IP: Accessibility of Federally-funded Data == THE PUBLIC's SIDE!

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

I am not at all sure Jim and I are on the opposite side. Also I note the main beneficiaries of the income from these 
are not the faculty (cept maybe in the bio sciences) but the institutions. djf


Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1999 18:38:05 -0800
To: farber () cis upenn edu
From: Jim Warren <jwarren () well com>

Hi Dave --

I suspect we're probably on opposite sides about this, but for the *other*
perspective ...

> ...  The [1998] bill language calls on the Director of the Office of
> Management and Budget (OMB) to revise OMB regulations "to require Federal
> awarding agencies to ensure that all data produced under an award
> [TAX-FUNDED!] will be made available to the public through the procedures
> established under the Freedom of Information Act."  Currently,
> only the federal agency funding the research can request raw data
> from researchers.
...
> The legislation has prompted concerns over the release and
> potential misuse of data before it has been peer-reviewed or
> published, the effect on intellectual property rights, and the
> possible violation of confidentiality of human research subjects. ...

1.  It has always been infuriating to me to know that many billions of
dollars of our PUBLIC TAX FUNDS were being eagerly accepted by [tax-funded]
researchers -- who then guarded and culled their data ever-so-carefully,
lest some competing researcher make use of it before its [tax-funded]
originator.

If they don't want to share with all interested members of the public, the
data that the public was forced through taxes to pay for, then they should
damned-well go get private funding for their possessive research.


2.  It has been even more infuriating that the results of PUBLICLY-funded
research has then been locked up for *decades* by the TAX-paid researcher
or their employer, via monopoly patent claims.

If they want to monopolize the results of their research, they can
damned-well go get private funding, just like *honest* entrepreneurs.

Aside from proprietary exploitation by drug companies of tax-funded
research, one of the more agregious examples are the U.S. (only!) patents
on fundamental public-key crypto.  In this case -- through an anomaly of
international i.p. law -- the ONLY people and companies who are PROHIBITED
(by Stanford's p.k. patents) from free public-domain use of public-key
technology are the same Americans who *paid* for the research at private
Stanford University, that produced p.k.!


3.  The whine about "violation of confidentiality of human research
subjects," is a completely-false misdirection.  Just as the federal Privacy
Act (as well as parts of the federal FOIA, itself!) protects against
release of most personal information in otherwise-public federal files, so
also would it apply to research data.

--jim; Jim Warren
columnist, activist, open-government advocate; jwarren () well com
345 Swett Rd, Woodside CA 94062; 650-851-7075; fax-for-the-quaint/650-851-2814

[self-inflating puff: Hugh Hefner First-Amendment Award, Playboy Foundation;
Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award (in its first year);
James Madison Freedom-of-Information Award, Soc.of Prof.Journalists-Nor.Calif
founded InfoWorld; the Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conferences; etc etc etc.]