Bridge to Asia -- News

First World Intellectual Property Regimes Slow China's Modernization

Jeff Smith

[Edited from "World Information", World-Information.org, distributed at the World Summit on the Information Society, Geneva, 10-12 December 2003]

China cannot afford the knowledge it needs in fields that are critical to development. It cannot pay First World prices for the hundreds of thousands of Western books, journals, databases and other materials -- in agriculture, finance, engineering, law, medicine, and other essential fields -- that are needed by its universities and research centers.

The depth of this knowledge gap can be seen in universities which are among the poorest institutions in the country. Their libraries, at the heart of the higher education enterprise, are outdated and half empty. The result is a calamity: faculty cannot stay current, students cannot learn what they should, and the system will not produce enough well trained graduates to sustain the modernization of the country.

The poverty of most libraries may be hidden by showcase buildings but is plan to see in the stacks. The new Library of Peking University, impressive as it appears, holds a large but weak collection. The Medical Library of Xi'an Jiaotong University is more typical: virtually all of its shelves are empty and coated with dust, and a small faculty reading room holds just a handful of current titles.

Why are there no books? Because they cost too much. The price of a Western textbook in medicine equals the monthly salary of a professor, and digital 'books' are equally expensive when they exist. The price of a core collection of new books and journals in Medicine and Health -- the 1,054 books and 220 journals recommended by the U.S. Medical Library Association -- is US$150,000, which beyond the means of nearly all universities. The price of 144 such collections for all of China's medical schools, is $20 million, beyond the means of the Ministry of Public Health.

China's inability to pay First World prices creates the default conditions that prevail: use of international editions of a limited number of textbooks; reliance on 'house books' that are printed in-country as copies of foreign materials (a practice that has recently stopped); use of donated used books from overseas; and use of digital materials -- none of which is a substitute for a proper library.

The Internet vs. cellulose and ink

Enthusiasts predicted that the Internet would replace paper libraries and make knowledge accessible to everyone. Yet, books have persevered -- hard copy materials, costly as they are, are still the most practical means of transferring knowledge to the greatest number of people -- and access to up to date journals and books remains limited to a few.

Scholars in China can use the Web to read catalogues of libraries or indexes of databases, but few can access the full text of a book or a document. SCIENCE is an exception -- China has paid $100,000 for a national site license for the journal, and users at nearly all universities can read the full contents on-line. Still, there are thousands of other journals, many more essential than SCIENCE, either not available in digital form or, if available, not affordable.

The more profound limitation is that most texts and references in higher education are not digitized, and they may never be, at least not in the foreseeable future. This limitation is severe. For example, Harvard University's Widener Library reports that only "a minuscule percent" of the 5.7 million materials in its collections can be found in electronic form.

This is not a fault of the technology, but of the privatization of the knowledge commons through regressive intellectual property regimes.

Some day, information technology may realize its potential to make knowledge universally accessible. For now, for most scholars in China and other developing countries, that day is far off -- and for most scholarly materials, the technology of cellulose and ink continues to rule, and with it, the high prices set by the First World knowledge industry.

Attempts to close the knowledge gap

Bridge to Asia (BTA) was founded in 1987 to supply Chinese universities with donated books, a second best strategy for providing a knowledge base. In cooperation with Western scholarly societies, professional associations, and the Chinese Ministry of Education, it gathered millions of used books and journals and delivered them to hundreds of universities. In the past five years, BTA supplied more than half of all foreign language books acquired by Chinese universities overall.

BTA has also used the Internet to help make some knowledge more affordable: it provided document delivery services in law and medicine, and conducted the first telemedicine trials between China and the U.S. by the Internet and by e-mail.

These and other efforts by both sides, energetic and well intentioned as they have been, have not provided what China truly needs: full collections of newly purchased books and journals equal to world class libraries.

Need for radical reforms

The solution is moral, not technological. Until knowledge is treated as a public good rather than as a commodity, and access to core contents is made affordable, developing countries will continue to struggle to close the knowledge gap.

The ideal solution and best hope is to build a knowledge base inside the country of essential materials in paper and digital forms -- with indigenous contents and materials imported from the West -- and then to share such knowledge openly, if possible freely, with everyone who needs it.

Such an ideal cannot be achieved without widespread reforms in intellectual property regimes. The global community should press the knowledge industry to release contents that are crucial to modernization, release them at cost or for free, as it has pressured the pharmaceutical industry to cut costs and release patents for drugs for AIDS sufferers in the Third World.

The professions should do the same. They are defined by, and derive their power from a core set of practices and beliefs which should be shared across boundaries and barriers around the world. The profession of law, for one, through its international bodies, should insist that students and practitioners of law in developing countries be given access to core legal knowledge, including the books, journals and other proprietary media that convey it. First World physicians should see that their Third World colleagues have adequate access to basic knowledge at the very least, and so on through architecture, economics, engineering, and 25-50 academic and professional fields or more.

Authors of works that bear on modernization of advancing countries should insist that copyrights be released for Third World access.

Unless these and other aggressive solutions are implemented, developing countries may never bridge their knowledge gaps, at a cost of human suffering and loss worldwide.

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