to
use that information. Neither was possible: information on how
a base station worked was strictly controlled (it was not until

32

the open revolution

2010 that a white-hat hacker managed to get hold of a GSM basestation on eBay and reverse engineer the protocol). In any case,permission to use that information, even if it had been available,
was restricted by a large number of patents.
As for connectivity, for most of the 20th century telephony wasregulated by governments through effective monopolies, which
did their utmost to resist encroachment, as in the David and
Goliath story of Henry Tuttle and America’s gigantic corporation
AT&T.
Mr. Henry Tuttle was the proud inventor of a telephone silencer, unpromisingly called the Hush-a-Phone. It was a large
plastic cup that you attached to the speaking end of a telephonehandset so that no one around you could hear what you were
saying. Mr. Tuttle had been in business for years when, in the late
1940s, he received the alarming news that devices like his were to
be forbidden by AT&T, on the basis of an obscure provision of its
agreement with the government which stated:
No equipment, apparatus, circuit or device not furnishedby the telephone company shall be attached to or connectedwith the facilities furnished by the telephone company,
whether physically, by induction, or otherwise.
Put simply: you could not connect anything even to yourown handset without AT&T’s permission, presumably including
a plastic cup from your picnic basket. AT&T’s network was atthat time and for long after the only large-scale communication
network available, so it was pulling the plug on Mr. Tuttle’s perfectly harmless business. In 1950, AT&T took Tuttle to court, or
rather to its equivalent in this area: a special hearing of the regulator, the Federal Communications Commission in Washington DC.
One might have imagined this was a minor affair concerning an
obscure product not in competition with the phone company andbought by a tiny minority of its customers. But AT&T showed up
in force: dozens of attorneys plus a bevy of expert witnesses andtop-level executives. Tuttle had only himself, his lawyer, and two
acoustic professors from Harvard.
For AT&T this case was not about the Hush-a-Phone but about

triumph over closed minds: the internet

33

the principle of connecting to the phone system. And behind that,something much bigger was at stake: who had control. For if
Mr. Tuttle were allowed to do what he did, then they might also
have to allow all sorts of other innovations to be connected, andif lots of people could do things uncontrolled and unsupervised
by AT&T, there was a potential danger. Someday, someone mightinvent something that would disrupt its business. A company thatwas sitting on one of the safest, soundest, government-guaranteedmonopolies in the world did not want anyone muscling in on any
part of its operation, however peripheral, and even if it didn’t
offer any equivalent.
After a five-year delay, the FCC issued a ruling that the Husha-Phone was indeed “deleterious to the telephone system andinjures the service rendered by it”, so AT&T had the right toforbid it, and devices like it. And there the case might have rested,
so dooming the internet even before it was conceived.
Really? The internet and the Hush-a-Phone are utterly different. Yes, but they share two key common features. First, bothcan be construed as attachments to the phone network. No one
was going to buy a Hush-a-Phone silencer without a phone that
could make calls. And the internet has to send its data either
down wires – metal or optical cables – or as electromagnetic waves
through the air or through space. To create the internet, access toa transmission system was essential, and in the late-20th-century
America, AT&T’s was the only one. For it was AT&T that had
run millions of miles of copper wire to reach almost every homeand business in the land, and connected each of its local networks into a national network, making enormous investments inhigh-capacity long-distance lines. It would be decades before any
real alternative arose locally in cities, with the systems installedby cable TV companies, and then for long-distance transmission,
first from satellite providers and later with fibre-optic lines financed by the internet boom. Even today, more than fifty years
on, AT&T and its equivalents in other countries are often still the
only providers of “last-mile” connections into homes and businesses. In sum, the internet, or any service like it, could operate
in the US only with access to AT&T’s network.

34

the open revolution

So AT&T went to extraordinary lengths to suppress the innocuous Hush-a-Phone. Such devices, they claimed in evidence,
posed a threat to the safety and functionality of their network,and vivid pictures were painted of repairmen being injured orelectrocuted. And if they thought a plastic cup could be fatal,
imagine the conniptions they would have had if they had dreamt
of something like the internet. For this would mean using AT&T’s
wires to send entirely new kinds of signals and messages. Not
just pieces of imitation crockery but entire computers were to be
attached to AT&Ts lines.
Of course the FCC couldn’t know that its anti-competitive
ruling of 1955 might have the effect of muffling not only the humble Hush-a-Phone but also the greatest technical breakthrough of
the following half-century. That is one of the great ironies andchallenges of innovation policy: we don’t know what we don’t
know.1 The future has no lobbyists or lawyers. We inevitably
make decisions based on what we can anticipate or imagine, butinnovations of the most important and exciting kinds are often
about precisely what we cannot anticipate. This is the reason,
worth reiterating, why Openness is so crucial: an Open systemor platform allows anyone to build on top of it, and so allows the
maximum variety of innovation.
Fortunately, though, Henry Tuttle was not, so to speak, to besilenced. He was indignant and determined to press on, despite
substantial costs already incurred over several years. He went to
the Court of Appeals, and in 1956 a panel of federal judges headedby Judge Bazelon unanimously overturned the FCC’s decision.
Furthermore, at the end of their judgment, in its penultimate
sentence, there was a crucial phrase. An AT&T user had theright “reasonably to use his telephone in ways which are privately
beneficial without being publicly detrimental.” That one phrase
was to give the internet the opening it needed. It punctured the
Closed system that AT&T had been defending, and AT&T wasright to be afraid, for a few years later the competition came
1 When asked what would be the use of the newly-discovered electricity,
Michael Faraday is said to have replied “What’s the use of a new-born
baby?”

triumph over closed minds: the internet

35

pouring through that breach and its once all-powerful empire wasto be fundamentally and fatally undermined.

The two expert witnesses in the FCC’s Hush-a-Phone hearing
in 1950 were the Harvard acoustics professors J. C. R. Licklider and
Leo Beranek. Both were to play central roles in the establishmentof the internet and its distinctive Open philosophy. In the late
1950s, Licklider became fascinated by computers and the problem
of how to improve interaction between them and humans. In
1962, he was appointed head of funding in the area of computing
at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
Suddenly, he controlled a bigger budget for computer science
research than the combined budgets of all other such efforts in
America, and he used it to fund some of the most imaginative
blue-sky research of the time. Central to his vision was the ideathat if computers were truly to enhance human thinking, ways
had to be found to communicate with them and between them. The
earliest glimmerings of the possibilities of networked computers
had been identified.
Licklider stepped down after two years at ARPA, but his ideas
gathered momentum thanks not only to his successor, Bob Taylor,but to Paul Baran’s packet-switching ideas at Rand Corporation,and to many others. In August 1968, the tender went out to build
the first prototype implementation – to be called the Arpanet –which a few years later became the seedling of the internet weknow today. The contract to build it went to a small consulting
firm with a reputation for brilliance and informality, Bolt, Beranek& Newman (BBN), founded by Licklider’s old Harvard colleague,
Leo Beranek.
This isn’t a history of the long road from that prototype to theinternet we have today, with its billions of daily users and traffic
measured in petabytes. The important thing here is the philosophy
that the internet enshrined, which is so different from any othercommunications network existing then or since: Openness ofaccess and information.

36

the open revolution

Here’s one extraordinary example: while Bolt, Beranek andNewman were building the initial four-host network in 1968,
questions arose as to what would actually be sent over it. Emailand web pages had never been thought of. BBN were responsible
for creating reliable physical links across which data could besent, but what data would this be?
What happened? An interested group of graduate students
at the universities involved spontaneously formed, calling themselves the Network Working Group. They contacted BBN andwere given informal approval. They started publishing ideas andspecifications under the rubric “Request for Comments”, whichemphasized their informality. Between them, they invented whatbecame the protocols of the internet, publishing them early, often
and Openly. To understand how remarkable this was, you have toremember that ARPA was a sub-agency of the Department of Defence, where contracts conventionally went to big firms with staidbureaucracies (the major bidder against BBN had been the huge
defence contractor Raytheon; the computer corporations IBM and
CDC had refused to bid, because they thought the project mustfail). In addition all telecommunications in the United States
were run by AT&T, the most hidebound and hierarchical of corporations. At AT&T, graduate students would not have comeanywhere near this project, let alone been left to design the core
specifications in a completely Open forum. Every single major
specification of the Arpanet – and hence the internet – was hammered out informally without any official committees. You could
get every single specification for free as Open software from thestart. (Readers over a certain age may remember how astonishingit was that to begin emailing one had to do no more than establish
an account and press “send”: no fee, no licence, no official carrier.
Magic.)
Contrast this with the traditional telephone industry, where
standards were arrived at in committees working for years, andaccess to them was limited to the priesthood. Not only were thespecifications Closed and closely controlled by the International
Telecommunications Union (ITU), but in 1992, when the Blue
Book could perfectly well have been put on the internet for free,triumph over closed minds: the internet

37

it still cost $5,000 and was locked up in software so old that the
ITU itself could not read it properly.
By contrast, thanks to the influence of Licklider, Baran andothers, the internet had an Open architecture. There was nocentral control, the network was distributed, and anyone could
connect anything to it, so long as they followed the protocols.
This was so alien to AT&T as to blind them to its import. In 1972,
the company was offered the chance to take over the Arpanet, as
the fledgling was still known. Senior managers and experts there
considered the matter for months, and then politely declined,
citing its incompatibility with their network.
AT&T weren’t the only ones with closed minds. With the
spread of personal computers in the early 1980s, several national
telecoms companies created their own mini-information networks,
such as France Telecom’s Minitel and British Telecom’s Ceefax.
Several were more sophisticated than the internet of the time:a decade ahead of the World Wide Web, they were carrying
into homes real-time information such as weather forecasts andtrain times. But they differed in one crucial aspect from theinternet: they were not Open. The owners alone determined what
information found its way onto these services.
Fortunately, the internet beat off the threat from these Closed
systems. Thanks to careful nurturing and a strong base inacademia, it was resilient, and by the mid 1980s it was poised totake over the world.
How was this possible? How could the internet be so different? Much of the credit must go to the fact of government
funding. The beginnings of the internet were almost entirely paid
for by government research funds in the US and to a much smaller
extent in the UK (where work at the National Physical Laboratory
under Donald Davies was crucial to the development of packetswitching). Even more important was the form of the government
funding. Today, ARPA is a legend of what is possible for a publicagency. It was staffed by outsiders and free to make bold bets
with a minimum of bureaucracy. Funding from ARPA helped tocreate not only the internet but other aspects of digital life that we
now take for granted, from user interfaces to the mouse. This was

38

the open revolution

money with a vision, and a vision that something unprecedented
was possible.
In addition to this essential government support at an earlystage, the internet had the good fortune to mature in a relative
power vacuum. At first, commercial operators did not understandwhat was happening and how it would affect their businesses.
During the 1960s and 1970s, with the support of the White House,
the FCC took an increasingly tough line with AT&T, insistingon greater Openness and competition. As a result, the internet
reached early maturity before any one player could try to dominate or control it. If AT&T had retained its monopoly on thedigital networks of the US, we would probably have a system ofsorts allowing digital communication, but it would have been lesslike the internet than like France’s Minitel service, very limitedin scope and perhaps very expensive. Sure enough, when theinternet took off in the early 1990s, big players ranging from AOL
to Microsoft to AT&T tried to seize control, but they were too late;it was too big for any one corporation – or even government – toown.

The internet and the web have been the greatest innovation
platforms of all time in terms of quantity, quality and velocityof what has been built on and around them – largely because
no monopoly controls them. The monopoly issue is a live one,though, because without active efforts to promote Openness,
our digital world keeps tending towards proprietary monopolies. Facebook, for instance, has been creating a proprietary layer
on top of the internet. More and more people do not log on to
the internet, they log on to Facebook. To most of us, including
myself, this seems at first to be fairly innocuous: Facebook provides a great service and all my friends are on it. Even as I use it,
we are scarcely aware that it dominates our internet usage more
and more, whether I am messaging friends, organizing events or
posting pictures and thoughts. Subtly and gradually, however,
Facebook is becoming where we live online. Some 80% of social
traffic now goes through this single company.

triumph over closed minds: the internet

39

Facebook is a monopoly, and its CEO and investors are anxious to keep it that way, so the company has been busy making
sure that the innovation that happens around it works not tothreaten but to reinforce it. Of course it is difficult to see thenegative effects, the companies and innovations that never madeit, or which have been absorbed into Facebook and neutralized,
diminishing innovation as they disappear.
Imagine you want to start your own innovative social network
today. To get started, you almost certainly need to co-operate with
Facebook in some way, so that your users can exchange content
with their friends and the world whilst on Facebook, rather thanon an entirely separate network of yours. But does Facebook havean incentive to make this easy or will it want to hamper yourefforts, subtly or otherwise? Alas, we know the answer. This is thegreat irony: the Openness of the internet made Facebook possible,
but that Openness is now a threat and Facebook is graduallyrendering the internet Closed.
As an example of a better way, let’s have a look at the operationof music streaming and how it might be operated to the benefitof a far wider public – an entire nation at a time.

7
Music to our Ears

The music-streaming service Spotify, founded in Sweden in 2006,
enables users to listen to songs over the internet, one after theother, without downloading them. By 2017 it had more than 150
million customers. When describing Spotify it is usual to call it a“streaming” service, but streaming is actually a sideshow, even a
gimmick. How, though, does streaming work? Strictly, it meansthat the information that constitutes the songs is sent to the user
in a continuous “stream” rather than having to be downloaded
before it is played. The importance of this distinction is that users
never have the whole song; they have only the part they needto play at this second. In many ways, it is very similar to radio.
Your radio plays only an instantaneous part of the broadcast
as it receives it. You can’t go back and listen to earlier parts,
or receive the whole broadcast and play it when you like. It’s
obvious, of course, why radio works this way: radio waves arebeing broadcast to everyone, and radios originally did not havebuilt-in means of recording and then playing back.
Spotify, though, is streaming over the internet where no such
limitations apply. It is not broadcasting: music is sent to eachindividual user. So why not allow each user to download themusic, or at least to pause or skip tracks at will (which would
be trivial to implement)? There are two answers. Technically,
streaming has the advantage that users do not need to wait for
the whole track to download before beginning to listen – they
can start listening the moment the first chunk of the track arrives.

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the open revolution

But this is a very limited advantage. It would be easy enoughto queue songs for download in the background instead, so thateach was ready as the previous one finished. And there is notechnical problem that prevents users from pausing, skipping or
keeping copies of tracks to listen to later. The reason for theserestrictions is the law of copyright.
Once digital music became available in the form of CDs andthe internet had decent bandwidth, the natural thing was toput the music on the internet and let people listen to what theywanted. They could listen for free, because by using peer-to-peer
distribution users could simply download it from one another.
And this is what people immediately started doing, most famously
using the free platform Napster. But in 2001 a court decision in
the US declared Napster illegal, on the basis that although it was
not hosting any content itself, it was enabling massive copyright
infringement by its users, who were downloading and listening
to music without payment or permission.
The next generation of companies, such as Spotify and Last.fm,
learnt their lesson. Whilst it would have been easier for themto make systems that simply let users download whatever theywanted, they went out of their way to limit this and to make their
online services like radio. Why? Because radio has special legal
status with respect to copyright, thanks to decades of negotiation and law-making that has led to an accommodation between
broadcasters and copyright holders such as recording companies.
Radio stations have blanket licences from “collecting societies”,
which permit them to broadcast music without obtaining a licencefor each piece they play. The collecting societies then dividethat pot of money amongst the copyright holders, roughly inproportion to airtime.1
1 The situation varies from country to country. In the US, broadcasters pay
the composers of the songs but don’t have to pay performers. The two
copyrights have been distinct since the second was created in 1972, andthe exemption is largely due to the power of the broadcasting lobby at
the time. Its argument was that broadcasters provide a valuable service
for performers by promoting their recordings on the airwaves. The
recording companies clearly believe so, because they have spent large

music to our ears

43

When streaming began, therefore, the companies reasoned
that if they could offer consumers something sufficiently similar
to radio, they too could avoid negotiating individual licensing
deals and instead use a blanket licence from the collecting society.
Without that, streaming would have been nearly impossible, andso Spotify, Last.fm and the others deliberately compromised theirproducts by, for example, limiting the number of times a user
could skip tracks in a 24-hour period.
Then, once they had started building a user-base and taking
money from investors, they negotiated with individual musiclabels and artists for licences, so that they could start charging
users for options such as choosing their own tracks or downloading music to listen to at any time (though Spotify does not haverights to several major artists including Taylor Swift because thecopyright-holders think its royalties are too low).2
Even the premium version has limitations, however. For example, Spotify is more like a rental service than a retailer: if you
stop subscribing to its pay service, you lose access to all the music
you have downloaded, which is a considerable incentive to go
on paying. This restriction arises both from Spotify’s agreementswith the labels and from its own interests. You cannot simply
download all the tracks you want and then cancel your subscription. As one user notes, Spotify’s premium service is addictive.
Once you are hooked, it is hard to leave: “I lasted two months
and wound up going back to premium: $9.99 is not that much fora crack addiction.”With no fee per track and no limitation on use, this all-youcan-eat buffet is a prototype for how one aspect of the Openworld would operate. Money would of course have to be collected
somehow to fund it, but instead of ten dollars a month to Spotify,
this could be a special fee incorporated in your taxes or added toyour internet or mobile bill. This money would then be distributed
according to usage, through remuneration rights fees.
amounts of money, sometimes illegally, to get prominent stations to playtheir artists’ records.
2 The Beatles were the most famous hold-out from streaming audio platforms but since 2016 most of their catalogue is now available.

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the open revolution

Suppose the Netherlands had made the transition to Openness.
Every recording ever made anywhere would then be Openly
available within the Netherlands, but with an electronic wall toprevent people in other countries accessing them (at least until
those countries also became Open). Any Dutch citizen would be
at liberty to listen to, share or remix any recording or composition.
To pay for this, the government might, for instance, add a small
charge to the data plan of everyone’s phone. Unlike Spotify’s fee,
this would be very low.
How low? Well, let’s examine how much it would take to
pay creators as much or more than they receive today. Currently,
the total revenue for music in the Netherlands is around €150m ayear. Of this, probably less than 60% goes to creators, but let’s err
on the generous side and suppose that all of it does. With some
15 million adults in the Netherlands, a fixed fee per adult to pay
for all current use of recorded music would be €10 per person
per year. At 85¢ a month, this is less than a tenth of Spotify’s €10
a month. If the levy were payable only by people with internet
subscriptions, the charge would be around €1.75 a month perconnection.
Whatever the method to raise the funds for the music industry, there could be several mechanisms for allocating them, which
could themselves be combined. Given the importance of individual taste in artistic judgments, they would be weighted differently.
Here is a suggested allocation:• Remuneration rights – say 80% of the funding for music –would be issued for both compositions and recordings, andwould entitle each holder to a share of the remuneration rights
fund. This would be allocated in approximate proportion to
usage of works. A legal and administrative framework forthis is already in general use in the industry. For example,
composers provide automatic fixed fee licences to recording
artists, and collecting societies administer collective licensing
for performances to commercial users such as shops, bars andnightclubs. In the Open world, the overwhelming bulk of funding would be distributed this way. One possible change, which

music to our ears

45

has already been pioneered by some collecting societies, would
be to make distribution progressive, reducing the proportion
paid to the very biggest stars so as to pay more to those earningless, in order to support the up-and-coming and experimental.
• Traditional expert-selected grant funding – say 10% – would
be allocated up-front to particular artists or organizations tocreate new pieces and recordings. This would be similar to
the work of existing public arts programs around the world,though it would cover information-production but not live
performance.
• User-choice (the “Kickstarter” or “X-Factor” model) – say 10%– would allow some active consumer-choice in the allocation offunding to particular artists, projects or even general policies(supporting blues artists, for instance). Artists would propose
projects, such as an album or new song, with a budget. Citizens would each be allocated “voting dollars” with which they
could support such projects (with unused dollars being allocated proportionally). This would give the public some control
over up-front funding, and has similarities to crowdfunding
schemes such as Kickstarter or audience-voting on shows suchas X-Factor.
So, you could have an Open music system in the Netherlands
and pay artists more than they receive now, for less than the costof a bus ride each month, or a even bottle of water. Perhaps thelevy could be put on water in plastic bottles!
Just how great are the benefits of increased access and use? It’s
impossible to say precisely. How much additional usage would
there be; and what is the value of a child having the chance tohear Beethoven’s Ninth or a grandmother dancing to the hits ofher youth? Yet there are ways to calculate a rough monetary value,
and the best and most recent estimate comes from a team led byProfessor Bernt Hugenholtz at the Institute for Information Law
at Amsterdam University, which carried out a study from 2012
to 2015. Their results indicated that a move to an Open musicmodel using an alternative compensation system would create
extra value of the order of €600 million a year for Dutch society

46

the open revolution– more than four times the entire annual revenue of the nation’srecording industry.3
Even this almost certainly underestimates the benefits, because
it does not include other gains from reducing or eliminating costsin the current inefficient system. For example, there are all thelegal costs of traditional licensing, the enforcement costs for rightsholders in suing infringers, trying to prevent file-sharing, and soforth. Exclusion is key to private monopolies, and the wasted
opportunity turns into a waste of money. Users who are excluded
will often try to get round the paywall, for instance by asking
friends who subscribe to the service to stream it to them in turn,or to download and share it. Since this would reduce its poolof potential customers, Spotify does various things to restrict theservice – even, one could say, to cripple it. In particular, it uses
Digital Rights Management (DRM), which encrypts all the music
it sends to you so that only you can play it. Users cannot play
the music through whatever application they like, and are able tocopy it only to another device with a Spotify app. Spotify thenhas to spend time and money defending the DRM against people
who want to hack or disable it, and suing anyone who does.4
All in all, it spends a lot of time and money implementing andmaintaining a system the purpose of which is to make its service
less useful.
Such elaborate digital obstructions are not unique to music.
They take many forms. They range from restrictions on which
BBC programmes are freely accessible (having, of course, been
paid for by the British public) and when, and where, to digital
3 Going Means Trouble and Staying Makes it Double: The Value of Licensing
Recorded Music Online by Christian Handke, Bodo Balazs and JoanJosep Vallbé in Journal of Cultural Economics 22 May 2015. Project
website: https://www.ivir.nl/projects/copyright-in-an-age-of-accessalternatives-to-copyright-enforcement/ (last accessed Mar 2018).
4 The shortcomings of DRM were precisely and comically skeweredby Cory Doctorow in 2004, in a talk at Microsoft Research. As
he points out, a dubious aspect of DRM and anti-circumvention
technology is that it enables companies to impose new restrictions
on the use of information which have no basis in copyright law.
http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

music to our ears

47

watermarks, paywalls around newspapers and complex login
procedures for the Oxford English Dictionary. Self-sabotaging
technology, made to prevent the very thing that the digital world
does supremely well – costless copying – is now an industry worth
hundreds of millions of dollars, and people are spending entire
careers contriving ever-more byzantine means to frustrate andinfuriate the rest of us. It’s a superb example of mankind wasting
its time. In an Open system these costs would be much reducedor entirely eliminated. (Some people will say that these costs pay
for the jobs of technologists, bureaucrats and lawyers, but if thesejobs don’t need to be done, they are unproductive, and freeing
these people to work productively can itself benefit the economy).

Moreover, the Amsterdam figures for the Netherlands probably understate the benefits because they focus solely on accessand do not consider potential benefits related to creativity andcultural freedom. With unfettered access to what has been done
before, there is more to inspire potential artists – more material
for them to build upon – and society is enriched.
Reuse is frequent and important in music. Performers playworks composed by others, and composers borrow and elaborate
the work of previous artists, increasingly directly these days withthe growth of sampling in genres such as hip-hop. Reuse fitsnaturally within the Open framework. As we have seen, anyone
would be free to build upon the work of others, but would thenbe liable to pay a proportion of their own remuneration rights
payments (or other revenues) to those whose work they reused.
The major difference from today’s copyright regime would
be that reuse would be easier and more fluid, because rather
than a monopoly right, music labels and creators would have
remuneration rights. The moral rights that copyright provides for
credit and recognition (or attribution) would be retained in thismodel, so that artists would continue to have the right to havetheir work credited wherever it was used or reused.
This new remuneration rights approach could also mean direct
benefits in terms of more resources to fund new recordings, which

48

the open revolutionmeans more music to enjoy. This would depend on how theadditional €600 million in value was divided. One option would
be to keep payments to music labels and creators at an inflationadjusted figure equivalent to the current €150m a year, and tochannel the additional €600m in value to users. This would mean
Dutch citizens paying less than €1 a month but gaining €35 amonth in value.
An alternative would be to allocate some of this additional
value to record labels and artists. For example, if people wereprepared to pay a fee of €3 a month (and some might like tocontribute more voluntarily), the money going to artists andrecord labels could be increased more than three times – a hugeamount – whilst consumers would still receive more than €30 ofextra benefit. So the Open music model could have huge benefits
both for citizens and for artists and record labels: more artists
being paid to make more music that anyone can listen to, at any
time, in any way they want.

7.1 Do we need an Open model? Isn’t Spotify
sufficient?
But do we really need government to put in place a levy, or can
we leave private companies like Spotify to sort this out?
Spotify is quasi-Open, and consumers evidently like its flatfee, unlimited-access model. Yet it has its drawbacks, such as adeveloping monopoly in commercial hands and the lack of universal access. Moreover, it will never be in Spotify’s commercial
interest to price at a level that gives access to everyone. It is therefore offering a more limited service to both artists and listeners
than an Open system would.
Spotify will never provide access to everyone because users
differ in their willingness to pay for the service. Some people
would pay a lot for it, because they value it very highly – or simply
have lots of money. Others are happy to pay a modest amount,and some can or will only pay a little either because music doesn’t
matter much to them or they don’t have the cash. Spotify, however,music to our ears

49

struggles to tell which is which and has to set a single pricefor everyone. And a for-profit company like Spotify will neverset a price that maximizes access for users. This is because atsome point, though lowering the price would bring Spotify morecustomers, it would not bring enough of them to compensate forthe fall in income from each of the existing subscribers. Thus, aprivate monopoly almost guarantees exclusion of a substantial
number of potential users.5 The Open music model solves thisproblem by giving universal service and allowing a thousand
services to flourish.
At root, platform owners have different interests to the users
and artists: open platforms with competition may be great forusers and artists, but a monopoly platform is more attractive to investors. Furthermore, a platform like Spotify has strong incentives
to use its power to shape the development of the ecosystem inways that preserve and enhance its grip. In particular, it will want
to restrict or kill off innovations or developments that threaten its
monopoly – a monopoly which if unchecked will give it power
not only over music-listening but over artists and record labels,
and over technological innovation related to music access anddiscovery.
The Open model would not be a proprietary platform taking
advantage of artists and users, but a neutral platform democratically overseen, mediating between users and suppliers, setting
the rules, levying the charges and setting them to optimize theoutcome for society as a whole, including users and creators.
There’s no need for the government to set up its own Spotify.
There is no need for the state to operate a streaming service or
create apps for your phone or store your playlists. All it would do
5 The same is true on the supply side of the market, where Spotify pays
for the recordings it streams. If it had a monopoly, it would be in aneven more powerful position when negotiating with record labels andartists, and would push down prices. This would mean fewer recordings
being made, to the general detriment. Record labels and artists alreadyworry about the power of platforms like Spotify, and a monopoly would
multiply that power. Instead, producers should support an Open musicmodel, ensuring that artists have more outlets, more exposure, and abetter deal with more bargaining power in the long term.

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the open revolution

is establish a standardized, automatic, blanket-licensing regime,
under which any firm could set up a service to provide music byoffering the playlists and the apps. Unlike Spotify today, theseproviders would be mediating as technical distributors only, notas legal distributors. They would not negotiate licensing. In otherwords, in the Open music model what the state would provide
is a universal legal protocol for the licensing of music. Not only
would this provide universal access to music and a better deal
for artists it would also enable innovation in the search for new
technical ways to deliver music to users. This Open legal protocol
would create a competitive market of music service providers
in just the way that our Open internet protocols have created acompetitive market of internet service providers (the companies
we all rely on to connect us).
This is not a programme of nationalization. State-sponsoredmonopolies can be terrible, combining the disadvantages of a
private monopoly with an added strata of bureaucracy. In thiscase, the state’s role would be that of promoting competition. It
was states which granted copyright monopolies in the first place;
if they now introduce blanket compulsory licences instead, and in
the process they will be diminishing those undesirable monopolies.
Anyone would be free to offer a new recording through any
channel they wished and earn a share of the remuneration fundproportionate to the number of plays of the music. Reciprocally,
the citizens would all be able to access music any time, anywherefrom anyone. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there would
be no restrictions to prevent building upon the licensing platform:
anyone could create a new business or a new kind of business
related to music. Not only would this stimulate innovation in techindustries directly concerned with writing, making and distributing music, it would have an indirect impact on quite different
industries, such as restaurants that play music or artificial intelligence startups that need music databases for their learningalgorithms.
The same applies equally to other media. Netflix would makejust as good an example. Like Spotify, it provides a fixed-price,
all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of film and television. Like Spotify,

music to our ears

51

it is a platform, with a huge stock-market valuation based on its
potential to become overwhelmingly dominant. Like Spotify, itdemonstrates how an Open model could work, in this case for film
and television. Just as in music there are collecting societies, in
television there are practical examples of how a state-coordinatedOpen model can work, albeit in slightly different form from the
remuneration rights approach proposed here. The BBC makes its
content freely available to UK citizens, almost all of whom pay alevy in the form of a TV license, and similar models for public
service broadcasters exist in many other countries (for example
Germany’s Rundfunkbeitrag). Yet as with music, the current
industry structure for film and television is inefficient, messy andprone to dominance by a single firm. But film and television
are an order of magnitude larger than music as businesses, andthe benefits we might reap from an Open model are accordingly
greater, running every year into billions of pounds (or euros ordollars) of increased value.
Initial funding for music in an Open world could begin atcurrent levels. Total revenues for the worldwide music industry
are around $15 billion, but estimates suggest only about 13%of this goes to artists, whereas roughly a quarter is invested
in marketing and promotion. In an Open world, artists would
generally receive a higher percentage but pay towards marketingof their own music. Suppose, for instance, that 40% of today’s
revenues were to go to artists. The funding necessary to replace
income from monopoly rights would then be around $6 billion ayear globally, with the lion’s share coming from the US and EU(each around a third of the global music market) and from Japan(18%).
This revenue could be raised by governments by several methods. If done through general taxation, it would amount to lessthan a dollar a month per person in the US. Alternatively, forexample, there could be a levy on digital devices that play or store
music. With 264 million internet and mobile data plans in the US
in 2015, the addition to each bill would be $0.62 per month.
A more novel approach would be to tax online advertising.
Many major online businesses, especially those that use content

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the open revolution

are heavily funded by advertising. For example, Google, whichmakes almost all of its money from advertising, relies heavily on
the use of content freely from others. YouTube consists of videos
and music provided by others, and its search engine would beof little value without access to all of the content on the web, via
Google. Similarly, Facebook’s revenue comes almost entirely fromadvertising, but its audience is attracted by content from the users
themselves. At present, only a tiny proportion of all these monies
are paid to the creators; almost none of Google’s search engine
advertising revenue reaches them, and even YouTube, which
has a revenue-sharing agreement, pays only a small proportionof its revenue to rights-holders. So a tax on online advertising
revenues to fund Open information goods is attractive on groundsof fairness and as a transparent means of benefiting artists andrights-holders.

8
How the Secret of Life Almost Stayed Secret

26 June 2000. In Washington and London Bill Clinton and Tony
Blair announce the release of the first complete draft of the humangenome – our shared genetic code. The achievement is comparedto the moon landings or even the invention of the wheel. Missing
from the announcement, and much of the coverage, was one key
fact. That the genome – nature’s ultimate database – would be“open”, publicly and freely available for anyone to look at and use,be they researcher, startup company or school-child.
Nor did the coverage make clear how close a call it had
been, how very near we had come to having a “closed” genome,
controlled and owned by a single private company who would
have limited access to those who paid – and would agree to keep
the information closed so as to preserve the monopoly.
And this matters: the human genome is a 3 billion long stringof letters that provide the recipe for how to make a human being,from proteins to cells to an entire living, breathing being. The
database has immense value to science and medicine, it enables
us to locate and understand genes and may hold the key totreatments for everything from cystic fibrosis to cancer.
The genome being “open” means that as many minds as
possible can set about the work of deciphering, analysing, using
and improving. Its being Open rather than Closed has accelerated
research and stimulated innovation, already saving lives andgenerating billions of dollars’ worth of social and private value. In
2013, economists estimated that opening this information to all has

54

the open revolution

resulted in a 20-30% increase in subsequent research and productdevelopment. And beyond any purely economic considerations,
it is obviously appropriate that our common genetic code, sharedby every human being, should itself be shared by all. To haveallowed it to be owned by a single monopoly provider would
have been a travesty.
The human genome is one of the greatest open information
projects yet seen. It shows that making information open isboth possible and desirable. Public, open information has proved
better: it has fewer costs, produces faster results, and has delivered
greater value to society. And the genome project was not small:several hundred million dollars of public and charitable funding
were needed to make it happen. Anyone who has doubts that
open information can be created effectively and efficiently at scaleneed only look at this example for assurance.
The open genome is also a microcosm for all publicly fundedscience and research, a cumulative enterprise that stretches fromthe Royal Society in 17th-century London to the present-day National Institute of Health in the US. As a whole, the scientificenterprise is almost certainly the greatest producer of new information – new knowledge – of all time, and openness is at its
very heart. Although it has recently suffered some corruption(notably from proprietary publishers and a creeping pressure tocommercialise), publicly funded science remains dedicated to theopen creation and sharing of information. The very essence of
science is “publication”: the sharing of the results of research withother scientists and the community at large. Openness is central
to the cumulative and collaborative nature of science. As Isaac
Newton knew, each scientist stands on the shoulders of those whowent before.

8.1 The Secret of LifeOn 28 February 1953 Francis Crick stood up in the Eagle pub on
Benet Street in Cambridge and shouted “we’ve found the secretof life”. Whether any of his fellow drinkers that lunchtime knew

how the secret of life almost stayed secret

55

what he meant, history does not relate. But today we do: hemeant that he and his colleague James Watson, had discovered
the structure of DNA, the substance within the cells of all animals,
including humans, that carries the genetic code.
This is the coding for every cell in our body, determining
everything from the colour of our hair to the functioning of ourkidneys. Watson and Crick had shown that it takes the form of
two long sequences of four bases or “letters” – A, C, G, T – woven
together in a double helix. (The sequence of 3 billion bases is solong that if you scaled up DNA to the width of a cotton thread,
it would extend for nearly 200km.) Within this sequence there
are much shorter strings of letters that form the recipe for eachprotein, and these substrings are called “genes”. Within the DNA
sequence, there are millions of genes, separated by chunks of“junk” DNA – junk because it does not do anything (or, at least,
we don’t yet know what it does). Genes encode every protein weneed and from the proteins they build all the cells in our bodies.
The discovery of the structure of DNA, in the Cavendish
Laboratory in Cambridge, opened vast new horizons for the world.
Watson and Crick knew that to work out the full sequence of DNA
would mean having the full code of life itself. That sequence, anda map of the genes within it, would be the basis for understanding
aspects of biology and medicine as crucial as the basic nature ofevolution and the sources of genetic diseases. It would enable
scientists to study the mechanisms of cell differentiation, anddiscover how it is that cells which all contain the same DNA canspecialise to do different tasks within the body. For example
some become liver cells and clean the blood, while others become
part of the eye and enable us to see. If we can understand thisdifferentiation we will be able to work out how to grow new cellsof any kind to heal or replace parts of the body that have become
worn out or damaged.
So from the moment Watson and Crick announced their discovery in a paper in Nature in 1953, the chase was on to sequence
our DNA. However, scientists knew it would not be straightforward. Though the structure had been guessed, there was still no
way to examine or read the individual letters. Moreover, even if

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the open revolution

the sequence had been known, how DNA functioned and how
genes actually create a living organism remained mysteries.
Publication of Watson and Crick’s paper told scientists thatsequencing would be possible, but it would be nearly fifty years
before, in June 2000, the International Human Genome Sequence
Consortium announced the first working draft of the full human
genetic code – and that it would be open to all.
In its final stages, however, the sequencing had become arace between two competing models. On one side were publicly
funded scientists committed to producing an open genome available to all. On the other, was Celera Genomics, a private company
who sought proprietary control over the genome together withpatents over its valuable genes.

8.2 Reading the CodeDuring the 1970s, the British biochemist Fred Sanger had invented
the first practical method of reading the letters in a sequence ofDNA. Using this, he and his team had for the first time readthe sequence of an entire organism, the bacteriophage phiX174,
which they had selected because the entire genome was only
5000 letters long. Their technique involves splitting the DNA intofragments, “cloning” them to create lots of copies, performing
complex chemical reactions to sequence the fragments, and thenpainstakingly joining them back together in sequence. This earned
Sanger a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980, andessentially the same technique is still used by sequencers today.
To begin with, each operation was done by hand, and readinga few thousand letters took years, but with the passage of time thetechnology improved, and by the mid 1980s people were startingto talk about sequencing much larger organisms – even humans.
In 1986, at a conference in Santa Fe convened by the US Officeof Health and Environmental Research, the Harvard researcher
Walter Gilbert estimated that the entire human code could beread for $1 per letter (or $3 billion for the whole genome), and becompleted by the mid 2000s. Both estimates were considered opti-

how the secret of life almost stayed secret57

mistic given the state of the technology, and there was significant
opposition to spending so much on a single project. However, twoimportant forces were converging, the technological feasibility ofthe enterprise and a growing interest in biological “big science” bymajor funders. The human genome was an ambitious, headlinegrabbing project that journalists could understand, and the sortof ego-boosting achievement that politicians and billionaires liketo be associated with. It was just the kind of project that could
attract the vast sums needed to get the job done.
In 1989, Congress approved the funds. Formally establishedthe following year, the Human Genome Project had a target ofcompletion by 2005 and was led by James Watson himself. Other
countries were also active, including Japan, France and the UK.
In fact the UK, despite its relatively small size was to play aleading role in what followed, largely thanks to John Sulston
and his group at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology inCambridge.

8.3 Of Worms and Men
Sulston is one of those characters whom it would be difficult
to make up. He once spent a year and a half looking downa microscope twice a day for four hours at a stretch in orderto perform real-time tracking of cell division in the embryos ofnematode worms. He is passionate about science as a higher
calling – not about fame or money, but as an open and sharedenterprise dedicated to developing a better understanding of ourworld. Humble, dedicated, and replete with glasses, generous
beard (and occasionally sandals), he is the textbook other-worldly
scientist. Two years after receiving the Nobel Prize in 2002, he
was invited to speak in Geneva about openness in science. The
organizers were short of funds because of the price of the local
hotels, so to help out, Sulston happily volunteered to stay in thelocal youth hostel. And yet, unworldly though he might look,
Sulston has a fierce determination and unsuspected political andmanagerial capabilities that would prove essential in the years

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the open revolution

ahead as the genome project grew in size, complexity and urgency.
By 1990, he had dedicated nearly a quarter of a century to
studying the genetics and developmental biology of the nematodeworm. Crucially, for the past five years he had been creating a“map” of its genome. His group was one of the two leading thisfield, with the other being led by his close colleague Bob Waterson
at Washington University in St Louis. It may seem odd, but thismeant they were well positioned to take prominent roles in therace for the human genome.
The humble nematode worm seems a long way from a human.
Yet to do something big like the human genome, you need tostart small and build up. The nematode worm had been studied
intensively for 30 years precisely because it was one of a few
perfect “prototype” animals: it was manageably simple, with only
579 cells and a genome of “only” 100 million letters, and yet it
was complex enough to have a rudimentary nervous system andbehaviours of much more complex animals including humans.
Thus, it had become one of a few “stepping stone” species on
the path to sequencing the human genome. Not only would its
genome be valuable in its own right, but the technology andexpertise needed could be directly re-applied to human DNA.
So in 1990, as the Human Genome Project began, Watson
invited Sulston and Bob Waterson to take part. At the time, thelargest genome ever sequenced was the human cytomegalovirus,
which had taken five years to do and had fewer than 300,000
bases. But Sulston, Waterson and Crick quickly agreed the highly
ambitious goal of sequencing the worm’s three million bases – tentimes as many – at a cost of $4.5m in just three years.
They came in ahead of target and on budget. A great part ofthis achievement was the availability of the new ABI automatedsequencing machine made by the company Applied Biosystems.
First available in prototype in 1987, this was already orders ofmagnitude faster than the laborious sequencing by hand. Relative
to what came later, the machines were still slow and expensive– several hundred thousand dollars each – but they were thebeginning of an advance that has continued to this day. Since 1990
the cost of sequencing per base has dropped a hundred million

how the secret of life almost stayed secret59

times, from one million dollars per megabase (million bases) to
one cent.
The involvement of Applied Biosytems highlighted the accelerating interest in genomics shown by commercial, venture-capitalbacked companies. Aided by the growing willingness of the US
patent office and courts to permit patents both for genes and generelated information, more and more capital flowed in. During thelate 1980s, this interest was still fairly muted, and when Walter
Gilbert, who had shared the 1980 Nobel Prize with Sanger, set up
a private “Genome Corporation” in 1987, his colleagues had been
shocked. (The company perished in the stock market crash of thesame year.) Soon after the Human Genome Project began in 1990,
though, gene mapping and sequencing experienced something ofa gold-rush, and by 1992-93, activity was growing rapidly.
Most notable was intervention in 1992 of Craig Venter. For theprevious decade he had worked at a research institute funded by
the American government’s National Institute of Health. There
he had been an early user of automated sequencing machines. A
lot of his work had focused on sequencing short, 200-base strandsof DNA at the end of genes (known as “expressed sequencestags”). In 1991 he had strongly advocated patenting of these. Thisidea, however, had led to conflict within the Institute of Health– and with Jim Watson, who strongly opposed patents on lowlevel genetic information because of their impact on research andaccess.
Ambitious and frustrated with what he felt was a lack ofsupport for his approach within the NIH, Venter quit in 1992 and,with $70m of venture capital from an investment company run byWallace Steinberg, set up of The Institute for Genomic Research.
This intended to pursue an alternative approach to genome sequencing, focusing on expressed sequences tags and what weretermed “shotgun” methods. While Venter’s was a non-profit institute and he and his team planned to publish their work, there wasa catch: Steinberg wasn’t investing out of philanthropy. In parallelto Venter’s institute, Steinberg would establish a commercial company, Human Genome Sciences, in which Venter and colleagues
would hold shares and which would have exclusive access to all

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the data (including the precious expressed sequences tags) for six
months, extendable to twelve months if the information looked
valuable. Even after that, while academic scientists could see
the data, Human Genome Sciences would retain “reach-through”
rights to any further commercial developments. The company
was an almost immediate success: doing a deal to sell special access to the data to the pharmaceutical giant SmithKline Beecham
for $125 million and making Venter and his backers millionaires
overnight.
For the public researchers like Sulston, this approach was ofgrave concern. With its high technology needs, sequencing thewhole human genome would cost billions of dollars to complete.
With their deep pockets, commercial interests might well be able
to outspend publicly funded efforts, and so make the genome
data private, locking it up and limiting or denying access to others.
Sulston and Waterson, as the most successful sequencers in theworld, had already been courted by private firms, and now theysaw commercial interests in the US applying increasing politicalpressure for public funding to be cut off, so that the field would
be left free to private for-profit concerns.

8.4 A Wellcome Arrival
At this crucial moment, an unexpected white knight appeared.
It took the form of the Wellcome Trust. The Trust was formed
in 1936 on the death of Sir Henry Wellcome, a pharmaceuticalentrepreneur and tycoon. Wellcome bequeathed the Trust all of
his shares in his company Wellcome Foundation, later Wellcome
plc, then Glaxo Wellcome which was finally absorbed into GlaxoSmithKline. Initially, the Trust had grown fairly slowly, but it
benefited enormously from the rise in the stock market in the
1980s, which had been especially steep for pharmaceutical companies. Then it had received a particular boost from the successof anti-HIV drug AZT, which was owned by Glaxo Wellcome.
In 1992 the Trust had sold some of its shares and become thewealthiest private medical research charity in the world. Its an-how the secret of life almost stayed secret

61

nual budget doubled from £100m to £200m a year ($350m in 1992
and nearly $1bn in today’s money).
This could not have happened at a better time, since 1992
was the crunch year for the Human Genome Project. Not only
was there the growing threat from the proprietorial commercial
players, but the end of the project’s initial three-year grant waslooming in 1993. The issue was especially acute for Sulston andhis team at the Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge.
They were powerfully aware that they were already stretching thelimited funds available from the Medical Research Council, whosebudget was a fraction of the billions that the National InstituteHealth in the US had at its disposal. But suddenly, the UK had afunder with deep pockets, and it was private, which mattered fortwo crucial reasons: it was (largely) immune to political pressure
and it could move much faster than any public-sector funder withall the constraints of reviews, checks and government approval.
Sulston went to Wellcome for funding. In just a few months
the Trust reached a decision, and in the summer of 1992 it agreed
to commit £40-50m over five years to his group, not only tocontinue its work on the worm, but to accelerate its work on thehuman genome. Included in the grant was support to create an
entirely new campus just outside Cambridge, to be called theSanger Center.
Even better, the Wellcome grant spurred action in other quarters. Put on its mettle by the Wellcome grant, Britain’s Medical
Research Council responded in June 1993 by committing morethan it ever had before: £10m over five years to complete theworm sequence. Just three years before, there was funding only
to do 3% of the worm genome over three years; now the target
was to complete the remaining 97% in the next five years andwork on the human genome at the same time. Wellcome’s grant
spurred action in the US, where the National Institute of Healthalso increased its funding to Bob Waterson’s lab.
With this new funding, the whole process scaled up andbecame industrialised. Sanger soon had more than 200 people
running dozens of sequencing machines twenty-four hours a day,seven days a week. Ambitions grew as to what was possible.

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And as the worm wriggled forward and technology improved,
attention began to turn to the human genome – the holy grail, butwhich was thirty times larger and more expensive than the worm’s,
and much more complex because of the greater proportion ofrepetitions in its sequence.
Still uncertain as to what could be achieved and in what timescale, Waterson flew to Cambridge to visit Sulston in the autumn
of 1994. On his way home, he came up with what he termed an“indecent proposal”: to escalate human genome sequencing to 600
megabases a year, with the effort split three ways between his
own lab, Sulston’s and a third to be identified. At this scale theywould be able to sequence at 10 cents per base (a tenth of the costestimated a decade earlier) and complete the sequence by 2001
for $300m.
It was a highly ambitious proposal. At this point, less than 1%of the human genome was sequenced and most of that consisted ofsmall fragments. Sequencing rates were less than a tenth of what
Waterson was proposing. And who would put up the money?
The proposal needed $60m a year for five years – an unheard of
sum in biology for a single project.
The proposal was also exciting, and a blueprint for what
was to come. But funders and the research community weredisappointingly slow and further disappointments were to come.
In 1996, Sulston finally submitted a new bid for funds jointly to
the Medical Research Council and Wellcome: £147m over sevenyears to complete his third of the genome. Unfortunately, the
MRC just did not have the money. Although Wellcome agreed toprovide half – £60m – the MRC would only continue its supportof £2m a year for five years.
With this level of funding Sulston would only be able to dohalf of what he wanted: one sixth rather than a third of the
genome. In the US, Bob Waterson had a similar experience, being
awarded only a quarter of what he asked for the next two years.
The plan was that the National Institute of Health would reevaluate progress in 1998, and make new grants only then. In
part, this was the result of politics and disagreements within the
research community.

how the secret of life almost stayed secret63

8.5 The Risks of Delay: the Saga of BRCA2
As a warning about the risks of any delay, scientists needed tolook no further than the saga then playing out around breast
cancer genes. In December 1990 Mary-Claire King at Universityof Berkeley California had identified a mutation of chromosome
17 (BRCA1) that was associated with a high risk of breast cancer.
Then, in the summer of 1994, Mike Stratton, at the University ofSurrey in the UK, identified a similar mutation, on chromosome
13 (BRCA2), which was also associated with a high risk of breast
cancer.
Knowing that Mormons kept excellent genealogical records,
which are a great resource when searching for genetically inherited disease risks, Stratton had been working with a colleague,Mark Skolnick, at the University of Utah. Skolnick had set up a
private company called Myriad Genetics specifically to look forcancer genes and then patent the genes and any associated tests
they could design. Stratton was aware of the existence of Myriad
and shortly before he located BRCA2 he asked Skolnick what
would happen if they did locate and clone it. Skolnick told himthat Myriad would patent it. But Stratton was deeply concerned.
As he stated later, it became clear to him that there was a clear
risk of a “conflict between the clinical and ethical imperatives andthe commercial imperatives” – between ensuring that patients
got the benefits of new tests and treatments derived from thisknowledge, and restricting access so as to charge high fees forany tests or treatments. “Myriad had a duty to service the needsof investors”, he said. “I realized I would have no influence on
how the discovery was used.”
Stratton ended his collaboration with Skolnick immediately
after identifying the location of the gene, but now he foundhimself racing the Utah lab to identify precisely the gene andclone it, because “locating” a gene is not the same as being able toisolate, clone and then sequence it, all of which are necessary toqualify for formal publication or for a patent application. Stratton
quickly enlisted the help of John Sulston and the Sanger Institute,and by November 1995 they had the sequence and rushed to64

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publish in Nature so that the data would be in the public domain
and unpatentable by Skolnick.
Unfortunately, despite Stratton’s efforts to keep the information secret even from close collaborators, somehow enough leakedout for Skolnick to be able to help his own team identify the geneand submit their patent application – just one day before Stratton’s
paper came out in Nature on 28 December 1995. Despite Stratton’sefforts to fight back, Myriad now claimed patents on both BRCA1and BRCA2, for although Skolnick had not discovered BRCA1,
his lab had been the first to clone it.
Successful in its applications, Myriad set up a lab to perform
tests, charging $2,500 per patient, and moved aggressively withlegal suits and threats against anyone else who sought to offer
tests more cheaply. Myriad restricted other labs to doing simpler,
less effective tests, for which they had to buy a license for several
hundred dollars per patient.
As Stratton bitterly said of the BRCA2 test, “Myriad is claiming a fee from all women who undergo tests in the United States
for a mutation that was discovered by us.” Stratton felt he now
had no choice but to try to secure some patents of his own –though only to use them defensively to fight back against Myriad.
These patents did turn out to be useful, but unfortunately onlyin Europe. For example, Britain’s NHS refused to license from
Myriad and instead carried out the tests itself using Stratton’s
publication and patents. In France, the Institut Curie, with thebacking of the French Government in September 2001, launched aformal objection to Myriad’s patent, and after a battle lasting several years the patents were struck down. Despite these victories,
however, Myriad was successful in the larger battle: worth over$3bn in 2015, it has made its founders very rich.

8.6 Back to the Genome
For Sulston and others in the public research community, themessage was clear. Almost every aspect of the discovery of the
BRCA genes had been publicly funded. Even Skolnick’s valuablehow the secret of life almost stayed secret

65

Mormon genealogical database had been largely funded by publicmonies when it started in the 1970s. Yet, a well-funded proprietary firm had jumped in at the last minute and claimed broadmonopoly rights that would not only limit future research but
would, through high prices and other restrictions, deny life-saving
diagnostics to patients around the world. This example of private
profiteering showed that it was essential to get the full humangenome into the public domain as soon as possible, so that no one
would be able to claim a similarly broad monopoly of low-level
genetic sequences.
Venter had not gone away, and soon the worst fears of Sulston
and his colleagues were realised. In 1998, the very year the publicconsortium planned to accelerate its efforts, Venter launched a newcompany: Celera Genomics. This had a single aim: to sequence
the human genome and exploit it financially. Launched without
warning at a major press blitz on 10 May 1998, just two days before
the annual meeting of the Human Genome Project, its message
was clear: the race was on. And Celera was a serious competitor,
backed by $300m from Applied Biosystems, the producers of
the sequencing machines themselves. Moreover, as a commercial
venture, its stance was clear: not only would it pursue patents on
any genes it identified, but the sequence would be released – if at
all – only after a delay and probably with restrictions on use. The
prospect of an open genome was facing the greatest of threats.
Venter and his colleagues skillfully played on the American
aversion to funding public efforts that might compete with private enterprise – an aversion that was especially strong in a
Congress controlled by Newt Gingrich’s Republicans. Venterand Celera had given an exclusive pre-briefing to Nicholas Wadeof the New York Times, whose piece on the day of the launch
stated: “Congress might ask why it should continue to finance thehuman genome project through the National Institute of Health. . . if the new company is going to finish first.” This was a
doubly brilliant attack on the public project not only insinuatingas fact that Celera would finish first but that public funding was
unnecessary and unjustified. Much more of the same was to comein the succeeding two years, with repeated claims that the private

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project would beat the public one. As Sulston ruefully observed
years later: “Craig was no longer in science, he was in business.
And the priority for a business is not scientific credibility but
share price and market penetration. Trying to get reporters toreport the admittedly more complex analyses . . . would be an
uphill battle. We were learning fast that we would have to play
the public relations game if we were to survive.”
Would funders lose faith and cancel their support for the
public effort, or (almost as bad) fail to increase their support sufficiently for the public effort to properly compete? At this crucial
moment, the Wellcome Trust once again came to the rescue. Bychance, on the Wednesday after Celera’s announcement, Sulston
had a meeting scheduled with the Wellcome Trust to seek more
funding. After an emotional plea for the importance of free genomic data, he waited anxiously outside for the Trust’s decision.
It was not long in coming: unanimous approval for a doubling infunding to £120m and full support for Sanger to take on a thirdof the genome by 2001.
In many ways, Venter and Celera’s aggressive approach backfired, as the Wellcome program officer reported: “Once the governors realized that Craig Venter’s initiative was essentially aprivatization of the genome . . . there was no risk they would pullout.” By the day of the meeting, he added, “everyone’s dander
was up . . . The governors just said: ‘We must do this.’ ”
It was a huge vote of confidence. Sulston and Michael Morganof the Wellcome Trust immediately got on a plane to fly to Cold
Spring Harbor to announce the good news to the Human Genome
Project conference.
On the Friday morning at Cold Spring, before a packed crowd,
Sulston and Morgan announced the Wellcome Trust’s doubling offunding and its commitment to a public, free, open genome. To
clarify the Trust’s motivation and commitment, Morgan addedthat it was opposed to the patenting of basic genomic information
and would fight such applications in the courts. The room erupted.
Everyone knew what this meant. Rather than the Human Genome
Project being dead – as many had feared on the Monday – theproject was suddenly stronger than ever. The pressure would now

how the secret of life almost stayed secret67

be on the US National Institute of Health to match the Wellcome’s
initiative, and it did, committing a further $81.6m in 1999 (plus$40m from the Department of Energy). The threat had brought
together this transatlantic community as never before.
The next two years would pass in a rush. Less than a year later,in February 1999, the leaders of the Human Genome Project met
in Houston and committed themselves to producing a “working
draft” of the genome by mid 2000, a year earlier than they hadplanned just six months earlier. The teams were working at fullpace. In 1999, Sanger aimed to sequence three times as much as
in 1998 – and more than in the whole of the seven years beforethat.
On 2 December 1999, the Human Genome Project announced
one of its first major successes: the publication in Nature of thecomplete sequence of an entire chromosome – chromosome 22.
The announcement included the discovery of 545 genes, morethan half of which were previously unknown. Chromosome
22 was also implicated in over thirty-five diseases, including
some forms of heart disease and leukaemia, so this was of major
benefit to medicine. By publishing the information openly, the
Human Genome Project ensured that none of the genes could
subsequently be patented, and that researchers in either the public
or private sector were free to start using it immediately, with noneed for licenses or risk of lawsuits.
But Celera showed no signs of easing off. In a tense conference
call on 29 December 1999, there was a showdown between thetwo sides. Taking part from Celera were Venter, Tony White (CEOof Applied Biosytems) and three other executives; on the publicside, Sulston and Waterson were joined by the director of the
National Institute of Health, Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus
and his colleague Francis Collins, and the Wellcome Trust’s Martin
Brobrow. During the meeting it became starkly clear that Celera
had no intention of publicly releasing data despite their statedcommitments on this front. Tony White of Celera wanted any
joint database to exclude commercial competitors for 3-5 years– an eternity in this fast moving field, and wanted the publicly
funded consortium to stop work as soon as there was a complete

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draft. This would have meant the publicly funded effort doing
most of the work and then stepping aside, leaving Celera control
with exclusive advance access to the joint database and all of theimmense commercial and scientific possibilities it opened up. It
was an aggressive demand and the public team flatly refused.
By now, any real hope of collaboration was dead, thoughFrancis Collins of the National Institute of Health, under immense
political pressure to collaborate with the private sector, would
continue to do all he could to build bridges. In March 2000,
after news leaked of Celera’s refusal to engage in meaningful
collaboration, the Washington Post said the project had become a“mud-wrestling match”.
Despite all the heat, there was some light. In response to thedebate, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair issued a joint statement thatthe human genome sequence should be freely available, at least
to researchers. Though the race was now nearing an end, thiswas valuable affirmation of the public, open approach and helped
close out any risk of last minute compromise.
Nevertheless, with an election looming, Clinton was anxious
to resolve what could be a damaging public-private conflict. So,
despite hugely unequal contributions, when the moment came tomake the announcement on 26 June 2000, it was claimed a joint
victory by Celera and the Human Genome Project. In the WhiteHouse, Clinton was flanked by Venter on one side and Francis
Collins on the other in a symbolic show of unity.
It only remained to compare the work of the two groups.
Celera had always had the benefit of full access to the public
team’s data, which was released daily, whereas Celera had notreleased its own data at all (despite initial promises to release
it quarterly). By the time of the White House announcement,each claimed to have a complete working draft of the humangenome. Joint papers were planned for February 2001 in thejournal Science. Each side would publish its sequence for the
first time. But before publication, a controversy broke out as it
became clear that Celera would not release its data into a public
database. This is a standard requirement for publication in thiskind of journal, since it is essential to allow for full scrutiny andhow the secret of life almost stayed secret69

reuse by the academic community. Nonetheless, in the face ofvociferous protests, Science agreed to bend its rules, whereupon
participants in the Human Genome Project unanimously agreed
to withdraw from Science and instead publish in Nature.
Finally, a few days before the official release of the papers, on
Monday 12 February 2001, the two sides exchanged their papers.
For the first time the public team could read Celera’s results. The
experience was shocking. As John Sulston wrote: “We had fully
expected their sequence to be better than ours, given that they
had access to all our data and we knew they were using it. But
they were publishing a sequence that seemed overall no better
than the publicly released sequence, and which depended heavily
on it.” He believed that Celera would have had no draft genome
at all without the public project, and concluded that its “chancesof ever having a fully finished sequence would have been very
slim indeed.”
Further analysis bore this out. A year later, one of the world’s
leading experts wrote that Celera had been dependent on the
public data in three different ways, and that “even with the publicdata, what Celera calls whole-genome assembly was a failure by
any reasonable standard: 20% of the genome is either missing
altogether or is in the forms of 116,000 small islands of sequencethat are unplaced, and for practical purposes, unplaceable.”
Two myths remain: first, that Celera’s sequence was more costeffective even though less accurate; second, that the competition
from Celera was ultimately beneficial for science – for example,
because it caused those “go-slow” scientists to pick up their pace.
However, neither claim is correct: later analysis showed that noneof the savings that Celera’s methods were intended to deliver
were realised, and that the duplication of work meant that theoverall costs were significantly higher than necessary. And on the
public side, the need to compete meant going faster than would
have been optimal, leading to some major inefficiencies which
eventually increased the total cost. When the publicly funded
team had to shift to producing a “draft sequence” of reduced
quality, it postponed the production of a higher quality sequence– and may even have been putting its eventual achievement at

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risk, because funding might have fallen away once the project wasannounced as “complete”.
Ultimately, we cannot know precisely the impact of this scientific race. But what we do know is that the public team produced
a far higher quality sequence – indeed really the only sequence– at approximately the same cost as the private project. Most
importantly, they produced a sequence that was publicly available
to all researchers, private, academic or commercial.
Almost from start to finish, the story of the discovery andsequencing of the human genome was one of openness and publicfunding. An open genome is one of mankind’s great scientificachievements, and provides a basis for future research and innovation. And it might not have been so.
We should leave the last word to John Sulston: “Deciphering
the information will take a long time and need every available
mind on the job. And so it is essential that the sequence is available to the whole biological community . . . When the commercial
company that became Celera Genomics was launched . . . thewhole future of biology came under threat. For one company wasbidding for monopoly control of access to the most fundamental
information about humanity, information that is – or should be– our common heritage.” He paid tribute to the public bodies
funding the Human Genome Project for deciding not to leave thefield to Celera, so that today any scientist anywhere can access thesequence freely and use the information to make his or her own
further discoveries. But as Sulston wrote, we should remember“how close we came to losing that freedom.”9
Meet Jamie Love

The establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1994 was
the most significant trade agreement of the 20th century. It had
three main parts. Two were classic trade agreements that sought
to remove barriers to trade, both in traditional physical goods(GATT) and in services (GATS). But the third agreement, TRIPS,
is quite different. TRIPS stands for Trade-Related aspects ofIntellectual Property Rights, but strangely this treaty said little
about trade. It was all about intellectual property rights – and the
expansion and enhancement thereof.
The justification offered for the inclusion of TRIPS was that bysigning the other two trade agreements, developed countries, andespecially the US and the EU, would be opening up their markets
to competition from lower-cost developing countries. Although
the developed countries would benefit from cheaper goods, thechange would have even more benefit for developing countries.
In return, developed countries wanted more. Their informationbased industries – from software to pharmaceuticals – were a large
and growing section of their economies, and whereas physicalgoods can be stopped at a border, it is almost impossible to erecttechnical barriers to the flow of that information. Once a piece ofsoftware is published, it can be copied by anyone; if the recipe
for a drug is published in one country, it can easily be copied inanother. So the developed countries wanted more “protection” fortheir information industries. The third component of this huge
free trade agreement therefore was a treaty dedicated to reducing

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the flow of information. As a result of TRIPS, for instance, India
had to introduce product patents for pharmaceuticals, and theUnited States modified and extended its copyright code.
Special interests such as the pharmaceutical lobby in the
United States had played a key role in drafting and promoting
TRIPS as part of the WTO package. The impact of this agreement
was immense, not only economically but on the framework ofglobal information, yet there was almost no public discussion.
How can this be?
The challenges of the modern world are exacerbated by theircomplexity and interconnections. Human beings struggle withthis. We want simple problems with simple solutions. But thecomplexity that confronts us and the rules that govern our world– and which shape and shift power – are practically opaque. Thisapplies not only to us, but to our representatives as well. Generalists in a sea of detail, they have no way of knowing, much of thetime, what the effects will be of what they are doing.
I remember watching the final vote on the Software Patents
directive in the European Parliament in 2005. On a voting day
there, each party produces a “voting list” instructing its MEPs how
to vote (and why) on each amendment that will come up (usually
there is not a single text but a proposed text and then a bunch ofamendments, each to be voted on). On this occasion the voting
list was over six hundred pages, and that was just one legislative
session. As you can imagine, most MEPs have no idea what they
are voting on and the ordinary citizens aren’t even aware thatthey are voting. This is not necessarily opacity by design (though
undoubtedly it can be useful and is manipulated for commercial
and political ends). The complexity of our legislation reflects thecomplexity of our world. After the financial crisis of 2008-9 the
US government responded with the Dodd-Frank Act. Not a single
person on earth understood it, or even read it, in full, since it runs
to nearly a thousand pages, with associated regulations that now
exceed 13,000 pages in length.
Unfortunately, complexity creates inequalities in power, above
all the power to influence the rules that run societies – rules which
in turn beget more power and influence. Concentrated interests,

meet jamie love73

usually corporate but also very wealthy individuals, are better
able to handle complexity than the rest of us. Not only do they
have the resources to buy teams to understand the issues andpresent a case, but they are better able to extend power throughtime and space: to send lobbyists hundreds or thousands of miles
to seats of power, and to pursue their interests persistently.
Complexity – and the interconnectedness that is part of it –has helped to centralize power ever further. Today, if you live in
the EU, it is likely that more than half of the laws and regulations
being made for you are from Brussels, not your national government, and meanwhile domestically over the past fifty years, power
has almost certainly shifted from local to the central government.
This is true all round the world, from Indonesia to Brazil.
Such centralization has the unintended consequence of moving rule-making away from voters both literally and metaphorically, making it easier for special interests to exert their influence.
It is easier for a corporation to have one large office of lobbyists
in Washington DC than an office in each of the fifty States of
the Union. For ordinary citizens, though, the opposite is true:
keeping up with and influencing decisions is much easier when
they are made on your doorstep.
Politicians and bureaucrats are charged to preserve and pursue the public interest on behalf of the electorate, but they struggle
to handle the growing complexity of the modern world, and find
it increasingly hard to resist outside interests even if they wish
to. This a fundamental challenge for modern democracy; but thisbigger question is not my focus, rather it is on the relation of thismind-boggling complexity to the regulation of information in thedigital age.
Digital technology is complex, fast-moving and fundamentally abstract. Unlike a child going hungry or a park being built
over, digital policy is not a visible or popular political cause. The
issues involved require value judgments, such as who should own
and control the cables that transport the bits the internet relies
upon, or changes in copyright law which subtly but significantly
change the distribution of money and influence between media
conglomerates, artists and the general public. And because digital74

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information involves enormous international networks, regulations are decided on a supra-national basis, often in remote andprivileged locations far from everyday political processes, such as
Geneva. The result is to reduce external scrutiny and to leave lawmaking to technocrats and corporate lobbyists with their special
interests.

Blue eyes, a kind face, a strong American accent. Until Jamie
Love speaks you can easily imagine him as an academic or bureaucrat – or even, given his smart appearance, a corporate executive.
But once you hear him speak, that changes. A passion, an anger
even, steams off him, and is evident, along with an incisive intelligence, in every word he says. It’s a passion forged by working
for years in obscurity on difficult issues in the front line of the“information wars”.
Starting in the mid-1990s, almost entirely alone, he madepilgrimages abroad to intervene in the meetings and deals where
the digital future was being carved up. Long before almost anyone
else, he realized that this was a special moment, when key rulesof the information age were being made. Almost no one else waswatching or reporting what was going on. Gradually, the fuss
he made, the speeches he gave and the articles he wrote alerted
others, and there is now a much wider appreciation of the issues,
though there is also more to fight for.
I first met Jamie in September 2004. Over the previous year or
so I had become interested in “information activism” and I wasjust acquainting myself with the area. Somehow I stumbled acrossan event that was taking place in Geneva. Most of the people
making the running seemed to be in the US, so it was exciting
to see them appearing in Europe, and the roster of speakers was
remarkable. The event was called “The Future of WIPO” andwas organized by something called the Consumer Project on
Technology (CPT), led by Jamie Love and his wife Manon Ress.
Blank about all this, I had to look up WIPO and CPT. The
World Intellectual Property Organization turned out to be a UN
agency dedicated entirely to promoting “intellectual property”.

meet jamie love75

From my reading, I already knew that intellectual property wasn’t
nearly so unabashedly positive as its name suggests. I’d neverbeen to Geneva and associated it with little more than luxury
and a lake, but there were cheap air tickets and a youth hostel,so I invited myself. The event was quite small, just fifty or sixty
people.
During the later ’90s, the World Trade Organization (WTO)
had become a household name thanks to anti-globalization
protests, but even now WIPO remains unknown to most people. Yet it was at WIPO that many of the rules of the internet
age were turned into treaties which the member nations were
obliged to enact into law. Acts and directives such as the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act in the US and the Copyright Directivein the EU derive directly from a WIPO treaty in 1996. You may
never have heard of those acts or directives either, but they haveshaped your experience of the digital age, through services suchas YouTube, TiVO and more.
Moulding of the structure of the information technology bycorporate interests is not new. It happened with the telegraphin the 19th century and with radio and TV in the 20th. What
was new in the 1990s was the internet. Connecting the world
more intimately than ever before, it was more Open and moredemocratic than anything before, and not everyone liked this.
“Intellectual property” now involved massively higher stakes.
For nearly a decade, Jamie and Manon toiled almost on theirown, unknown and barely funded. They had to watch as thelobbyists for the media conglomerates that owned the major labels
and studios and outlets rigged the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996,
which laid out how copyright would function on the internet.
But gradually they built awareness and were joined by others,
analysing, challenging, objecting.
In such a difficult area, against stacked odds, successes are
small and compromised: amendments made here and there, arule slightly less bad than it would have been, a treaty stalledor even stopped (usually only to be replaced by something only
marginally less bad). This is not high drama that makes goodnews copy or television. It is work in darkness. Year after year

76

the open revolutionof peering through mind-numbing legalese to see to the playof wealth and power beneath. It involves explaining what thewording means and why it should be revised, again and again
and again, to officials who are at best mildly sympathetic, at worst
in their posts precisely because they’re aligned with the prevailinginterests.
But Jamie and his evolving coalition did make a difference.
Jamie managed to stop a broadcasting treaty proposed by – youguessed it – broadcasters, which would have given them new
special monopoly rights in their programmes. In another instance,
the coalition persuaded WIPO to add legal exceptions to provide
better support for blind people and those with disabilities toaccess copyrighted work. Alas, part of the result of all this work
was to alter the mechanisms by which the rules are drawn up.
The US Trade Representative, the real American power in thesematters, and almost entirely the creature of the major corporate
interests, gradually relocated “intellectual property” and otherkey information regulation out of international fora such as the
WTO or WIPO and into bilateral negotiations where the US andthe lobbyists could more easily exert their will.
The sheer strength of that will became clear to me in 2009,
when I travelled as an academic to the European Parliament towatch it debate a Directive that would extend copyright in existing
recordings. This was one of the most blatantly partisan – or evencorrupt – of possible changes. To add 20 or 40 further years’
copyright to the prevailing 50 was simply to extend the monopoly
for back catalogues. It was in effect a shockingly regressive tax on
EU citizens for the benefit of a few multinational record companies(Sony, BMG, Universal Music Group) and a few hugely successful
artists such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and U2. This goesagainst the very purpose of copyright which is to incentivize andreward creators for making new music.1 There is no way for the
Beatles to get in a time machine and record another album in 1965
1 The extension also lengthened copyright for new recordings. However,
the incentives for this are so negligible as to be irrelevant: an uncertain
gain of small amounts of extra money fifty years or more in the future is
economically insignificant both to artists and investors.

meet jamie love77

because their copyright was extended in 2009.
So I went to meet MEPs to try to persuade them that this was a
mistake. The record labels and collecting societies had permanent
staff in Brussels who had done a good job of lobbying. I wasprobably the only person many of the MEPs ever met who would
make the case for the other side. Even the Commissioner who
introduced the Directive admitted to me that of the 27 meetings
he had been to with interested groups, 26 were with groups promoting it (the exception was from the Consumers’ Union). When I
visited one British Labour MEP who was playing a significant rolein establishing the position of his group, he was so incensed thatanyone should oppose longer copyrights that he yelled at me andalmost ejected me bodily from his office. Afterwards, I discoveredthat he had worked for many years in the music industry. He was
not motivated by anything other than long-ingrained conviction,
but he certainly wasn’t listening to the merits of the case.

10Openness: The Best Medicine

Patents and copyrights do, of course, exist for a reason, so let’slook at one crucial instance. Patents support the research anddevelopment of new medicines. Formulating and testing new
drugs is extremely expensive. Without monopoly protection, theargument goes, competition (copying of drugs by other manufacturers) would drive drug prices down so far that pioneers would
see little or no return on their substantial investment. Without the
anticipation of high return companies and their investors might
never risk the expense of research, and rather than high-priced
drugs we’d simply have no drugs at all.
This logic is not wrong, so much as misplaced. There are
Open-compatible ways to fund the development of new medicinesthat are more effective than patents at rewarding innovators andstimulating innovation. We can make medicines available toeveryone at the cost of manufacture and fund medical innovation
at, or even above, the level we do today.
In any case, the situation today is hardly satisfactory. In many
countries, high prices for medicines are an everyday concern, andeven where many people have free prescriptions, they are paying
those high prices through their taxes. Americans spent over $400
billion on pharmaceuticals in 2016. That is $1,400 for every man,woman and child, whether ill or not, and this average conceals the
everyday reality that individuals who actually fall sick may haveto spend tens or hundreds of thousands. Millions of Americans,struggle to afford what they need, and some even will die for lack80

the open revolutionof medicines. And if citizens in the richest country on earth can’t
afford medicines, imagine the plight of countries that are muchpoorer or facing epidemics.
During the AIDS epidemic of the 1990s and 2000s whichravaged Africa and other parts of the world, the principal antiretroviral treatments were all under patent with big multinational
pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline andBoehringer, which kept prices much too high for most patients orfor the governments to afford. In South Africa, basic treatment
costs were more than two thousand rand ($250) per month in 2002
at a time when per capita GDP was $250 a month. To maintainthese prices, the companies refused to allow the manufacture ofgeneric versions. Tens of thousands of people were dying andcampaigners were desperate for a change.
In 2002, members of the Treatment Action Campaign filed acomplaint with the South African Competition Commission. The
lead complainant, Hazel Tau, a single woman from Soweto, wrote
in her submission that she was the family breadwinner.
I was diagnosed with HIV in 1991 . . . Since April 2002, I
have not been so well. I have had an increasing numberof opportunistic infections including . . . a lung infection,
which was suspected to be pneumonia . . . I have also losta lot of weight. I weighed about 75 kilograms up to about
2000. I have lost over 25 kilograms since then . . . I need to
go onto treatment given that my CD4 has dropped below
200 . . . anti-retroviral treatment is required. But I cannot
afford to pay even R2,000 a month for this. If the prices
of anti-retrovirals were reduced to between R400 to R500 amonth, I could afford treatment on my present salary. I amaware that I will have to sacrifice some things, but I knowthat this treatment will help me and keep me healthy. I
cannot afford to pay the prices the drug companies charge
for anti-retroviral treatment.
At this point, Jamie Love and his team at the Consumer Projecton Technology re-enter the picture. The impact of the high prices
of drugs, especially retrovirals in developing countries, had been

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81

a major concern of Jamie’s for years, and he was among those
who provided expert evidence to the South African Competition
Commission on the economic side of the case. In all, he wrote or
co-wrote six of the expert opinions.
On 16 October 2003, the Competition Commission ruled
against big pharma and in favor of Hazel Tau and the hundredsof thousands of other AIDs sufferers:
Pharmaceutical firms GlaxoSmithKline South Africa (Pty)Ltd (GSK) and Boehringer Ingelheim (BI) have contravened
the Competition Act of 1998. The firms have been foundto have abused their dominant positions in their respective
anti-retroviral (ARV) markets.
As a result of this decision, major pharmaceutical companies
agreed to license their patents to generic manufacturers on reasonable terms – and not only in South Africa but across sub-saharanAfrica. Prices dropped immediately and have continued to fall.
Between 2000 and 2014, Médecins Sans Frontières estimated thatprices fell 99% to around $100, and much of that is due to thisvictory.
This was an example of the benefits of removing patent monopolies, but we also have a striking example of the costs ofintroducing them. For the twenty years before the TRIPS agreement of 1994, India had forbidden patents for pharmaceuticalproducts.1 However, under the agreement – to which India is asignatory – patent protection must be provided for pharmaceuticals, to allow the holders to raise prices. Until then, without
patents, any firm in India could manufacture a given drug: andthey did. India had a booming industry in generic medicines –those that can be produced by anyone (often without the fancy
brand names), because there are no patents. Drugs were cheapand even poor people could afford them, but in theory this meantless revenue for the original creators. India is therefore a good
1 Strictly, India did not have “product” patents but had “process” patents
for pharmaceuticals. Patents on the recipe for a drug did not exist but acompany could register a patent on a specific, novel way of manufacturing a drug.

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test case for what these trade-offs mean in practice, and thanks toa case study that focused on a major category of anti-bacterials
called Quinolones, we have some numbers.2
The paper estimated the cost to the nation in just this one
segment would be some $350–500 million a year, falling primarilyon consumers but also upon local manufacturers. Yet the gain tothe owners of the patents was a mere $50 million a year (gains
to patent owners can be much lower than the costs to consumers
because increased prices mean lower sales and those lost sales area loss both to consumers who get no medicines and to manufacturers who get no revenues – this is the so-called deadweight cost of
economists, in this case a very appropriate term, since lost accessto drugs could literally mean death). So the net cost to India of
introducing patent monopolies was $300–$450 million a year. And
these are just the dollar numbers. Think of the costs in misery, ofthe people who can no longer afford treatment, whose illnesses
are prolonged or whose lives were shortened unnecessarily.
Medical patents, then, can have appalling financial and practical consequences for millions. But what of big pharma’s argumentthat they are a just and necessary reward for the expenses andrisks of research? That without patents there would be many
fewer medicines and many more who miss out on treatment?
That too needs examination, because almost every innovative
medicine we now have started with work in a government-funded
research lab – and many of them were completed there too. Thisis especially true of our greatest advances, from Pasteur’s germ
theory to Fleming’s discovery of penicillin and right through to today’s work on gene therapies and predictive medicine. Alexander
Fleming’s work was paid for by public institutions. Accordingly,
he did not hide or patent the discovery of penicillin, but publishedit for everyone to test, use and build upon, so helping to savemillions of lives.
On the same principle, current and future work that is paid
2 Shubham Chaudhuri, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, and Panle Gia, Estimating
the Effects of Global Patent Protection in Pharmaceuticals: A Case Study of
Quinolones in India, Yale Working Papers, 2003; repr. American Economic
Review, 2006.

openness: the best medicine

83

for collectively by the public is usually Openly available. And thisis a huge proportion: almost half of all medical R&D in the world
today is funded directly by governments, and in basic scientificresearch the proportion is much higher. In addition, UNESCO
estimated that in 2012 private, non-profit financing of medical
R&D in the US amounted to just under $15 billion. This includes
both the “mega-philanthrophy” of super-rich individuals and theaggregate contributions of many small donors, such as charities
that focus upon particular diseases, and almost all of it is Openly
published.3
One of the reports that Jamie Love wrote for the Competition
Commission in South Africa investigated R&D costs and challenged the assumption that they are borne by the companies thatend up with the patents. This is rarely true, he argued, especially for drugs for diseases such as HIV/AIDS. For instance, apatent for one of the most important of the anti-retrovirals, AZT(marketed as Retrovir) was granted to the Burroughs Wellcome
company in March 1987, and then acquired in a takeover of Burroughs Wellcome by GlaxoSmithKline. Burroughs had not been
shy in claiming primary credit for the development of AZT, but
the facts were a good deal more complex.
Though the patent was granted in 1987, the drug had firstbeen synthesized in 1964 by Dr Jerome Horowitz of the Michigan
Cancer Foundation, supported by a US government grant. Its use
against animal retroviruses was first demonstrated by Wolfram
Ostertag at the Max Planck Institute in 1974 using mice, and was
3 Traditional state funding of academic research pays for effort, not specific results. It allows researchers to determine their avenues of study
partially or entirely for themselves and is not directly dependent upon
the achievement of particular goals. This is particularly useful for funding basic research, which can be very long-term indeed, and high-risk
research, which may be worthwhile because of occasional big breakthroughs even though mostly it produces no or negative results. Thiskind of funding often envisages a combination of research with teaching,which is desirable for both the teachers and the taught, and is itself aform of long-term investment. The results are unpredictable, and very
hard to quantify, but can be spectacular, and have included many of thegreat achievements of every academic discipline.

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the open revolution

again supported by government funding (this time not American).
Next came crucial clinical research including the first test to see
whether AZT was effective against human immuno-viruses suchas HIV, and at what specific concentrations it was effective. This
too was carried out by government-funded researchers in theUS, this time at the National Cancer Institute at Duke University.
These researchers, none of whom were funded by Burroughs
Wellcome, were also the first to administer AZT to a human being
with AIDS, and performed the first clinical pharmacology study
in patients.
As some of the key scientists wrote in a letter to the New
York Times in September 1989, not only was almost all of thedevelopment of AZT carried out with public funds, but Burroughs had actually retarded developments in the final stages.
The demonstration of clinical effectiveness had, they pointed out,
been accomplishedby the staff of the National Cancer Institute working withstaff at Duke University. These scientists did not workfor the Burroughs Wellcome Company. They were doing
investigator-initiated research, which required resources
and reprogramming from other important projects, in response to a public health emergency. Indeed, one of the key
obstacles to the development of AZT was that Burroughs
Wellcome did not work with live AIDS virus nor wish toreceive samples from AIDS patients.
Presented with a working drug, the result of several decadesof research, Burroughs Wellcome had merely carried out the final
set of clinical trials to win approval for use from the regulator,
the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). And even here,
they received assistance. In the US, AZT had been designated an“orphan” drug (one for use in a small patient population), whichmeant that half the costs of clinical trials would be paid for by thegovernment, through a tax credit to Burroughs.
Under the Open system, Burroughs Wellcome would nothave been handed such an enormously valuable patent on thebasis of work done, in large proportion, by others, including

openness: the best medicine

85

researchers paid for by taxpayers. Instead, private R&D would
be Open in the same way as publicly funded R&D. The sciencewould be available for use by everyone; manufacturing would beunrestricted and competitive, and this would keep prices close to
the cost of manufacture, just like generic medicines today. Open
access to the information would also encourage more scientists
to work at the cutting edge of knowledge, to tackle diseases anddisabilities more quickly.
And yet these social benefits would not impoverish the pharmaceutical companies. The companies would continue to be
rewarded for their work, because instead of patenting their innovations, they would apply for remuneration rights, which would
entitle them to payments from a central fund in proportion to
the health benefits of innovative drugs – regardless of who actually
manufactured them.
For in medicine what matters fundamentally is improving thehealth of individuals and populations. This may mean actuallysaving lives or simply improving the quality of life by reducing
pain or avoiding disability. Our aim should be to ensure that theresources we dedicate to this are spent so as to maximize these
improvements. We need, therefore, to track not only who uses
particular medicines but also the estimated benefit to their health(at least on average). In order to tie payments to outcomes inthis way, a standardized metric is needed to enable comparisons
between treatments of different kinds. For example, how can one
compare a treatment that fights a rare form of cancer and saves ahundred people under 30 with a different cancer treatment thatsaves two hundred people whose average age is 65?
One answer is by measuring what are known by the ungainlyname of “quality adjusted life-years” (QALYs). These allow atreatment to be assessed according to the number of extra “lifeyears” it is presumed to have provided, and the quality of those
years. So if a treatment saves the life of a 30-year-old who canbe expected to live another 40 years, it has a value of 40 QALYs,
whereas a treatment that saves a 65-year-old whose life-expectancy
is only five more years has a value of 5 QALYs. In the case oftreatments that prevent disabilities, of varying severity, the value

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the open revolution

in QALYs is weighted accordingly.4
Under the Open rules, the share of the remuneration fund paid
to different rights-holders would be proportional to the healthbenefits, calculated as the number of people treated multiplied by
the estimated benefit per patient in QALYs.5 By relating remuneration rights directly to the benefits that various medicines bring,
this system creates incentives for targeted and socially beneficial
research. And at the same time, the lower prices of drugs gives
patients dramatically expanded access to treatment.
An important consideration in these distributions would be
the reuse of information that is itself covered by remunerationrights. Research is a cumulative process, and as the case of AZTvividly illustrates, innovations that yield new medical treatments
usually build upon and incorporate previous work. It is importantto think about how this is handled in the Open model, because
otherwise the incentives might become heavily distorted, withresources going to the wrong people for the wrong things.
Consider the problem of derivative drugs that arises under
the current patent system. Imagine that researchers at the company WorkedALot create a new drug for diabetes called Diax.
They apply for and receive a patent. Then another company,
DerivativesInc, produces a slightly cheaper variant called Diox,
and this too is granted a patent. Clearly it would be unjust andwould reduce the incentives to innovation if most of the rewards
were to go to DerivativesInc at the expense of WorkedALot as it
4 This system of valuing lives has been criticized as contrary to, for instance, religious teachings and the spirit of the UN Declaration of Human
Rights, for which it is axiomatic that all lives are equal. These are genuine
objections. The weightings in particular are obviously debatable, andwould be subject to revision with advances in knowledge. But QALYs are
not measures of the value of one individual’s life; they are a statisticaldevice, and they do at least provide a systematic way to assess the valueof medical interventions. We inevitably have to make judgments aboutpriorities (and already do), so it is better to have a measure of some kindthan none.
5 Refinements to this basic formula might be made to account for rarediseases where the number of patients may be small, for example byincluding a health prioritization multiplier in the formula.

openness: the best medicine

87

is WorkedALot which did the pioneering and costly work. So
under the present patent law, there are means for ensuring thatsuch derivatives must license from the originator together with adispute resolution system. This model would be adopted under
the system of remuneration rights, with one major difference.
With remuneration rights, lack of a licence would not prevent
DerivativesInc from engaging in research or releasing its drug
(though it would run the risk that later arbitration might award
much of its future income to WorkedALot). Patents, by contrast,
are usually interpreted as providing complete exclusion: withouta licence, reusers are liable for damages and can do nothing – ifthey go ahead in the knowledge that they may be infringing thepatent, they risk more severe damages for wilful infringement.
Opening all research, whether financed privately or by thestate, may sound all very well for a single country, but it does
raise the free-rider problem: if all the publicly funded research
the US does is Open, won’t others skimp on research and use thatinstead? What was to prevent South Africa’s government relying
entirely on American research into HIV and funding none of its
own?6 Well, even in an age increasingly obsessed with IP, there isa way to solve this problem and to refocus policy on innovationand outcomes rather than corporate protection.
The solution is international agreements under which countries commit themselves to minimum levels of medical researchfunding (as members of NATO, for instance, do currently in thecase of defense spending). At its simplest, each country would
agree to allocate, say, 0.5% of GDP, but it is more likely thatthe percentage (as well as the gross level) would differ between
countries, with richer countries committing themselves to higher
proportions. Countries might also agree to reciprocal recognition
6 This problem is not limited to the Open model. It exists whatever approach one takes to paying for the production of information, including
monopoly rights such as copyright or patents. For example, if a country
does not recognize the patents or copyrights of its neighbour, it canbenefit from the innovative and creative efforts next door without contributing to the cost: they use the products but pay a lower price that
does not include a component for the rights-holder.

88

the open revolutionof remuneration rights, so that a remuneration right registeredin one country would be rewarded also from the remunerationrights funds of other countries where a drug had saved lives or
reduced suffering.
This is almost exactly the approach set out in the Medical
Innovation Convention proposed by Jamie Love and others. As
well as tackling the free-rider problem, such agreements could
also allow more systematic international prioritizing of neglectedareas. At the moment, more money is spent each year finding
drugs to reduce signs of ageing than on fighting malaria. Yet
more than half a million people die each year of malaria, whereas
no-one dies of wrinkles. Because people in rich countries aren’taffected by malaria but care a lot about ageing, drug researchby big pharma is directed not towards deadly diseases but tothe gratification of vanity. Through international agreements, itwould be possible to focus research on these neglected diseases,
for example by weighting research investments when calculatingeach country’s spending commitment as a proportion of GDP.
So far, sadly, no such agreements on medical research havebeen negotiated, yet over the past decade there have been somelarge victories. When Jamie and others started work on access to
medicines in the late 1990s, fewer than ten thousand people inthe developing world were receiving effective HIV therapy. That
figure is now above ten million, thanks to price reductions fromthe making available of essential drugs through voluntary, or
sometimes compulsory, licensing of patents. Thousands, possibly
millions of people are alive today because of work by Jamie andhis colleagues on an area of information policy that most of thebeneficiaries have never heard of.
Although the Medical Innovation Convention has not been
adopted, it remains a blueprint for a different model of researchfunding. It and proposals like it are essential to the future of theinformation age, as ways to marry Openness with a resolutionof the free-rider problem while continuing to benefit from market mechanisms and up-front funding. Such models rely uponinternational agreements, but so does the current solution to thefree-rider problem, the granting of monopolies for “intellectual

openness: the best medicine

89

property”, which were going to be extended yet again in the TPP(Trans-Pacific Partnership) – although this time Donald Trump’s
America did not sign.

11
Making an Open World

The principal advantages of the Open model are simple:• Universal access to information• Increasing innovation and creativity• Maximizing positive use of the capacities of information technology• Increasing competition• Ending of global monopolies over various forms of information• Reducing inequalities of opportunities and outcomes• Increased global wealthTogether, these amount to an overwhelming case for the Openmodel, but there are still questions to answer about how it canbe put into operation. These are not technological but politicalquestions, often about our values and priorities, and this is thetime for policy-makers and commentators to discuss them. In
doing so we must keep in mind that the Open model need not be
perfect. It only needs to better than our current Closed one, andsufficiently so to warrant change.
In the coming years, more and more people are likely to realizethat monopolies in information have effects that are even more
pernicious than monopolies in physical goods, particularly whenit comes to inequality and innovation. “Intellectual property” will
come under increasing criticism as its consequences become more
visible in the virtual and real worlds.

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the open revolution

However, any change must address the main concern people
have about the alternative: how will we pay for the productionof valuable information in an Open world where there are no
copyrights and patents? The Open model provides a simple,
comprehensive answer: replace current patents and copyrights
with remuneration rights while maintaining existing funding
sources that are compatible with Openness, such as government
and philanthropic funding for research, and community-resourced
projects like Wikipedia.
Today, information production is funded in a variety of different ways, as it will continue to be in future. As substitutes for
copyrights and patents, remuneration rights will play a big part,but their scale and logistics need to be determined by research,
discussion and planning. They will evolve along with technicaland social concerns.
Huge amounts of information are created by all of us all
the time – our blogs and photos, novels that never see the lightof day, emails – but most of this is without economic cost orconsequence, and will continue unabated. It is the funding ofvaluable information, whether Open or Closed, that matters here,
and it has many sources:• Business (journalism, film production, market research, advertising, fashion)• Sponsorship (whether commercial or pro bono)• Philanthropy (research, the arts, architecture, prizes, etc.)• Crowdfunding• State spending (universities, learned societies, charities)
All five of these forms of funding will continue under theOpen model, and a good deal of the information they produce
is already Open – or could be. For example, information createdby publicly funded researchers is already largely Open – and therest should become so.1 But Openness is not principally about
1 There are other examples of Open information production today. For
instance, some innovations by commercial operations are Openly shared,
with revenues being generated from complementary goods, related

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93

state-funding or depending on volunteers. The more information
we can produce without direct state control the better, because
this minimizes politicization and bureaucratization and permits
the greatest freedom for enterprise. The commercial business ofmaking and marketing information must go on flourishing, andOpenness can coexist with markets because we can use remuneration rights.

11.1

Remuneration rights in place of monopoly
rightsThe production of knowledge and information that is alreadyOpen today would be unaffected by the removal of “intellectual
property”. But there remains a huge amount of information whichis paid for by businesses which rely upon patents or copyrights
for their returns. What this book proposes is the wholesale replacement of intellectual property monopolies such as patents andcopyright with remuneration rights. This would mean remuneration rights for software, statistics, design, news, maps, medicines,
and a myriad of other kinds of information. Furthermore, wewould replace each of the main intellectual property rights (patentand copyright) with a similar remuneration right: i.e. a patent-like
remuneration right and a copyright-like remuneration right, eachservices or consultancy. This is termed the “fries and ketchup” approach:give away the fries and sell the ketchup, or vice-versa. Pioneers inmany fields, including some in which innovations are not recognized
as “intellectual property”, do likewise. A good deal of the innovation in,
for instance, surgical techniques is not (and could not be) patented, butsurgeons developing new methods often share them eagerly, knowingthat this will bring them professional credit and more patients (norshould one overlook the simple desire to do good and improve humanwell-being). The new idea is shared freely, for indirect rewards, andthis kind of innovation is much more common than we may at first
suppose. Research by Eric von Hippel and his colleagues has shownthat it extends far beyond medicine, from Michelin chefs to the chemicalindustry. Remarkably, von Hippel estimates that the majority of all
production innovations are made by practitioners, a great many of whom
do not seek or need exclusivity to justify or resource their efforts.

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the open revolution

with the same qualification rules and term of operation as thoseof the respective existing monopoly rights.
Remuneration rights are entirely compatible with continuing
other means of encouraging innovation – and can enhance them.
For example, the existence of remuneration rights would provide
new avenues for private philanthropic support. Philanthropists
could for instance donate money directly to the remunerationrights pool, making the rewards larger for, say, photography or
poetry. And private support for Open innovation through prizes
or remuneration rights could be encouraged by tax breaks.

11.2

Are remuneration rights feasible?

In order to represent a viable alternative to the patent system,
remuneration rights must be technically and politically feasible
to implement. Technically, many of the aspects required under aremuneration rights system already exist; we already have meansof measuring value, we already define ownership of innovations,as well as what happens when innovations are built upon by others. Each of these mechanisms could be reused for remunerationrights.
Furthermore, much of the political infrastructure required
for a remuneration rights system is already in place, including
coherent international (and often national) legislation and meansof arbitration that could be co-opted, as well as similar governing
bodies for related funds, and the means of securing sustainablefunding.

11.3

Remuneration rights are technically feasible

For remuneration rights to be a viable funding mechanism, thetechnical aspects of the model must be practicable. Four issues
stand out:
1. Demarcation. Which innovation belongs to which innovator?
2. Reuse. As research is cumulative, it is important that the remuneration rights model rewards innovators in a proportionate

making an open world95

manner, without disadvantaging those upon whose shoulders
they stand.
3. Distribution. How should we allocate those funds to individual holders of remuneration rights?
4. Evaluation. How should we determine how much to spend
on different kinds of information (medicines, music, software,etc.)?
Fortunately, there are precedents for all of these requirements.

11.3.1

We already determine who owns innovations

It is crucial to both the patent and the remuneration rights systems
that innovations can be separated from one another. In order togive a right, whether a patent monopoly right or a remunerationright, to an individual, we have to be able to attribute innovation
correctly. This process is vital in the patent system, and could bedirectly reused in a remuneration rights system.

11.3.2We already share rights between multiple
innovators

Remuneration rights would be granted on the condition of completely Open access to all information relating to the innovation.
It is therefore important that remuneration can be shared fairly
between one generation of innovators and the next.
This kind of sharing already happens. Because innovation andcreativity are cumulative, reuse is often frequent. Under today’s
monopoly rights system, follow-on innovators are required to pay
royalties to the earlier innovator. Under the remuneration rights
model, in a similar fashion to royalties in the patent or copyrightsystem, follow-on innovators would be liable to pay a proportionof their own remuneration rights payments to those whose work
they built upon. These proportions might be standardized forsimple cases or, for more complex cases, the two parties could
negotiate, with ultimate recourse to the courts if no mutuallyacceptable solution were found. In other words, if an innovation

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built upon a previous innovation holding a remuneration right,
then a proportion of the right granted to the secondary innovation
would be set aside for the primary innovator.
The major difference with the present system would be thatearlier innovators would not have an absolute right to prohibit
reuse as they do today. Rather, they would have the right only to“equitable remuneration”. This change would favour the succeeding innovator but still ensure that the earlier was fairly compensated.

11.3.3

We can distribute funds between holders of
remunerations rights

Paying creators from a remuneration rights fund is fairly straightforward, and the case studies above have already demonstrated
how it would be done in music and medicines. The distribution
is done by comparing similar things, which allows a common
yardstick, whether it be the number of plays of different songs or
the usage and health benefits of medicines. Whilst the fund foreach kind of information would need its own specific mechanism(software would have a different criteria from music, for instance),
the key principles are clear: holders of remuneration rights would
be paid in accordance with usage and the value created by theirinnovations; and distributions would be made by transparent,
pre-defined algorithms overseen by an independent assessors (soas to eliminate the risk of political meddling in the process).

11.3.4

We can evaluate how much should be spent oneach kind of information

The proportionate allocation among the remunerations funds is agreater challenge, because it requires comparison of values thatare incommensurate: how much do we value a new single by
Beyoncé compared to a new treatment for breast cancer?
We can begin by looking at how we make such judgements
when it comes to dissimilar physical things such as a footballand a cake. The most common mechanism is the market. The

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interplay of buyers and sellers determines prices (and therefore aform of relative value), as well as how many footballs and how
many cakes are made. But while traditional market pricing works
well when we want to compare physical things, because there is alimited supply of each, this mechanism breaks down in the caseof information. Because as we have seen, there is no limit to the
supply of digital information unless we deliberately restrict it. As
economists might say, the cake gets larger as required. Everyone
can have a slice and no one need go hungry. In a market system
for information without monopoly rights, this limitless supply
would result in prices tending to zero – giving us no indication ofrelative values of different types of information.
But what about monopoly rights: don’t they give us market
prices for information goods? The issue here is that market
prices are useful not because they exist but because they allocate
spending and production in line with actual value and costs.
However, this is so only under certain conditions that are largely
absent in the case of information goods covered by monopoly
rights.
First, information goods (in common with public goods suchas national defence) have significant one-off costs but trivial costs
for each additional user. For example, once we have spent themoney to maintain an army, protecting an extra hundred citizens
comes at no cost. Similarly, once an app is created, the cost ofan additional copy is zero. This creates challenges for a market
pricing system as the large fixed cost means that prices fall as use
rises (although the value is not falling).
Secondly, at a fundamental level, true market pricing of information goods is impossible. Only when the state creates artificial
monopolies can prices be attached to information – but the very
act of doing so undermines the mechanism of the market by allowing the producer, rather than consumer demand, to set theprice. Although there may be other films to watch, none of themis exactly equivalent to Harry Potter or The Italian Job, so there isno true competition. The mechanism is distorted and as a result
resources are not optimally allocated.
Nor is the regime of “intellectual property” the pure free mar-98

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ket mechanism that it is often taken for: it is already politicized(which is why it attracts so much lobbying). For example, thelength and nature of the monopoly rights that society grants toparticular kinds of information depend upon political decisions.
Should patents for new life-saving drugs last for 10 years, or 20,
or 50? (Think of the profound implications of such a ruling.) Governments have to decide, too, how much to spend on scientificresearch, where there are even more factors that make evaluation
highly speculative. Basic biological research, for instance, may or
may not lead to medical breakthroughs, but with a time-lag of
decades.
So the challenges remuneration rights face in assessing value
and allocating funds between different types of information are
already present in the system we have today – albeit more hiddenfrom our view. The issues that remuneration rights raise are notnew, just more visible.
Economists do have techniques to assess value, and so tocompare – albeit imperfectly – musical apples with medicinaloranges. Sampling techniques, for instance, give a good idea ofthe overall usage of information goods, be they apps, weather
forecasts or algorithms. This tells us only the levels of use, notthe value that the users put upon it, but there are also techniquessuch as willingness-to-pay surveys. So-called “hedonic pricing”
uses things that have prices to evaluate things that haven’t. For
example, what is the value of a beautiful view? There is no explicit
market in beautiful views, but we do measure the prices people
pay for houses. So if in addition we know which houses havebeautiful views – along with other factors such as size and location– we can begin to tease out the implied value of a beautiful view.
We can even say something about the value of life. What will
people pay to avoid a small increase in the risk of death? For
example, what bonuses do we have to pay people to take on
dangerous jobs such as cleaning the windows of skyscrapers?
Furthermore, we can initiate the remuneration rights regime
using the knowledge we have to spending levels today: howmuch we spend on music versus movies versus software versus
medicines, etc. Whist imperfect, these existing expenditures domaking an open world99

provide a useful guide, and basing remuneration rights on themwould also provide a welcome continuity.
In conclusion, whilst there can be no final answer to thequestions of allocation, it is possible to suggest a general approachto them in an Open world. In each creative field the current levelof investment offers a starting line for the new model, and we canat least put nominal values upon our information goods in theOpen world, using existing tools and the large amount of data
available about the levels and forms of usage of digital goods.
Ultimately the sums to be channelled to different forms of
information through remuneration rights are necessarily mattersfor public debate. How much should we allocate to the new
information in the many different realms? But the challengeof setting levels of expenditure is neither new nor specific toinformation. Societies face the same problem when deciding how
much to spend on parks, schools and fighter planes.
This is why we need to start discussions now about how large
the remuneration funds should be, how they should be collected,
and how they should be distributed. We also need to explain to
the public what remuneration rights are, and the benefits that
Open access will bring both to society as a whole in the form ofcheaper medicines, faster advances in research, and so on; andto each of us personally in the form of cheaper, non-proprietary
goods of all kinds; a much freer internet with universal access tonews sites, music, films, books and much more.

11.4

Remuneration rights are politically feasible

As well as functioning technically, remuneration rights must beable to operate politically. This involves
1. Adequate and sustainable financing of the funds
2. A robust governance structure and legal status for the funds
3. A successful transition from where we are today to the newOpen model
These requirements too can be met.

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11.4.1

Sustainable funding can be ensured, nationallyand globally

Starting at the national scale, governments must provide a predictable and reliable level of resourcing. There are several ways
this can be achieved and these will necessarily vary with theexisting circumstances and practices of the country in question.
The funds should be legally independent, with transparent
governance. This “ring-fences” the money, keeping it separate
from the general government budget. The most important featureof the governing body would be impartiality. One way of guaranteeing this would be to make it independent of electoral politics
and political factions.
On the global scale, international agreements must be reached,establishing a system to set equitable contributions to the fundand binding all countries to contribute. This would ensure thefund would have a fixed disbursable pool each year. Only by
establishing such binding agreements for specific types of remuneration rights can free-riding be deterred.
Happily, we already have such mechanisms in place. For
example, the existing intellectual property regime demonstrates
the effectiveness of international agreements to prevent free-riding.
And we already have many examples of international initiatives
where governments pool funds, for example in research fundingor space exploration.

11.4.2

Remuneration rights are compatible with national
and international laws

Most countries are signatories to treaties such as the World Trade
Organization’s TRIPS, which require provision and recognitionof patents and copyrights. The remuneration rights model iscompatible with these legal frameworks.
Whilst TRIPS is global and binding, it also has built-in flexibilities. Legal provisions are in place to allow exceptions to exclusive
rights in order to widen access and to bypass monopoly rights
under specific circumstances. For example, “compulsory licens-making an open world

101

ing” is permitted in certain circumstances to ensure that patent
owners cannot block the use of their innovations – though theymust be suitably compensated.
Temporary difficulties in the process of completely replacing
monopoly rights need not prevent progress. For example, holdersof monopoly rights could voluntarily license their rights into a
remuneration rights fund – just as copyright holders do withcollecting societies or Spotify today. Alternatively, remunerationrights could be granted in parallel with monopoly rights, with
innovators having to choose one or the other. Remuneration rights
could then be made more attractive than monopoly rights in avariety of ways to ensure take-up: for example, by providing highlevels of funding for remuneration rights; or by giving preference
in all state spending to remuneration rights (state spending on
patented drugs, for instance, could be limited); or finally by directly taxing income from patents, so reducing their attractiveness(but without breaching TRIPS and other international agreements).
Although this opt-in approach is less attractive than a full transition, it might be useful where abolition of monopoly rights is not
feasible in the short term, for political or legal reasons.

11.4.3

We can make a successful transition to an Openmodel with remuneration rights

Obviously the quickest method of introducing the Open model
would be a global “big bang”, with all existing monopoly rights being abolished overnight, replaced by remuneration rights. Equally
obviously, this is unlikely to happen because of the scale andcomplexity of such a change. Instead, we should encourage incremental adoption, both by region and by industry. Individual
nations or groups of nations can adopt the Open approach whileother countries retain monopoly rights. And it is quite feasible
for one country or group of countries to adopt the Open model
initially just in one or a few industries: for example, introducing
remuneration rights for, say, music but keeping monopoly rights
for everything else. This ability to pilot the Open model, and to
run it in parallel with the existing monopoly rights system, is a

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huge advantage. It both allows for testing of the new approachand for the gradual adoption essential to the success of such acollective effort.
Another key requirement for any change is that major interest
groups will support it – or, at least not actively oppose it. Given
their political power, a key group will be existing holders ofmonopoly rights such as pharmaceutical companies, record labelsor publishers. Such interests are always wary of any change to thestatus quo, but there are reasons to be confident that remunerationrights can offer advantages to them as well as society. First, fromthe point of view of a monopoly rightsholder, a remunerationright looks quite similar: it will be issued by a similar body,last for a similar period and yield a similar or greater income.
This, of course, is the crux, and it is essential that the amount ofmoney guaranteed through remuneration rights funds compares
favourably with current income from sales. For instance, if the US
set up a remuneration rights fund for medicines, it should be atleast as richly endowed as the total pot of money spent on patent
medicines today. The companies need not lose out, even though
the public can be greatly benefited by increased access and lower
costs.
That is the beauty of the win-win Open Revolution, and together, these features of remuneration rights greatly increase thechances that this change is politically as well as technically feasible.

12
Help us Make it Happen

Concerted action is required if we are to create an Open world.
Some people assume that because digital technology makes it
so easy to share freely, nothing can hold back the free flow of
information. But optimism about the inevitability of Openness
is naive about the interplay of technology and power. For power,
whether that of special interest groups or us collectively throughthe state, does much to shape and control the impact of technology,
especially in this area of information. Even if digital technology
did create a world in which information could not be prevented
from flowing freely, there would still be the question of who pays
to create it in the first place. In the absence of a new financial
structure such as proposed here, free information might wellhinder innovation and creativity, by robbing innovators of theirincome, so impoverishing us all.
Another mistaken assumption is that if we leave the freemarket to work, the Open business model will prevail on its
own. Alas, whilst Open business models in a Closed world (orcommunity efforts such as Wikipedia) are impressive, they can
only pay for a very small portion of the information we want
and need. Many important information goods – such as new
medicines or new films – have no obvious Open business modelin a Closed world without remuneration rights.
Action is therefore needed and it should take three complementary forms: informing and involving the public; lobbying forpolicy change; and building-it-ourselves. Ultimately, we need to

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the open revolutionchange policy at a national and then international level. At thesame time, individually or in groups we can take action now tocreate Open materials, whether software, databases or content
with the intention of both delivering immediate value and acting
as exemplars of the potential of Openness.
A fundamental shift in the public conception of information,
recognizing the benefits of sharing rather than hoarding, needs
to be matched by political pressure to fund Open information;
to establish disbursement processes, including the creation of
remuneration rights as legal entitlements and the mechanisms
for licensing and dispute settlement; and to make international
agreements instituting Open policies.
But before policy changes can be brought about, we needa broad-based Open movement with a common language andgoals: both are currently lacking. This movement requires avanguard of individuals and organizations engaged in advocacy.
For inspiration, they can look to other efforts to secure major
governmental changes in the public interest, for example theenvironmental movement.
Concerns with problems such as pollution go back at least to
Roman times, but in societies that were primarily agricultural, thehuman impact on the wider environment was barely noticeable.
With the coming of the industrial age environmental mattersstarted to receive greater attention, boosted by the Romantic
concern with the sublime, the beauty of nature, and the uglinessof manufacturing cities. As industry and urbanization grew, thepollution of water and air became starkly visible, but regulation
was limited for a variety of reasons including poor understandingof the science and political systems which favored owners overworkers. Even in the 20th century, environmental progress washampered not only by two world wars, but by a political failure
to think long term.
After 1945 the momentum of environmental concern finallypicked up, fueled by better science, maturing representational
democracy, and states taking a more active interest in generalsocial welfare. Increasing wealth raised the relative value of environmental goods such as parks, clean air and long-term health,help us make it happen

105

as well as the leisure to enjoy them and the willingness to votefor them. In the early 1960s these crystallized into the modern
environmental movement. The symbol and catalyst of this was
the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, whichbrought home to middle America the alarming impact of manmade chemicals on the environment and human health.
It would take decades for the environmental movement tomature, but by the early 1990s, several environmental organizations had become significant political forces, with membership in
the hundreds of thousands and substantial funding. They had
independent researchers, sophisticated media strategies, grassroot campaigns, and lobbyists in major political centres. Thoughstill vastly outgunned financially, Big Environment had arrived
to take on Big Business. Public awareness had also grown, andterms such as “sustainable” and “green” had entered the popularvocabulary. By the turn of the century, calling a car or a house“green” was usually no longer a description of its colour.
Meanwhile, though, the scale of the damage had greatly increased, and people had become increasingly alert to ever larger
challenges, with climate change the greatest of them all. Yet oil
producers, whether ExxonMobil or Saudi Arabia, remain among
the most powerful lobbies on the planet, and continue to fightevery inch of the way to prevent action on climate change thatwill reduce their profitability.
The analogies with the information environment are striking.
Concerns about the control of information also go back hundredsof years – think of the Church’s refusal to allow the Bible to betranslated, lest people read it for themselves. Again, though, it
was with industrialization that information goods, ranging frommanufacturing equipment to newspapers, became economicallyand socially crucial. Here too, though, political discourse wasdominated by special interests, especially those of the producers and controllers of information. Mechanisms for representing
broader groups such as consumers were poor and although information was becoming increasingly commercially valuable, few
people understood the conceptual significance of this. Closed
monopoly rights grew in term and scope.

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the open revolution

In the second half of the 20th century, however, two new factors came into play. The invention of digital technologies led tothe proliferation of information and to costless copying; and thegrowth of Big Science, with research heavily funded by government, massively expanded the production of information in the
public sphere. Yet still, with information increasingly dominant in
the economy and society, there was little political understanding.
Elements of Open sharing were widespread both in the academy
and in the nascent information technology industries, especially
software, but this was rarely driven by political conviction.
Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, the Open information movement appeared in embryonic form. If one were to look for a
totemic moment similar to the publication of Carson’s Silent
Spring, it would probably be Richard Stallman’s work at the Free
Software Foundation. Whilst Carson exposed the harm done bypesticides, Stallman revealed the increasing threat posed by theway that more and more information was becoming proprietary.
At first on a tiny scale, a community of coders and scientists,
connected by personal computers and the rudimentary internet,
gathered around a radical ideal, as they gradually worked out theramifications of the difference between information and physicalthings.
Information politics began with such groups as the Free Software Foundation (founded 1986), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (1990), and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (1999). There were some major early triumphs, suchas the rejection of software patents in Europe in 2005. Groups
formed and re-formed, but there was little shared language or
vision. The excitement of the internet economy spurred consideration of monopoly rights and the potential of Openness in an
information age – most notably and most popularly by American
law professors such as Lawrence Lessig and James Boyle. At thisstage, the corporate opposition to Openness was powerful but
still cumbersome and unsophisticated.
Public science was also increasingly aware of the need forOpenness as research began to become entangled with commercial interests and monopoly rights – as evidenced in the case of

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the Human Genome Project, which began in 1990 with funding
from both government and philanthropists. Eleven years later,when the project released the first ever complete sequence of thehuman genetic code, it was completely Open. Now it is the basisof a global industry worth more than $20 billion, and its Openness
is far from unusual: today more than half of all basic medical
research is released Openly. In February 2018, an even more
ambitious project began to be planned by American and Chinese
researchers. The BioGenome Project (or Whole Earth Genome)
aims to sequence all species on earth, from amoeba to blue whales.
The cost would be in billions of dollars, and the sources of funding are so far unclear, but it is obvious to politicians as well as
scientists that such an extraordinary databank must not be held
exclusively, but shared as widely as possible with everyone who
might make use of it.

More than half the planet is now online and in regular directcontact with the world of digital information. And yet, no common goal or language of Openness exists. If you were to stop
people in the street and ask “Do you want an Open world?” oreven “Do you want an Open information society”, they would
have no idea what you meant, just as if you had stopped themin 1975 and asked “Do you want a green society?” The Open
information movement is still incoherent, unstructured and without an acknowledged global spokesgroup, a shared purpose ora platform or an agreed approach. “Information politics” is aterm barely understood. The published manifestos of politicalparties scarcely mention it, and when they do it is usually only
to reiterate dogmas about innovation and intellectual property
rights.
Of course, individuals, groups and businesses are alreadycreating Open information within the paradigm of monopoly
rights. There are volunteer efforts motivated by a combination of
personal interest, public-spiritedness and a desire to develop anddemonstrate knowledge and skills (examples include Wikipedia

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and many small Open software projects).1 There are also businesses that are providing Open information for free while sellingcomplementary goods. Philanthropic support is a source of increasing funding in many areas, though uncoordinated and not
yet systematically promoting Openness.
Yet even as the public wakes up to the excessive power of
those like Facebook and Google, many still fail to understand theconstituents of these monopolies. They do not understand that
it is the rules we have made that create and sustain them, that
it is “intellectual property” monopolies that are allowing these
extraordinary concentrations of power and wealth. We must go
on spreading awareness and challenging mistaken conceptionsof the workings of the digital information economy. We need aworld where every policy-maker, every expert, every educatedcitizen understands that bits are different from bread – and whatthat implies.
We need to spell out the dangers of a Closed world built on
proprietary information. We need research bodies dedicated tounderstanding our information economy and society, as well as
think-tanks to track progress and develop policies. We need massmembership organizations to campaign for an Open world, in theway that Green organizations campaign on behalf of the physical environment, because membership provides the resources toengage long term and a clear constituency supporting change.
Finally, we need policy-makers to see the opportunity, and necessity, of an Open world. For, ultimately, it is only by our collective,
political action that we can effect the large-scale reforms we need.
To find out more about what we can do to make an Open worldand how you can get involved, visit:https://openrevolution.net/make-it-happen
1 Wikipedia is a hugely impressive voluntary effort, but it was kick-started
commercially and it too has benefited from state spending: its content islargely collected from information already published elsewhere, much of
it produced in state-supported academia (or in commercial contexts suchas journalism). One way or another, a good deal of the Open material
available to us today has been supported by governments and business.

13
Coda: The Original CopyfightFifteen hundred years ago, in 6th-century Ireland, a dispute overthe copying of a book led to a pitched battle. At its heart was apriest named Colmcille, better known to us as St Columba. Afterordination at 25, he began travelling around Ireland and founded
three dozen monasteries in 15 years. With shortages of books
restricting religious scholarship, he copied manuscripts whenever
he could, and encouraged his monks to do the same, to spreadthe Church’s teachings.
The Vulgate was St Jerome’s great 5th-century translation of
the Bible into Latin. The first copy to reach Ireland was broughtfrom Rome by Finnian of Molville. Although so protective of his
book that he would not allow others access to it, Finnian had
been one of Colmcille’s teachers and he made an exception forhis pupil, allowing him to read the translation so long as he did
not copy it. Colmcille acquiesced, but ignored the restriction, no
doubt feeling that this knowledge was too precious to be lockedaway.
He proceeded to copy the book at night as fast as he could.
Discovered one night, Finnian demanded that he hand over the
copy. Colmcille refused, believing that the holy text could not
be owned by anyone, and that his first duty was to God and the
Church, not to Finnian.
When Diarmid, the High King of Ireland, was asked to adjudicate, Colmcille made his case by saying that it was the dutyof the Church to spread its knowledge by copying. He had not110

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diminished Finnian’s book by doing so, and in any case, that
too was a copy, since it was not St Jerome’s original manuscript.
Books were different in kind from material goods.
King Diarmaid, however, ruled against Colmcille: wise men
had always described the copy of a book as a child-book, he said,
which implied that the owner of the parent-book also owns thechild-book. “To every cow its calf, to every book its child-book.
The child-book belongs to Finnian.”
Colmcille is said to have cursed the King and stormed backto his monastery, and soon afterwards events took a bloody turn,when Colmcille granted sanctuary to a hostage who had beentaken by King Diarmaid. The King violated the sanctuary ofColmcille’s monastery by having the hostage hunted down andkilled. A battle ensued in which, legend has it, three thousand of
Diarmaid’s men and only one of Colmcille’s men were lost.
But Colmcille’s victory was short-lived. He was excommunicated by a synod of fellow priests, and then exiled. So in 563,
two years after the “battle of the book”, Colmcille set sail with 12
followers for Iona. He went on to found a new monastery and toplay a major role in bringing Christianity to the Picts in Scotland.
Colmcille’s understanding that the text of the Vulgate could
not be property in the usual sense was, of course, based upon its
doctrinal importance rather than a modern sense of information
as the basis of the economy, scientific progress and much else. Yet
his distinction between ownership of physical possessions andthe intrinsic replicability of information is even more importanta millennium-and-a-half later. His final, passionate plea before
the King had perfectly articulated the essential logic of Open
information:
My friend’s claim seeks to apply a worn out law to a new
reality. Books are different from other chattels and thelaw should recognise this. Learned men like us, who havereceived a new heritage of knowledge through books, havean obligation to spread that knowledge, by copying anddistributing those books far and wide. I haven’t used up
Finnian’s book by copying it. He still has the original andcoda: the original copyfight111

that original is none the worse for my having copied it. Nor
has it decreased in value because I made a transcript of it.
The knowledge in books should be available to anybody
who wants to read them and has the skills or is worthy
to do so; and it is wrong to hide such knowledge away
or to attempt to extinguish the divine things that books
contain. It is wrong to attempt to prevent me or anyone elsefrom copying it or reading it or making multiple copies todisperse throughout the land.

14
Acknowledgements

My deep gratitude to Sylvie for everything she has contributed tomaking this book happen, and my fulsome thanks to my editor
Jim McCue who helped wrangle the book into a coherent form.
As this book attests, our culture and our ideas are built on
the shoulders of others. Innumerable people have shared theirthoughts and time with me over the years and this book rests on
their contributions. There are many more than I could adequately
acknowledge and here I can only begin to thank some of those
who directly contributed to the making of this book: Lionel Bently,
Tanvir Chahal, Shelly Chen, Michiel De Jong, Cory Doctorow,
Lottie Fenby, Ninon Godefroy, Jonathan Gray, Robert Hart, Tim
Hubbard, Laura James, Adam Kariv, Liam Kavanagh, Martin
Kretschmer, Geoff Mulgan, Lieke Ploger, Cressida Pollock, Karen
Pollock, Gordon Pollock, Allison Randal, Andrew Rens, Esteban
Ruseler, Philipp Schmidt, Tom Steinberg, Audrey Tang, Fiona
Thompson, Paul Walsh, the Open Knowledge community, theShuttleworth Fellows and many, many more.