Ray Corrigan has posted a draft book chapter to his blog and seeks comments from readers. This excerpt begins after he finishes telling the very interesting story of Colmcille, a sixth-century Irish monk devoted to multiplying hand-transcribed copies of the Bible, frustrated by pre-copyright permission barriers to his work, and subject of one of the first legal decisions on access barriers to public-domain literature.
The Colmcille story is about a struggle over access to information. Access to information underpins the themes of this book which is about decision making related to and involving important socio-technological information systems....[I]n a knowledge society the default rules of the road are the laws governing the flow of information and the restrictions built into the architecture of technology. These laws and technologies are shaping up to be a bottleneck, particularly for decision making and education. It might be reasonable to stick a digital lock on an electronic version of some educational material and make it a crime to bypass the lock, but people need to be aware of this....
The third idea in the book is that changes in law and technology could be leading to a kind of “second enclosure movement” which threatens not only our ability to make informed decisions about those complex information systems, but even something as fundamental as our access to the basic raw materials of education. This is something which has been a problem in the developing world for generations. Relative to average incomes, a student paying $80 for a book in Indonesia would be the equivalent of a US student paying nearly $3200 for the same book in the US. A vibrant information ecology is at the foundation of our knowledge society, just as a vibrant natural environment is at the heart of a healthy society....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/10/2006 11:01:00 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.
