Thinking Out Loud About the Ownership Society, an unsigned blog posting from Outsell Now, February 11, 2005. This excerpt comes after a discussion of renting v. buying digital music: 'It's not just the bandwidth that's changing; it's the nature of content itself. In the case of scientific literature, for example, the idea of a journal article or a book as a permanent, fixed document might soon be obsolete. Such literature is inextricably bound up with the other literature it cites, and the literature citing it. Current knowledge on a topic is dynamic and not confined to a single document; in that environment access to the flow of knowledge is more important than ownership of a document that's just a snapshot of knowledge at a point in time. We've concluded that all parts of the content industry are lined up along a "rent vs. buy" spectrum, but that the concept of owning content is slowly losing ground to other models of access.'
(PS: It's true that new models of access are challenging the ownership model. But it's too tidy to suggest that all content lies somewhere on the rent/buy spectrum. OA content is a true commons that is neither rented nor purchased.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/12/2005 08:32:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
