John Naughton, Priceless thinking at the BBC, The Guardian, April 24, 2005. Excerpt: 'Until recently, everything was going [copyright owners'] way. Clueless legislators were bamboozled by lobbying propaganda about the need to protect 'property' and stamp out 'piracy' and 'theft'. Mass media - generally owned by outfits with a vested interest in strong IP law - reported the issue in terms that were at best uninformed and at worst rabidly partisan. And nobody, beyond a few isolated voices, spoke out for the public interest. Or pointed out the implications for free culture of a world in which every idea, and every expression of an idea, is 'owned' by someone (usually a company). Nobody asked what would become of music if every songwriter had to pay a royalty on every idea they'd borrowed from earlier songs. Or what would happen to film-making if the rights to every out-of-focus billboard, chair, poster or magazine cover had to be cleared and paid for before movies could be released....Until recently, this was the way the world was heading. But now something significant has happened to buck the trend. The BBC - the world's greatest creator of high-quality multimedia products - has finally launched its Creative Archive....The world's leading public-service broadcaster is declaring it believes that creative output for which the public has paid should be in the public domain. This is big news. Some years ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology blew the nascent educational-content business out of the water by making its courseware available for free on the web. Who would pay for content from Mickey Mouse universities when MIT's was free? By challenging the IP mania that threatens to engulf us, the Creative Archive project is doing something similar. And in the process showing us what public-service broadcasting is for.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/24/2005 09:25:00 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.
