Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an "information economy". The vision of an economy based on information seized the imaginations of the world's governments. For decades now, they have been creating policies to "protect" information — stronger copyright laws, international treaties on patents and trademarks, treaties to protect anti-copying technology.
The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you've paid for it.
That means that we have to make it harder for you to share information, even after you've paid for it....
But this is a tragic case of misunderstanding a metaphor. Just as the industrial economy wasn't based on making it harder to get access to machines, the information economy won't be based on making it harder to get access to information. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true....
It used to be that copy-prevention companies' strategies went like this:
"We'll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an unauthorised copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy."
But...a third option [now exists]: you can just download a copy from the internet. Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to access any data, without having to break the anti-copying technology, just by searching for the cracked copy on the public internet....
And, of course, as Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology and the King of Thailand have discovered, taking a piece of information off the internet is like getting food colouring out of a swimming pool....
Many of us sell information in the information economy — I sell my printed books by giving away electronic books, lawyers and architects and consultants are in the information business and they drum up trade with Google ads, and Google is nothing but an info-broker — but none of us rely on curtailing access to information.
Like a bottled water company, we compete with free by supplying a superior service, not by eliminating the competition....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/20/2007 10:28:00 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.
