... In the last several decades, Congress has drastically extended the term and broadened the scope of both patents and copyrights, on the premise that only monopoly control of the product will motivate companies to invest the large sums required for research and development. So computer programs, gene sequences, chemical compounds, melodies, and databases, or even tiny parts of all these things, are increasingly no longer available to other artists, scientists, and programmers without payment of a stiff licensing fee. ...
A cadre of public-spirited law professors has formulated a powerful critique of this "second enclosure movement," a critique that has achieved considerable resonance among musicians, programmers, scientists, and other intellectual workers. The Ralph Nader of this movement is Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig. Another leading light is Duke professor James Boyle, whose new book, The Public Domain, is a superb introduction to the subject.
Underlying all property law is the question: How is wealth created? Obviously, every innovation has an individual component and a social component: inspiration plus tradition. Every original creation, Boyle observes, is "built from the resources of the public domain - language, culture, genre, scientific community, or what have you." Artists and inventors must eat, so they must have enough control over their creations to reap some financial reward. But unlimited control could make their work unavailable to future artists and inventors, diminishing everyone's welfare. ...
What to do? Along with Lessig and others, Boyle has pioneered the Creative Commons license. This new form of copyright allows the author of a work to reserve fewer rights than usual - or none at all - over its subsequent use but keeps others from taking it out of the public domain, or "commons." Though it was incorporated only seven years ago, tens of millions of books, articles, songs, photos, videos, and software upgrades now bear a Creative Commons license. The story of Creative Commons, Wikipedia, open-source software, the Human Genome Project, and other heartening developments is told in journalist David Bollier's Viral Spiral, a lively history of the "public knowledge" movement. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 4/06/2009 02:28:00 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.
