Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

UNESCO Symposium on the Knowledge Society

Today's UNESCO symposium featured a panel of eminent politicians and technology leaders. After a brief introduction by Stephen Cole of the BBC, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo spoke of Africa's role in the knowledge society. "When you talk about knowledge, you want to talk about what you know, and seek knowledge on that which you do not know -- and I will talk about what I know, which is Africa," he began. Africa, he said, is the "original home of knowledge - the awareness of your surroundings and the indigenous capacity to explore, create, transmit ideas and opportunities." But over time, new civilizations would appear, and Africa fell further behind. "What happened to the genesis of knowledge in Africa?" he asked. Through centuries of colonization and social strife, Africa's capacity to create knowledge was eroded.

"We are now in a world village, but is it a village where we cannot communicate? What kind of village would that be?" he asked. "Even in small villages there are not communicating, because the poor are not communicating with the rich. Poor countries are not communicating with rich countries."

"People talk about having too much information," he added, "but what about making information accessible to all? Now we have this thing called ICT. What does it mean in an African village? Can it be of benefit to improve ordinary peoples' knowledge? I've seen the impact of it." Obasanjo went on to describe how Nigerian farmers can use weather data to know when to plant their crops, waiting until late-season storms pass, thanks to the information they have collected through ICTs. "Rural farmers do not have the education that we have, but they are not morons," he said emphatically. They only need greater access to knowledge and education.

"Shouldn't we have a way of democratizing knowledge? I can see this will be an uphill task. We are only paying lip service to democratization in general, let alone to democratization of knowledge.... You can't talk about freedom without free access to knowledge."

"I believe we cannot be talking seriously about freedom of expression without talking about the democratization of knowledge, because there must be a free flow of ideas, where everyone can go online."

"Can we not have a dialogue?" he concluded. "Is it not possible? ... Our work and decisions we reach here will determine the world we live in tomorrow. Will it be a harmonious village or a divided one?"

John Gage of Sun spoke following Obasanjo, focusing directly on the Nigerian president's comment that people do not have freedom unless they they have free access to knowledge. John painted an image of young people in Nigeria at a cybercafe - not only are they being exposed to information from around the world, he said, but they are the first generation to be creators of content, masters of a medium in which they can be producers. His presentation couldn't have been more than five minutes, essentially, it was a personalized response for Obasanjo. Obasanjo listened intently, nodding his head and taking notes. You could feel the gears of his mind running at full speed.

Lawrence Lessig of Stanford then spoke about the state of copyright, describing it as an essential feature of a creative society, but one that needs to be kept in tune with the technological times. Today, he said, copyright law is wildly out of date -- it presumes too easily that all content must require permission before use, creating transaction costs that often make content inaccessible to anyone but rich people with lawyers. (In the background, a slide displayed the phrase costs=death.) Technology enables creativy, he said, but the law disables it.

Lessig said you could tackle the problem two ways - either a top-down approach or a bottom-up one. If you start from the top, you could update the Berne Convention and update the legal formalities regarding copyright registration, renewal and content marking. But this requires lawyers, which means only the rich will have access. But if you take a bottom-up approach, he said, a world of possibilities opens up. He described the creative commons approach -- creating a voluntary online system that allows copyright owners to publish information clarifying how their content can be used, in a way that is easily identifiable. By filling out an online form, a copyright owner generates a human-readable deed that explains to anyone how their content may be used; a lawyerly license that covers it from a legal perspective; and a machine-readable license that allows search engines and other online tools to detect automatically how your content can be used.

Lessig gave an example of a young man writing a song and recording himself playing it on his guitar. He creates a license for it and makes it available online. Since the license allows anyone to download it and manipulate it, a girl finds it on the Net and downloads it. She plays violin, so she adds a violin track to the piece and republishes it on the Net. Creative content made by two people who have never met, without any lawyers getting in the way. So far over a million websites have used Creative Commons, and it's spreading internationally to address the copyright laws of different countries around the world. Soon, he said, they will add a developing countries clause to the licenses, so content may be tagged as being freely available for people in the developing world, while those in the developing world would have to make other licensing arrangements. -ac