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In Ireland in the mid-6th-century AD, power depended on connections and access to and control of information. Not a great deal has changed in fourteen hundred years. The short story of Colmcille and the Battle of the Book at Cooldrumman goes something like this — Colmcille copied another monk’s manuscript. The other monk, Finnian, objected and they settled things the way they did in those days. Three thousand were killed at the resulting battle.

In an information society the key laws are those governing information and these can be found in unexpected places generating unintended effects.

Sometimes [imprecisely] called the ‘copyright wars’, disputes over the developing landscape of a complex but increasingly important area of law, called ‘intellectual property’, form a prominent battleground to decision making about modern digital systems, systems which in turn have an increasing impact on the knowledge society.

James Boyle has written extensively about the degree to which theories on the environment and environmental activism can inform the debate about the regulation of digital technologies. He explains that whilst the duck hunter and the bird watcher might not like each other, they have a shared interest in ensuring that the birds’ natural environment or habitat is preserved.

For some years now the UK government has used a lot of resources building up what they have come to call ‘-government’, by which they mean government services facilitated by computing technologies. Unfortunately, if reports about government information systems failures are to be believed, their record of designing, building and managing these systems is not encouraging. There have been a range of problems, for example, relating to the national DNA database, the Criminal Records Bureau Database, a variety of children’s databases, the Child Support Agency (now scrapped), the Police National Computer (PNC) system, the Department for Work and Pensions system, the scanning and creation of a digital population database (outsourced to India), the Passport Agency computer system, the Immigration and Asylum system, a £100 million Violent Criminals Database (scrapped in 2000 after being criticised by police and probation services as a disaster); and more recently the national identity card system and the National Health Service (NHS) information system.

Back in Chapter 2, when considering the factors that influence DDM, I said the personal values and relative power basis of key decision makers are fundamental. It is important to realise that we are all conditioned and predisposed to believe certain stories more than others. This is because of our individual prejudices and values. If someone doesn’t like George Bush or Tony Blair, a song that makes fun of them will appeal. If we do like Bush and Blair, however, we might find the song offensive.

There is a rather touching faith in the magical ability of technology to solve problems in a way which turns a mess into a mere difficulty. This belief is particularly widespread amongst decision makers who do not understand the technology.

In this chapter I want to return to the areas of intellectual property and access to knowledge covered explicitly in the context of James Boyle’s ideas outlined in Chapter 2. As I suggested earlier in the book, the default rules of the road in digital decision making (DDM) are the laws governing information flows and technologies. The rules of intellectual property constitute a significant chunk of those laws and no book on DDM would be complete without at least some cursory consideration of how those laws get made.

In 1964 Richard Feynman was asked to join the California Board of Education’s Curriculum Commission to help them choose the mathematics textbooks for state schools. When he agreed he was inundated with letters and telephone calls from publishers offering to help him assess their books. Feynman politely insisted he did not need help, gifts, or seminars explaining the books, he just would read them and assess them in the old-fashioned way.

In the first part of this final chapter, I offer a theoretical digital decision making (DDM) framework. It is based on some of the Open University work I have been involved in over the past ten years, producing and delivering masters degree courses in the area of environmental decision making.