the following article is offered as food for thought... it is followed by an admittedly opinionated postscript which it is your constitutional right to ignore...
If you have the time on your hands and cash to spare, you can walk into the Patent and Trademark Office in Arlington, VA, sit down at a computer terminal and browse through the entire technological history of the United States, invention by invention: the drawings and descriptions of Morse, Whitney and Bell; the paper clip, the transistor, and the accelerating rush of scientific creativity in modern times.
"We have basically all the images and text going back to 1790," says the commissioner, Bruce Lehman. "That's unique in the world. This is a fabulous data base." It is a treasure trove for scientists, historians, students--anyone who needs to see the art and thinking of the inventors who came before.
Now the bad news. It will cost you $40 an hour, a prohibitive price for any but the most specialized user. Alternatively, you can dial into a private data service like Lexis or Dialog and pay even more--fees that can amount to hundreds of dollars an hour for public information.
This is the Information Age, Washington style. As a citizen of the United States, you have accumulated valuable property, in the not-so-ethereal form of data. And most of it is locked away where you cannot get at it.
Every time an inventor receives a patent, the secrets of the invention become available to the public for their perusal. The same is true of every planetary image beamed from a space vehicle, every corporate filing before the Securities and Exchange Commission, every decision of every judge, every Geological Survey map, every Federal health study and ultimately every memo of the President's, scrawled or E-mailed. They all join a virtual public library--arguably the most valuable storehouse of data on the planet. It is also one of the most archaic: scattered across departments, poorly catalogued and expensive to access. And, with few exceptions, it is off line.
Meanwhile, across the Potomac from the patent office, in a tiny room in the District of Columbia, sits the Internet Multicasting Service, which is not much more than a fast telephone line attached to a donated work station and disk drives. The service has obtained the patent data for last year and the first months of this year and put it on line, free, fully indexed and searchable. Carl Malamud, the service's founder, says he could just as easily offer the entire historical data base--but the office won't give him the data.
"They treat this as a product, but it's not a product--it's enabling information," he says. It is, or should be, fuel for the information economy.
The patent office already has a high-bandwidth Internet connection. That could easily enable any of the millions of home and business computers with access to the Internet to plug into its system and see what a user sees at that Arlington terminal, just as any computer can now plug into the New York Public Library's online catalogue or the data bases of thousands of other libraries. The public has already paid more than $400 million to create a patent data base available only to walk-in traffic.
So why not go on line? The commissioner's responses echo the reasoning of scores of other government agencies, Federal and local, facing the same issue:
It's not our job. "We're not a library," Lehman, the commissioner, says. "It's not the fundamental purpose of the patent office. Now if Congress wants to change that they can, and they can provide us with a tax appropriation to do that."
We're doing it anyway, as fast as we can. "It has always been part of our plan to provide a plug into the patent office to outsiders," Lehman says. "We are not at this moment in time in a position to open up that plug for technological reasons.
And, we must not compete with the private sector. "We're developing a big information industry in the United States. We already see about 30 companies that feed off the patent office, and we want to encourage that. Part of what we're trying to do is bootstrap new industries."
That last argument sounds attractive, until you realize that those companies are lobbying for the privilege of paying the Government more--in other words, they want to forestall competition. They belong to an industry that has used heavy, targeted campaign contributions to protect its stake in an economic model that is rapidly becoming obsolete: scarce data sold to specialists at high prices. West Publishing, with a near monopoly on the Government's court data bases, is a costly example, as lawyers quickly discover. The Internet has created a different model: information of all kinds, a mass audience, low prices.
Lehman acknowledges that private-information services lobby him hard to keep prices up; he denies being influenced by their pleas. Nevertheless, the patent office, like many other Federal agencies, sells its data mostly on old-style mainframe computer tapes, at prices low enough to guarantee enormous profits for commercial services but just high enough to prevent widespread distribution.
A potentially far-reaching new statute, passed with little fanfare this spring, requires Government agencies to make electronic data available for no more than the "cost of dissemination." Twenty-five years of patent data--for which the patent office charges nearly $200,000--would fit on tape costing no more than a hundred dollars. How to explain that gap? The office's arithmetic counts not lust the tapes and the few technician-hours that would be needed to fill them with data, but also fuzzier items: general staff time, updating the data bases and "customer service."
This is an Administration that has jawboned hard for the on-line world since taking office. The White House has an elegant home page on the Internet, with digital renditions of official seals, speeches and their press releases--political information sitting in for the real thing. Yet where the truly valuable data bases are concerned, the Clinton Administration has produced no comprehensive plan for the future.
It may not be necessary. The White House could take a powerful step forward merely by leaning on its bureaucrats: ordering them not just to comply with the new public-information law, but to embrace it. That would mean taking the crucial phrase cost of dissemination literally--cheap disks or tapes; duplicating and shipping and nothing else.
"People are concerned about universal access--the wire running into your house will be the easy part," says James Love, director of the Taxpayer Assets Project, a Washington advocacy group. "Certainly the one thing people shouldn't have to worry about is government information, the thing they own as taxpayers. There'll be lots of other things they won't be able to afford. At least this should be available."
copyright 1995, The New York Times, Inc.
this article was scanned into an electronic format and is proudly reproduced without the permission of the copyright holder... why? well, for starters, i take indignant exception to commissioner lehman's argument that the patent office's function is to provide fodder for the information industry--especially when:
as an historical phenomenon, the patent office is a uniquely conceived, and peculiarly american, blend of idealism and commercialism... the patent office owes its existence to that portion of the american revolutionary ethos (itself a product of the "enlightenment" as refracted through the colonial american consciousness) which identified information and inspiration as the catalytic agents of invention--a materialistic manifestation of the "common sense" championed by thomas paine and embodied in the public persona of benjamin franklin... the patent office, therefore, was established as a commercial catalyst--the dispassionate guardian of america's intellectual/industrial agar, in which the chromosomes of capitalism are nurtured... by establishing a highly specialized archive, where excruciatingly detailed data is systematically collected, collated, and cataloged, the united states sought to effect the widest and most pervasive dissemination of industrial and technological knowledge possible...
while a patent ensures individual inventors that their right to profit from their intellectual industry is safeguarded by the full weight of the federal judiciary, the prosecution of patent infringement is the domain of the justice department (in close collaboration with individual citizens and corporate entities), not the patent office... that the patent office is the ultimate arbiter of attribution is an accident inherent in its efficiency as an archive--patent applications record not only how, but why and who, just as your dna contains genetic markers which identify, and hence, individualize, it... by safeguarding the intellectual property of individual inventors, the patent office ensures that the ideas of others continue to serve as a spur to innovation, thereby fulfilling the most basic biological (with emphasis squarely on the logical) function--the replication, perpetuation, and mutation of america's economic chromosomes...
thus, if the patent office can be said to be in the business of "bootstrapping" new industries, to use commissioner lehman's term, it is not as a vendor of publicly-owned information, but as a open repository of intellectual endeavor--a federally mandated impetus to innovate... the purpose of the patent office as an organ of the federal government is to protect the integrity of america's intellectual inheritance, not to provide commercial interests with a virtual (in more than one sense) monopoly over public information... since the purpose of the patent office is to ensure individuals access to the intellectual infrastructure upon which the american economy is constructed, why should we be forced to pay in order to access that information in an electronic format--especially one ill-suited to adaptive equipment?
it's not merely a question of access to the patent office's archives--what about the national archives? the s.e.c's investigations, statistics, and findings? the u.s. geological survey? all of the information ever compiled by the census bureau, from its inception through 1990? the court records of the federal judiciary? all the presidents' papers? its our government, our information, our problem...
arguments concerning freedom of information invariably lead to proprietary issues... it's long (and justly) been said that freedom of the press applies only to those who own one... when it comes to publicly owned information--such as that maintained by the patent office, the national archives, and any other federal or state archive--it is "we the people" who not only own it, but who foot the bill to maintain it... why then should we allow the patent office, or any other publicly funded archive, to mark up publicly owned information exclusively in an unintelligible or imperfectly accessible format? why should we be forced to purchase publicly owned information from third parties? freedom of information need not be a merely an empty slogan...
comments? criticism? hate mail?
email me at <oedipus@hicom.net>
James Gleick's article copyright 1995,
The New York Times
rant copyright 1995, Oedipal Enterprises, (very) Ltd.
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