Lawrence Lessig, The BBC's lessons for America, Financial Times, September 8, 2003. Lessig congratulates the BBC for the brilliant decision to make its Creative Archive (not yet online) of digitized TV and radio productions free for non-commercial use and priced for commercial use. The BBC has already recouped its expenses on these productions, and the people who paid for them are among those who will now have free online access. Free access not only gives back to donors and the wider culture, it advertises the material to commercial firms that might license it and generate new revenue for the BBC. Lessig then turns to the US, which hasn't shown such creative thinking thinking about the commons recently. He castigates Lois Boland, director of international relations for the US Patent and Trademark Office, for trying to kill the WIPO meeting on open-source software, open-access journals, and related "open and collaborative projects to create public goods". Her objections were ignorant of the nature of open-source software, ignorant of copyright law, ignorant of the WIPO mission, and designed to favor one industry over the public interest.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/11/2003 02:34:00 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.
