I am compiling intellectual property issues that will affect two Federal
information systems, and would appreciate any comments, insights, extended
diatribes, etc. from the community. Should you reply, please indicate if
you wish to remain anonymous, be quoted, and so on.
The systems are NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System
(EOSDIS), and the Global Change Data and Information System (GCDIS).
For those wishing detail, a description of the goals of these systems follows. The issues I have so far identified are in the second section.
The participating Federal agencies, academia, and the international community have made a commitment to work with each other to make it as easy as possible for researchers and others to access and use global change data and information. The GCDIS is the set of individual agency data and information systems supplemented by a minimal amount of crosscutting new infrastructure, made interoperable by the use of standards, common approaches, technology sharing, and data policy coordination. The GCDIS user community extends from global change researchers to other researchers, policy-makers, educators, private industry, and private citizens.
The participating agencies are the following: Agriculture, Commerce (NOAA), Defense, Energy, Interior, State, EPA, NASA, and the NSF. Each of these agencies will modify their internal information management systems to be interoperable with GCDIS, and as such, EOSDIS forms NASA's contribution to GCDIS. The EOSDIS will manage data from NASA's Earth science research satellites, airborne campaigns, field measurement campaigns, as well as some inter-agency data, and foreign data resulting from international agreements.
The intent is to provide users a view of all priority data and information
regardless of source (agency, university, state, or international), type
(digital, analog, text), whether or not the data or information were
obtained through focused programs of the USGCRP, and to give the users the
ability to identify, search, view, order, and (where possible) take
electronic delivery of all data managed under this plan through access to
any single agency system. The goal is to provide services to users from the
high end (T1 to T3 connections, workstations) down to users who own laptops
and modems.
The plans also call for data and information location and access connections to additional systems, such as those maintained by the States, other countries (both developed and developing), and international government and non-government organizations. Libraries and information centers, with their data and information resources, services, and standards, will be an integral part of the GCDIS, giving access to those users who cannot afford computer systems.
2. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ISSUES The data and information that these systems intend to make available includes not only data sets gathered by the Government, but also all of the derivative datasets, the algorithms, and the scientific results and conclusions. In the sections below I refer to all this material as 'data'. Current policy dictates that US Government data be made available at the cost of reproduction, and that researchers using the system make available all their data (algorithms, results, etc.) derived from EOSDIS products to the other users. There are in addition other categories of data that are copyrighted, or that will be released under license agreements. ESA, the European Space Agency, deems that its data has commercial value, and so exercises copyright by licensing data for scientific purposes only. NASA has also entered into a data purchase agreement with a private enterprise that will provide ocean color data that also has commercial value. This data will be encrypted and licensing will be enforced with public keys issued at regular intervals. Similar situations exist at most agencies with Global Change data.
PUBLISHING: EOSDIS had intended to provide the relevant articles on the collection and proper use of data in some sort of Browse products, but electronic reproduction of copyrighted material from journals was immediately recognized as a problem.
It is fairly clear that having this type of material is to the advantage of the users, and it is clear that the problem is royalty collection. It is also clear that a collection and accounting system would put great burdens on the DIS (those burdens are precisely the reason for the marginal cost policy). Perhaps the DIS could supply pointers to an electronic copyright clearinghouse (using EDI standards, knowbots?), with the copyright holders providing the manpower and information to run some sort of list server with the relevant articles. Perhaps library problems and the scanning debate are relevant here.
These types of problems apply to all other relevant publications, including general interest articles for the public, educational materials with copyright, as well as several other product categories that may be of advantage to include, such as commercially provided data or processing algorithms, commercial network access software etc. etc. In short, any material for which remuneration is a precondition for its availability.
LEVELS OF PROTECTION: To ensure that the systems can offer all relevant data, including data that may be copyrighted, there will have to be some sort of compartmentalization of both data and users. Levels of protection may range from none at all (public domain), simple enclosure of a copyright notice, restricted access, to fully encrypted data. As yet, very little has been done to address commercial users and suppliers. Because the potential user base is so large, there is a very real possibility that there will be insufficient bandwidth for the demand, and that a peripheral supply industry could grow around the fringes of the system to meet the excess demand. No policy has been formulated to address this type of secondary use.
LICENSING & CONTRACT LAW: Most software purchase agreements fall under contract law rather than copyright law, and a similar situation will exist for GC- and EOSDIS. What problems exist when a user is in Louisiana (where shrink-wrap licenses are not valid), or when a user calls from, say, Taiwan? What if the caller from Taiwan calls a computer in Stanford and logs in from there? Obviously, some pragmatic solutions are needed that take inter-state and international contract law differences into account, rather than a blind faith in technological solutions. The validity of electronic contracts and the EDI protocols are an area of direct interest here.
BBS: Electronic bulletin boards are changing the way scientific literature is generated and used. Several areas of physics are using electronic bulletin boards as repositories for 'works-in-progress', and as sources for the latest theories. Journals in the field have been relegated to archival roles. It could be argued that science was always done this way, because unless you were receiving preprints from your colleagues, you weren't really at the forefront anyway, but the BBS system has opened up physics in a way that most users find beneficial.
I read with interest the latest postings to CNI-copyright about BBS liability. GCDIS may have a BBS for 'work in progress'. Copyright issues may arise here when an article is submitted for publication after a public posting. Anybody know of any other issues here?
LIABILITY: Although it falls outside intellectual property law, liability
is an unavoidable issue. Pure science has advanced in the past through, logically enough, the scientific method. Mistaken theories resulted in, at least, some professional embarrassment, and at most, career damage. If, asis now proposed, pure science is used in a much more direct manner to formulate broad public policy decisions (e.g. How much setback there should be along seashores in the zoning laws...) there are far greater implications for the careful interpretation of results and the appropriate application of analytical tools supplied by GCDIS. Potentially, these tools might be used to support opposing sides of environmental litigation. Software liability is a very real issue.
FUTURE: There is still a state of legislative flux surrounding many of these issues: is data a work? What constitutes software reuse? How is hypermedia classified? Will software have a separate hybrid copyright/patent category? Will there be licenses required for programming and network access?
Also, the prospect of universal access to the information network through the cable/telephone system promises unforeseen users. Currently, the largest group of inquiries to the National Weather Service comes from the legal community ("...was there ice in Wabash, MN, on the day my client slipped?"). Similarly, we cannot predict from which user community the greatest demand will come.
3. WHO AM I? I am a Visiting Scientist at the Universities Space Research Association in Washington DC, and am researching data policy at NASA. I was recently a geophysicist, but I seem to have been sidetracked.
Dr. Paul E. Filmer | (202) 479-2609 voice
Universities Space Research Association | (202) 479-2613 fax
300 D Street, SW | INTERNET: filmer[_at_]usra.edu
Washington, DC 20024 |
| OMNET: p.filmer
Received on Thu Jan 27 1994 - 20:30:08 GMT
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