Will Davies of the IPPR publishes a paper examining the politics and economics of online information:

This paper looks at some of the politics and economics surrounding online information. It asks why this area become so bitterly contested, especially around intellectual property, and explores the dilemmas this creates for policy-makers. The paper stands back from this to ask why things have reached this impasse, and presents an analysis that positions all these competing visions within a broader understanding of what constitutes ‘the public sphere’. It concludes by out-lining the possibilities available for Government.

James Boyle writes in the FT about the EU’s empirical evaluation of whether the Database Directive, which gave intellectual property rights over the creation of database, is actually helping stimulate the industry.

Using a methodology similar to the one I described in an earlier column on the subject, the Commission found that “The economic impact of the “sui generis” right on database production is unproven. Introduced to stimulate the production of databases in Europe, the new instrument has had no proven impact on the production of databases.”

In fact, their study showed that the production of databases had fallen to pre-Directive levels and that the US database industry, which has no such intellectual property right, was growing faster than the EU’s. The gap appears to be widening. This is consistent with the data I summarised in my earlier article, but the Commission’s study is more recent and, if anything, more damning.

[...]

The Commission coupled its empirical study of whether the Directive had actually stimulated the production of new databases with another intriguing kind of empiricism. It sent out a questionnaire to the European database industry asking if they liked their intellectual property right – a procedure with all the rigour of setting farm policy by asking French farmers how they feel about agricultural subsidies.

Whilst the EU should be commended for its empirical study, and encouraged to do the same for other legislation, such as the new data retention directive, it’s a shame to see them diluting such good work with this weak and predictable industry questionnaire. Still, it’s a step in the right direction.

Went into BBC Television Centre last night to record a review of 2005 with Neil McIntosh, Tim Worstall, Chris Vallance and Kevin Anderson. Managed to get a plug in for the Open Rights Group, and you can listen to the show online for the next week (til Mon 9 Jan; our bit starts around 26:50). I’ll try to get an MP3 again if I can.

It was slightly odd doing a review of the year because I couldn’t remember much of it. Talk about the recency effect - most of the year before December was a bit of a blur really. I spent ten minutes or so before the session began flipping through Tim’s book, 2005 Blogged: Dispatches from the Blogosphere, trying to swat up on what actually happened. As it turned out, I didn’t really need to worry and it was fun to try and make predictions (or, in my case, fervently held hopes) for 2006.

Still I made one point that I would like to think more about, and maybe get a bit more evidence for: ‘political blogging’ is usually seen as attempting to influence the electorate regarding voting when in fact, I think that activist blogging is a strand of political blogging that going to be more influential in the long run. If political blogs is talking about political issues, activist blogs are trying to get people to do something about those issues. Is that too fine a line to draw? Or are activist blogs really different to (and potentially more influential than) straight political blogs?

The white paper that we prepared before Christmas for the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group’s public inquiry into digital rights management is now up on the ORG wiki.

You might also like to read Kevin Marks’ submission. If you submitted a paper, please let me know so that we can link to it, or feel free to put it on the ORG wiki.

Spent a bit of time today working on the ORG wiki, so if you have a bit of time to add more information to it, that’d be superb. In particular, I’ve added a resources page and an issues page, both of which could do with expansion.