11th
Information doesn’t want to be free
Not so obvious. This assumes that one values being a well-known academic over paying one’s mortgage.
Sometimes I wonder if the tech advocates proselytizing that “information wants to be free” would feel the same way if a group of writers, photographers and filmmakers decided to copy and paste all the code from the Huffington Posts, Flickrs and YouTubes of the world onto a server somewhere and then forced those businesses to compete against their own IP (leveraged by a company that paid nothing to develop it, no less). And by “compete,” I mean struggle to survive in a market where your product has been artificially devalued by someone who hasn’t had to invest a dime to create it.
“Joi Ito is the chief executive of Creative Commons, a not-for-profit organisation that is tackling head on the challenges of intellectual property and copyright ownership in a digital age. Joi argues that permissive licences, which allow people to share creative and other materials, are good for innovation.”—
An interview I did with Joi for the Tech Weekly podcast in December of last year.
See also the Observer article that resulted. Here’s a snippet:
Aren’t our concepts of copyright ownership outdated in the digital age, where it’s easy and cheap to copy and distribute anything?
As CEO of Creative Commons, I have a very clear position: we’re pro-copyright and we work within the constraints of copyright. It’s a hack; we’re trying within copyright to lower friction as much as possible without breaking the law or forcing people who use copyright to have to change what they do. We believe open is better. But we don’t go around telling people they should give things away.
Where do you think things are heading?
Well, I do think the models we’ve created around ownership and copyright are outdated. I’m not sure about the idea that information is the same as a thing – so if you give it away, you don’t have it anymore. A banana is worth a dollar, you give it away and you don’t have it anymore. But that’s a very simplistic view of the way in which the information economy works. It’s never worked that way before. If you are an academic, your value increases every time someone references one of your papers. If you charged a dollar for everyone to cite your paper, that would increase the friction involved in that transaction. And which would you rather? That you get paid or that everyone cites your work? It’s obvious.
(via untanglingtheweb)
