Open Access News

2. You also mention “non-monetary” incentives. What are those?

There is something of a joke in the very posing of the question on a business site. Nonmonetary motivations are what make you stop on the street for a moment to answer a stranger who asks you for the time or directions; what makes you travel five hundred miles to be with you family for the holidays, and what makes you tell a friend a joke, or listen to it. They are also the motivations that lead some of the world’s leading minds to work for what, by comparison to other lines of business in which they could succeed, is a pittance-to satisfy their curiosity, for fame, or because of the sheer fun.
These are motivations on which all of us act many times a day, but which have been shunted to the periphery of the economy throughout much of the industrial period. What we see now, as the two core inputs into information production have become widely distributed in the population (that is, computation and communications capacity, on the one hand, and human creativity, experience, and wisdom, on the other hand), these same motivations have moved from the domain of the social and personal to occupy a larger role smack in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world today....

5. Can copyright block these open forms of collaboration - how?

Certainly. Copyright blocks access to the inputs into information production that are copyrighted....Annotated books, illustrated editions, updated guide books, so many other things that are much easier to imagine, once one looks at wikipedia or sites like tripadvisor provide a much more immediate sense of how much is lost because of copyright. Now, that doesn’t mean that we should get rid of all of copyright immediately. It is merely to offer an example of how copyright dampens the possibilities of social production, because it increases the costs, and often simply blocks completely, access to the raw material of any information production activity --existing information. More threatening still is not copyright proper, but the steady assault that the copyright industries have been mounting on the free information ecology through statues like the digital Millennium Copyright Act and the efforts to pass a regulatory requirement that all equipment capable of rendering digital media be designed so that it will behave predictably in the hands of its user, and that users will not be able to do things --like implement new pieces of software or copy files-- that might threaten the tightly controlled distribution pipes of copyrighted material. These acts threaten the very foundations of the networked information ecology, because they seek to change the basic instrumentalities of social production and the free and easy flow of information across the network that makes it possible.

6. There is a tricky economic question when it comes to free (as in beer) distribution of media - books, text, music, film - how can, in this environment, artists be remunerated?

I think here the answer is different for different forms of expression. In general, thinking at the broad abstract level of “copyright” and “information” leads to excessive concern with copyright....Much of text publication has long been outside the needs of copyright: --newspapers and magazines have long been based on advertising and attention brokerage, not on copyright. Books are different, and the current solution --which is that people habits of reading books are still allowing free distribution online to be couple with sales may not be long lived....