The computer is now the factory of the Information Age -- optimized not for automation but collaboration, and requiring a different legal framework. But key industries, most notably entertainment and software, have bamboozled Congress and much of the public into believing that their wares deserve the same protection that was awarded to say, a patent for blast furnaces in the mid 20th century. Foragers in the Information Age use computers as their implements. Unlike the Earth, there are no raw materials in the cyber world waiting to be picked at like veins of ore. The Industrial Age was about discovery. The Information Age is about invention....Digital product development is less about aggregation and ownership of raw materials and more about manipulation of facts and ideas, concepts and values, pictures, sounds, video, and numbers -- much of which must be borrowed from the work of others and transformed in some new and hopefully lucrative way. But without free and easy access to a wide variety of these intellectual resources, our information-based trade goods will be less competitive in the global marketplace because of increased time to market (compliance), fear of innovation (something new like file-sharing networks might be made illegal), and because our regulated goods will cost more -- like Californian cars requiring extra-emissions control gear....Digital factories need to be supplied with large quantities of license-free supplies to grow, just as manufacturing industries needed plentiful and cheap raw material.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/25/2005 12:18:00 PM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
