As the UK government reviews patent and copyright law to boost Britain's creative economy,...democratic access to knowledge ought to benefit too....Three separate reviews, two conducted by the British government, and one by a leading thinktank, will examine current patent and copyright law, and their findings will have direct implications for the democratic future of the information society....What has this got to do with technology or democracy? The dissemination of intellectual property, or access to knowledge, is one of the key pillars of democracy. As information courses ever more rapidly through the internet, barriers to access are gradually reduced....If Britain is to come out top in the knowledge economy, it needs to understand new ways of managing intellectual property that have emerged with the information society, existing under the controversial umbrella term "free culture". One such development is the Gnu project's general public licence (or "copyleft"), which nurtures collaborative authorship of software within the open source movement. More recently, Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons licences have shown how relaxing key areas of traditional copyright can democratise creativity in a new remix culture, facilitated by the wider availability of digital sound and moving image production tools. Within the scientific community, the open access publishing movement is exploring how best to disseminate scientific knowledge in the internet age. And new proposals to decouple research and development from production in the pharmaceutical industry, inspired by the success of the Sanger Institute in mapping the human genome, are gaining gradual support. Will the British government take note of these innovations in their reviews?...What is crucial now is that defenders of the public good vested in the democratic dissemination of information step forward to make their voices heard.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/14/2006 09:52:00 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.
