The Free Our Data blog has noted that Tim Berners-Lee endorses the project (for OA to publicly-funded geodata in the UK) and promises details next week in The Guardian. Stay tuned. At the same time, however, the bloggers make this point:
The interesting point about Sir Tim, of course, is that he could have patented his work in developing the hypertext protocol (what if CERN had had a requirement that workers’ ideas were patented?) and perhaps made a lot of money - although equally, the Web would not have been taken up with the same excitement if one had had to pay a licence fee for every web page served or link clicked. Sir Tim said as much in 2004 (original article seems to have disappeared.)
The content you’re looking at now is an illustration of how freeing publicly-paid and generated data - in this case, how to implement the hypertext protocol (http to you and me), developed at a taxpayer-funded particle physics laboratory - can lead to individual and commercial implementations whose value far exceeds those that could have been realised by charging.
We’re glad to know that we’re thinking along the same lines as the man who invented the Web. But can anyone think of a counter-example - of patented or copyrighted ideas around data that have been taken up on a huge scale? To win the argument for this campaign, we need to consider any counter-example.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/20/2006 09:44:00 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.
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.
