We live in strange times - when massively capitalised corporations like Google share the ambition of the most idealistic librarian, and the most utopian writer, to make the 'republic of letters' a genuine reality. Yet we can't just expect one strong player to make for a truly healthy and energetic game; others have to play their part....As a publicly listed corporation, Google has to partly think like a great municipal library. We're facing a real mutation of the standard economic model - or perhaps an addition to it, an "economics of sharing", in the words of Yochai Benkler - if they can do so successfully....I think most writers would respect the need for a tapered and gradual de-commodification of published works - some initially saleable product at a profitable rate, some period in which this gradually lowers in price, and then a return of the work to 'the digital commons', in which the work becomes part of the collective resource of a creative society. It's this trajectory that we need to defend against Google's potential mendacity - the 'act of evil' that attenuates fair usage, and extends copyrights, in ways that damage and dry up creative wellsprings. (To be fair to them, that's not their current rhetoric. But companies with quarterly market reports are not always the most consistent of creatures)....My dream is that there is actually a golden age of active, passionate readers and writers awaiting its moment - if we can get the cultural and commercial ecologies balanced properly. I think we may well entrust too much to a publicly-listed company to allow the 'digital republic of letters' to be rendered as 'Google Print for Publishers or Libraries'. But I shudder to think of the prospect of book houses becoming as glint-eyed about the pay-per-view possibilities of digital reading as record companies have been about digital listening....It's important that writers, readers and publishers come up with their own...vision that might help these world-inheriting geeks to enrich and extend our culture, rather than constrain and enclose it.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/16/2005 09:50:00 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.
