Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Copyright and open content

Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society has released a 54 minute podcast of Christine Harold's talk yesterday on copyright and open content.  From the description:

Christine Harold, an Assistant Professor in Department of Communication at the University of Washington, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series....

Harold’s presentation, entitled “Inventing Publics: Kairos and Intellectual Property Law” looks to explore the possibilities of the “open content” movement, specifically the licensing model offered by Creative Commons, as a productive alternative to other prevalent responses to the corporate hoarding of cultural resources.

As she argues in her recent book OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture, rather than engaging commercial culture dialectically, an open content approach serves as a provocation to commercialism by amplifying certain market logics and, in doing so, undermines concepts such as “author” and “property” on which corporate power depends.