Sudhakar Thaths Chandrasekharan, Pirates of the Commons, The Hindu, July 3, 2005. Building a defense of the information commons on Jared Diamond's Collapse. Excerpt: 'Controlling access to literary works to prevent copies from being made is a practice that goes back millennia. The Royal Library of Alexandria was so notoriously difficult to get into that Ptolemy III had to bribe his way in with 15 talents of silver. Innovations do not bloom in an intellectual vacuum where access to knowledge is controlled. Jared Diamond, in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, says that societies that restricted mobile exchange of ideas sowed the seeds of their own demise....The modern concept of Copyright evolved with the development of the movable type printing press, which made it relatively easy to produce multiple copies of works at a small additional cost. Publishers, not authors, were the first to seek restrictions on copies of printed works....The first modern Copyright law was the English Statute of Anne enacted in 1710. It granted 14 years of exclusive rights to the author and could be optionally extended for a further 14 years. The Statute was a revolutionary piece of legislation that even protected the rights of consumers by ensuring that printers could not control how a work was used by its purchaser....The Commons are a shared spring from which we all draw sustenance and inspiration without diminishing or polluting it. But these days the Commons are becoming stagnant and brackish. There is a real danger that the Commons will dry up and hamper the ability of future generations to be inspired by contemporary works of our time. The digital revolution has made reproducing music, books and movies trivially easy at negligible cost. We need a Statute of Anne for our times. Instead, nations are propping up antiquated ideas of intellectual property ownership and extending the lives of Copyright in ways that greatly impoverish the Commons.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/03/2005 10:30:00 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.
