Today's intellectual property laws weren't designed for a world where just a click, drag, and drop is all that stands between your new idea and expression and my ability to make unlimited copies with worldwide distribution. It's become easy to copy bits. The only restrictions are storage, which is super cheap, and bandwidth, which is abundant....Are Google and Yahoo! breaching Incisive Media's copyright by storing and reproducing a copy of my column [in their search engine indices]? If they are, the folks at ClickZ seem to be OK with that, as are most Web sites. What Yahoo! and Google are doing is and must be legal. They copy the Web pages they find, index those pages so you can search them, then store them in their original form without making any changes. When the engines display regular search results, they don't display the entire page but a fair-use quote from the page that's related to your search....Copyright isn't wrong, yet new models, such as the Creative Commons initiative, are critically looking at new intellectual property approaches for the 21st century. Intellectual property protection is necessary to ensure people and organizations are fairly recognized and remunerated for their creative pursuits. But copyright can stand in the way of facilitating the power of connections. This will increasingly happen as it becomes easier to collect and connect ideas, information, stories, entertainment, people, indeed everything by using the ever-growing suite of tools and services the Internet offers. The intersection of collecting, sharing, and connecting is fertile ground for new businesses and ad models. The debate over what is good copyright protection and what limits innovation, commerce, and learning in the world of bits has only just begun.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/19/2005 09:13:00 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.
