data sharing/commercial value

[Karstad-Schueler]

Doug Yanega wrote:

> another aspect of public access [to collection data]
> is the access to *commercially valuable* scientific information. For
> example, a person considering a new cash crop plant might simply
> plug into collection databases and extract information about
> insect pollinators or herbivores, etc., and profit
> tremendously, with nothing going back to the institutions that
> supplied the information.
> if this information is worth so much money, then we may have a right
> to share in that profit, a right we essentially
> sacrifice if we make everything public.

* I suggest that the problem here is a basic incompatibility of
values. In science and scholarship the source of the data receives
more status the more often and more widely the data are used, and we
all try (within the constraints imposed by trying to get our own stuff
out) to have our data and publications used and cited as widely as
possible. Socially, scholarship is essentially a potlatch: we get
status by giving stuff away, because the recipients can use what we
give away, and we don't lose the use of it.

Commerce is the opposite system: trying to get more stuff by taking it
away from those who have it (this pleisiomorphic system is better
suited to material 'resources' that aren't easily repoduced, as any
Song Sparrow could explain). When commerce intrudes on scholarship,
inviable hybrid, oxymoronic, phrases like "intellectual property
rights" are spawned.

If the "person considering raising a new cash crop plant" were working
within a potlatch system, and was succcessful with the new crop, he
would have (purely internally, without any external accounting) to try
to give back to the source of the pollinator/herbivore data gifts
whose value exceeded the benefit gained from the data, and they would,
in turn, try to give him counsel whose value again exceeded that of
the libraries, endowments, cabinets, etc, given in return for the
first data.  The problem here, is that within our own system we have
to give out data freely, and we don't have any automatic mechanism for
excluding what evolutionary behaviourists or game theorists call
'cheaters.'

At the Model Forest "Biodiversity as criteria and indicators of
sustainable forestry" meeting in Gananoque this October Ole
Hendrickson discussed international protocols regarding biodiversity.
He didn't point it out, but these call for study of everything but the
problem. The problem of unsustainable forestry is: what makes
transnational companies want to come, uninvited, onto other People's
land and carelessly cut down excessive numbers of trees? We need to
study this, and I suggested that anthropologists be deployed to the
board rooms to find out, so the exploiters can be understood, if not
controlled.

So Doug's problem is the core problem of the current economic system,
over-exploitation of ecosystems, and mass extinction.  We have to find
a solution to it: maybe we present reasoned alternatives, maybe we
giggle under our breath whenever they appear, maybe we ignore them as
much as possible, or maybe we try to rouse the electorate. Game
theorists, Pacific Coast First Nations, museum people, and others with
theoretical or practical experience with the interface between
potlatch and commercial value systems all have to work together to
find the solution to this problem, or we can kiss the world as we know
it goodbye.

fred.
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         Eastern    Ontario    Biodiversity    Museum
                Grenville Co, Ontario, Canada
(RR#2 Oxford Station, K0G 1T0) (613)258-3107   bckcdb at istar.ca
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