On any given day you can find thousands of words of reporting, advocacy and debate over the role of patents in technology. One side promotes the availability of patent protection as the source of much innovation, while the other contends that patents have exactly the opposite effect, and many other vices besides.
There is, however, one inequity that patents help to perpetuate that gets little attention. That inequity arises in the area of standards, where the owners of patents can exercise significant influence not only over the costs of implementing standards, but over who can reap the greatest economic benefits from producing standardized products at all. In a nutshell, this inequity works to the favor of patent owners in developed countries, and to the disadvantage of the industries of developing countries, making it that much harder for those living in emerging nations to attain the same standard of living as those lucky enough to be born into the developed world.
I dedicated the latest issue of my eJournal, Standards Today, to this topic, and if you're interested in the intersection of social justice, intellectual property and government, you might find it worth a read. Here's what the issue is all about.
The recent announcement of a new standard for "slipperiness" reminded me not only of the seemingly infinite, and at times surprising, types of standards we find we cannot live without, but also of the linkage between language and standards.
The standard in question was developed by the Entertainment Services and Technology Association (ESTA), one of those worthy standards development organizations that may somehow have escaped your notice to date. According to the
ESTA Web site, its core mission is "Building the Business of Show Business," and in support of that quest, its Floors Working Group developed what it calls
BSR E1.34-200x, Entertainment Technology - Measuring and Specifying the Slipperiness of Floors Used in Live Performance Venues.
If one were so inclined, one might wonder whether it is more surprising that the world has existed so long without a way to measure the slipperiness of the floors of live performance venues, or that someone has now taken the time and effort to plug that remarkably small gap (odds are that your wonder may incline towards the latter). Still, as noted in the announcement, "It is axiomatic that you can't manage what you can't measure," and if you're in the Business of Building Show Business, I guess it's quite plausible that you might find yourself in need of managing the slipperiness of live performance venues as well.
Over the last several months I have spoken at conferences and symposia in places as widely dispersed as Washington and Cambridge, Beijing and New Haven. In each case, the topic was the intersection of standards and the public interest, comprehending new concepts such as the "knowledge commons" and increasing importance of "cyberinfrastructure," and issues such as government's responsibility to utilize appropriate standards to safeguard the future of public documents, and the best way to ensure that the promise of information and communications technologies (ITC) is fulfilled in developing nations. These gatherings have been held under the auspices of institutions as diverse as the National Academies and the United Nations Development Programme, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce and the United States – European Commission Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, and the Law Schools of Harvard and Yale Universities.
The fact that so many people are meeting in so many venues to discuss standards in non-technical contexts demonstrates the fact that something new and important is at work here. And the fact that many of these conferences are taking place in academic and government venues suggests that people are still trying to figure out what it's all about.
Human beings have an astonishing capacity to take the most incredible innovations for granted almost as soon as they begin to enjoy them. A less attractive feature of human nature is our ability to forget (and even not care) that others may not be able to enjoy those same advantages. Sometimes, those that are disadvantaged in this way may even lose ground as we gain new conveniences and privileges, because those that are less fortunate may lose access to traditional services as they migrate to the Web.
As a result, I have tried to do my part to focus attention on a regular basis on Web and IT accessibility issues, in all their many forms (a recent example is here). Happily, the media in general are paying closer attention to equal IT access, if only because advocates of the rights of (for example) those with physical abilities have sought to make accessibility issues more visible. A recent example of such public attention was the focus in Massachusetts on accessibility in connection with the adoption of ODF. More broadly, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a multi-year initiative under the auspices of the United Nations, has sought to promote Internet and Web accessibility on a global basis.
To the general public, hardware and software economic roadblocks to Third World equality of access are easy to understand, and thus the worthwhile work of the One Laptop Per Child initiative justifiably receive wide attention. But there are many other initiatives that have been, and continue to be, pursued largely outside public notice. These projects address much more basic infrastructural challenges, and therefore appear less "interesting" to the general public. Yet without this important work, true global equality of Internet and Web access would not only be economically challenging to achieve, but technically impossible as well.
Citizens of modern societies lead highly regulated lives. Whether as individuals we agree or disagree with the degree to which governments control our existence, we nevertheless benefit from a myriad of laws and regulations that seek to ensure our safety and welfare. The range of regulation is breath taking, encompassing the purity of air and water, the quality of food, the sanitation of towns and cities, the safety of transportation systems, and the delivery of utilities and other essential services, to name just a few.
To date, however, the provision and usage of information and communications technologies (ICT) are largely unregulated at the technical level, despite the increasingly profound impact that ICT has on our lives. True, the communications side of the equation continues to be subject to significant government control. Radio, television, and a rapidly increasing range of wireless frequencies are the subject of treaties internationally, while the allocation, sale and usage of the bandwidth thus defined remains the province of national regulation. In the United States, Congress occasionally passes a law to accomplish a particular data-related purpose, such as preventing the unauthorized sale of consumer information. But most aspects of the modern networked world are controlled primarily by commercial forces, and to the extent that they are regulated on a de facto basis, it is through the adoption and use of consensus (and sometimes proprietary) standards.
Three and a half years after 9/11, I remain astonished at how few of the comparatively easy and essential defensive tasks we've accomplished, in comparison to the vastly expensive (and often unsuccessful) initiatives that we have mounted. One shining example is the failure to create and deploy a suite of effective first responder standards to enable those whose peak performance would be most essential in the case of a new disaster to even communicate effectively with each other. Another is to put in place the necessary technical, procedural and regulatory controls needed to protect sensitive personal information.
I have two consortium clients dedicated to information security, and both have found it necessary to issue statements recently to highlight gaps in our cyber defenses. The first was a terse statement issued on January 18 by PCI Security Standards Council, LLC, an organization formed by the major credit card payment brands (American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa International) to create and administer global security standards up and down the credit card payment chain. The statement was occasioned by news of the latest in an ongoing series of breaches of consumer financial records, in this case involving millions of customer records maintained by retialer Target Corporation.
A story that aired on the NBC evening news recently highlighted an even more appalling situation – focusing on county and other governments that had placed records on their Websites that included the social security numbers, names and birth dates of individuals. These sites, of course, provide a gold mine for identity theft.
And then there is a press release issued two days ago by the Cybersecurity Industry Alliance (CSIA), whose top-level membership includes all of the major and anti-virus and other security vendors. It's sober reading.
For more than 200 years, moderns have sought to divine the life stories of the ancients through the practice of archaeology. Through such efforts, we can learn something about the quotidian existence of not only those prehistorians that left no written descriptions of their daily lives, but also of our more recent forebears, who rarely saw fit to tell us what they ate for breakfast or which penny dreadfuls and broadsheets they liked to read.
Of course, archaeology permits us at best to see through a glass very darkly. Not only are we limited by the vagaries of what has survived through fortuitous chance, but by the fact that few materials used in daily life are designed for long-term survival under harsh conditions. As a result, not much has been consistently preserved from before the last millennia other than a limited number of works of art, personal adornment and handwritten books, records and plays. For more, we must grub around in the ruins of palaces and hovels to see what has survived the unforgiving embrace of dirt, or search about in the more preserving, but much less accessible, chilly depths of the sea.
Hence, the farther back we look into the past, the less we are likely to find, and the more limited are the types of artifacts we can hope to discover. For a few hundred years of history, we may discover glass and metal, crockery and bones, and (particularly in arid regions), scraps of basketry and fabrics. For a while longer, there are seeds and pollens, stones and bones. But soon enough there are only enigmatic stone flakes and tools – not much from which to intuit how a people lived, what they knew, and how they understood themselves, their gods and the world around them.
Unicode marks the most significant advance in writing systems since the Phoenicians
James J. O'Donnell, Provost, Georgetown University
There are fundamental standards that are constantly in the news, such as XML (and its many offspring). And there are standards development organizations, like the W3C, that enjoy a high profile in part because of the importance of the technical domains that they serve. Some standards have even taken on socio-political significance, becoming pawns in international diplomacy, such as the root domains of the Internet, despite the fact that they are insignificant in size and design. .
But there are other standards that go largely unheralded, and are developed by consortia that are virtually never in the news, despite the vast social and technical significance of the standard in question. Perhaps chief among them is the Unicode, created and constantly extended by the Unicode Consortium, whose loyal and widely distributed team of contributors for the most part labor quietly in the background of information technology.
Notwithstanding the low profile of the Unicode and its creators, it is this standard that enables nearly all those living in the world today to communicate with each other in their native language character sets. It even permits the words of many of those that lived in the past to become accessible to those alive today in electronic form, and in their original character sets as well.
Following a ten hour, acrimonious debate, the U.S. Senate voted 63 to 34 yesterday to approve a measure that would confirm that detainees can be deprived of certain rights to contest their detention; would bar certain interrogation techniques; but would allow the President to determine whether other techniques would or would not constitute violations of the applicable Geneva Convention. Concurrently, the United Nations is debating what actions, if any, to take to defend those in danger of starvation, disease and violent death in Darfur.
Today, it seems that the progress towards consensus on human rights, and agreement on effective mechanisms to guarantee those rights, is at best lagging. As a result, I've dedicated the September issue of the Consortium Standards Bulletin to the topic of Standards and the Human Rights Crisis. You can view the entire issue here, and the editorial is reproduced below.
NATURAL LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of the divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
The American Declaration of Indepence (1776)
In contrast to 1776, the idea of human rights is today often addressed as a relative rather than an absolute concept. Despite the fact that the modern concept of democracy was in part based upon a belief that human beings possess "unalienable rights," even democratic governments today disagree on how such rights must be honored in the breach. As a result, only scattered, selective, and in some cases haphazard mechanisms exist to permit the global community to intervene (if so inclined) to protect the rights of the individual against the powers of the state.
Nova aired an excellent program last night called Building on Ground Zero, and has what may be a long-term page set up here, with a variety of stories, slideshows and interviews on the same topic. The show was memorable for many reasons, one of which was its focus on both the importance as well as the economic calculus of standards. Another was the degree to which the US is lagging in the upgrading of crucial standards identified in the wake of the 9/11 catastrophe, although a number of Asian nations have apparently taken to heart the lessons learned five years ago today.
It's rare that standards are featured so prominently in a documentary, and even more unusual for them to be dealt with so clearly and intelligently. The WGBH team behind the Nova program derived much of its data from the detailed investigation performed by the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) and the final recommendations of that agency. The 30 detailed recommendations offered by NIST cover a broad range of topics, including upgrading of materials, reexamining existing safety margins, improving communications, providing for more effective evacuation capabilities, and much more. Nova reports that implementing all of the engineering-related recommendations, if I recall correctly, would add a total of about 5% to total building costs.
Tellingly, the experts interviewed on the program conclude that the Twin Towers were not only adequately designed, but indeed had been engineered with a degree of ingenuity that permitted them to withstand the infernos set within them quite well before the towers ultimately collapsed. What failed, therefore, was not the design — but many of the standards to which the design was built.