Implications of the Evolution and Consumption of Intellectual Property
Sorel Reisman
2cnd Vice President, Electronic Products and Services Board
July 2007
Intellectual property (IP) is undergoing a dramatic evolution, from traditional media formats available through conventional distribution channels, to all-digital formats available almost exclusively over the Internet. To survive, for- and non-profit entities dependent on traditional forms of IP must evolve their business strategies to address this evolution; they must also give consideration to the changing behaviors and tastes of both the suppliers and consumers of IP.
Suppliers
In the case of the Computer Society (CS), aside from membership revenues, the preponderance of our revenue has come from magazine/transaction subscriptions, conference fees and proceedings. In the last few years, the CS Digital Library has generated an increasingly large majority of revenue, still through the sale of IP in the form of PDFs generated from traditional, printed magazine articles and conference proceedings. Mostly what has changed is the distribution medium. The source and even in some ways the format of the IP remains the same - peer reviewed articles submitted, reviewed, and published as PDFs via magazine/transaction/conference review editorial boards and publications services.
However, there are major changes taking place in the centers that generate this kind of IP – typically higher education institutions. In the 3-tiered hierarchy of higher education, there are i) R1 (upper tier, research-oriented) doctorate-granting universities, ii) state systems (some offering doctorates), and iii) community colleges. Traditionally, faculty in all of these tiers, to one degree or another, have been encouraged to do research and publish in peer reviewed publications in order to attain tenured faculty positions. This has been the major source of IP for CS publications. Over the last decade there has been a radical change in higher education. Well over 50% of instructors across the nation are now part-time or adjunct faculty, and the concept of tenure no longer applies to them. Their performance is based almost entirely on their classroom instruction, and because of this, there is hardly any motivation for them to generate traditional IP for peer-review publications/conferences.
This is the beginning of a trend that will eventually result in the elimination of academic tenure, a status that in many ways is already an anachronism, resented by the general population, for reasons of economics and of envy. This should really not be a surprise since the kind of job security offered by tenure no longer exists in any other facet of our employment sectors. The consequence of this trend will be a shrinking source of the traditional, high quality, peer reviewable IP that has, to date, been the basis of most of the Computer Society’s revenue.
Practitioners developing IP from best practices.
Consumers
The traditional Computer Society member today is largely a middle+ age academic or practitioner who was raised and educated before the Internet. Many current members can play the game of, “Do you remember when you had to boot the computer with a plug board or paper tape or console switches or ….” In fact there are too many of us in that demographic today. But there is a whole new demographic out there that can play a different game of, “Do you remember when Windows 98 crashed every time you attached a printer?” or the demographic that can reprogram an iPod or XBox, or spam every YouTube user in North America, and doesn’t care how any of this stuff really works, as long as they can make it do what they want it to do.
This is a new and different generation of computer user, educated on the Internet, world-wise in the way computers are, rather than how they were, and a generation in which attention deficit is not a disorder but a way of life. This is a generation of computer users, [even including IT professionals] who don’t give a damn about peer reviewed articles in magazines or in PDF formats. This is a generation of “professionals” who want bite-sized chunkettes of information that will enable them to get on with what ever it is they have to do. This is a generation that is not interested in lengthy tomes of peer-reviewed materials. This is a generation that wants to Google and find what they want in the first three of the 7,000,000 search hits. For this generation, IP only has value if it’s brief, to the point, is mostly correct, and has utility.
Another aspect of this new generation is the value they place on the importance of their own opinions, right or wrong in the face of volumes of empirical evidence. This is a generation that demands to be heard on just about any topic -- a generation for whom blogs and wikis and YouTube are all legitimate sources of information. Like it or not, that’s the way it is, and that’s the way it’s going to be, and in order for the CS to continue to be viable, we need to attract the IT professionals who play in this new arena.
For Survival
In order to remain viable, the CS must offer young IT professionals the products they want in the ways they want to receive and use them. The popularity of Google and YouTube provides clear markers on ways to do this. The website www.computer.org requires a radical redesign that incorporates interactive tools that enable community-building among IT professionals who visit the website.
As we begin to redesign the website, we already understand that blogs, wikis, and threaded discussions are essential elements. As subsequent versions of the website become available, it will incorporate customization and personalization features to allow visitors to build their own “my-computer.org.” And as these personalized sites proliferate, we can expect them to begin to self-generate personal communities among visitors with common professional needs – specialized communities of research and practice that will be generated by IT professionals seeking solutions to IT problems. And these solutions must, as described above, be brief, to the point, mostly correct, and have utility.
Initially, the nucleus of expertise available to the communities that will self-create from the new interactive tools will be the traditional forms of IP that we currently produce – articles and conference presentations. However, with systemic-strategies that we must develop to encourage their growth, we should begin to see the formation of new kinds of IP-generating micro-communities of expertise. In the simplest sense, these might consist of threaded discussions related to, for example, a specific conference presentation, where conference participants or others wish to discuss with one another and/or with the presenter, matters related to the presentation. While such threaded discussions might have a brief “half life,” perhaps only for the duration of the conference, we hope that the members of that micro-community will continue to interact with one another via the interactive community tools provided on the new www.computer.org.
An interesting offshoot of this kind of community building can provide the Computer Society with new revenue producing opportunities based on the generation of a new kind of IP – that produced by the expert participants of our new communities, and archived within our own new community-enabling tools.
The “harvesting” of IP generated by these micro-communities should present new product marketing opportunities that will allow us to capitalize on the expertise of many, many community participants, rather than the few thousand who currently write magazine and transaction articles, or who present at conferences. In addition, the nature of the new, community-created IP should be in form and content, desirable to the new demographic of IT professional. It will be brief, it will address specific, timely issues, and best of all for them, they will generate it themselves!
For the ongoing good health of the Computer Society, these new forms of IP should provide opportunities for new revenue generation by, for example, targeted community-focused advertising, variable charges for participating and/or accessing communities, or for attending virtual conferences, some even in virtual worlds such as Second Life.
We Must Be Prepared
Currently, the Computer Society’s operations are guided by the Policies and Procedures Manual (PP&M). Much of the content in the PP&M, related to publications and web operations, is based on models that are rapidly becoming obsolete. For example, it will be essential for the CS to begin to seriously consider the implications of Open Access content in a ‘free for all’ community proliferating environment. We will have to address issues of ownership of community-generated online materials in ways that have not been relevant to traditional publishing operations to this point. Serious examination of Creative Commons’ licensing practices will have to be done and incorporated into revisions of the PP&M.
And finally, it will be essential for us to develop new policies that guarantee that all our IP, in whatever form it takes, continues to meet the high standards of accuracy and expertise ensured by our peer review processes. In order to maintain our worldwide reputation as leaders in computing, we will have to develop equivalent vetting processes for these new forms of IP so that members and non-members alike will have confidence in the quality of their online participation in the professional network sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society.