Last night PBSNOW broadcast an excellent documentary on copyright in America, Tollbooths on the Digital Highway. Jack Valenti and Pat Schroeder spoke for the content industry, while Eben Moglen, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Nancy Kranich, and Jim Griffin spoke for reform. Rick Karr narrated. PBS offers a transcript but not a webcast of the show. (Thanks to Jason Bobe for the link.)
Quoting Jim Griffin: "You know, equalizing access to knowledge is one of the hallmarks of a civilized society. Depriving people of access to knowledge based on the size of their parents' wallet is a hallmark of a despotic society." Quoting Siva Vaidhyanathan: "We're allowing the content holders, the content producers, to have a...remarkable amount of control over the manner and amount and re-use of all this material. We don't want to build a cultural environment, in which the media companies have that much control over our daily lives."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/18/2003 07:53:00 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.
