From 21 June to 23 June, Yale Law School hosted the first international "Access to Knowledge" (A2K) conference. Following two workshops on the same theme held in 2005 in Geneva and London, the aim of this conference was to "come up with a new analytic framework for analysing the possibly distortive effects of public policies relying exclusively on intellectual property rights” and to "support the adoption and development of alternative ways to foster greater access to knowledge in the digitally connected environment."

The Conference saw the participation of a large number of speakers and observers from numerous countries, distributed among a packed set of panels, ranging from larger, conceptual discussions on how political actions and academic discourses around A2K should be framed, to the nitty-gritty details of global Digital Rights Management laws and regulations, licensing frameworks, wireless technologies, genetically modified food and organisms etc.

The introductory plenary panel on "Framing Access To Knowledge" set up the beat for the three days; Jack Balkin (law professor and director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School) highlighted how A2K is a matter of distributional justice in "promoting economic development and human flourishing in this historical moment, the global information economy." On the other hand, Balkin continued, A2K is about intellectual property but also goes beyond that.

As expected, intellectual property issues were a central element of the overall debate during the conference, but Balkin's last remark was generally recognized; and, arguably due to the widespread participation of delegates and observers from developing countries, several panels highlighted how, more often than not, infrastructural obstacles are at least as much a worry for a proper policy maximizing A2K as are laws regulating the distribution and widespread usage of intellectual assets.

On the other hand, Joel Mokyr (professor of economic history at Northwestern University) remarked how the debate around A2K should strive to properly conceptualise what does "knowledge" mean, and care on the costs of access should always be kept firmly in mind when devising any policy in this area. Prof. Mokyr suggested that the sheer amount of information - and the need for such information to be properly categorized, as well as the different needs of different people and communities - will produce the occurance of "access specialists", i.e. people that will serve as intermediaries and help reducing the unavoidable information-gathering transaction costs that are already emerging.

Many other points of view were presented during the three days; although it would be impossible to cover all of them in this article, luckily the conference organizers have set up a wiki, where it is already possible to find notes from all the panels and related references.

"Access To Knowledge" Conference
http://research.yale.edu/isp/eventsa2k.html

Yale Access To Knowledge Wiki
http://research.yale.edu/isp/a2k/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Access To Knowledge Initiative Portal
http://www.access2knowledge.org/cs/

CPTech's Access to Knowledge page
http://www.cptech.org/a2k/

UNU-MERIT's Access 2 Knowledge Hub
http://www.merit.unu.edu/a2k/

(Contribution by Andrea Glorioso - Italian consultant on digital policies)