Yesterday I attended a meeting sponsored by Google at the New York Public Library in which Google's Jim Gerber presented the following statistics. Since 1982, the costs and size requirements of computer processing have gone down by a factor of 4,500; computer memory, by a factor of 45,000; and computer disk space by a factor of 3.6 million. If this trend continues, as it surely will, he said, then an iPod, or a device its size, will be able to hold a year's worth of video (8,760 hours) by 2012, all the music ever created by 2018, and all the content ever created (in all media) by 2020.
This will be roughly when my three children will be attending...college (if I let them out of the house at all)....
Comments.
This kind of memory capacity is coming. I want to let my fantasy horses run, but I have to clear some underbrush first. Capacity is not content. The fact that a device could hold all the content ever created doesn't mean that it actually will hold all that content. It doesn't matter whether it's the size of an iPod or the size of a city bus. But if it did hold all that content, then it's not likely to provide free access to it. (As we've noticed for a couple of centuries, technology improves faster than copyright law, even if anti-DRM hackers also work faster than pro-DRM hackers.) Fortunately, these caveats don't stop my fantasy horses from running and I hope they don't stop yours.
Think about the difference between free online access to all the content you'll ever need and free offline access to all the content you'll ever need. Online access has its advantages because the content will always be current and we'll be in real-time contact with other users who have the same access to the same content. Offline access has its advantages because we won't always have connectivity, we won't always want connectivity, and lots of copies keeps stuff safe. Because all our work for free online access will also help the cause of free offline access, we don't have to choose between the two. We just have to start thinking about them.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/20/2007 02:07:00 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.
