Part 9 (1/2)
Sure enough. We regularly hear about the great ”information age” we live in, while seeing the tightening of laws relating to dissemination of information. The contradiction is obvious.
This problem has also affected several European countries, where the copyright law switched from ”author's life plus 50 years” to ”author's life plus 70 years”, following pressure from content owners who successfully lobbied for ”harmonization” of national copyright laws as a response to ”globalization of the market”. To regulate the copyright of digital editions in the wake of the relevant WIPO international treaties, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was ratified in October 1998 in the United States, and the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) was ratified in May 2001 by the European Commission.
According to Michael Hart, and Project Gutenberg CEO Greg Newby, ”as of January 2009, the total number of separate public domain books in the world is between 20 and 30 million, and that 5 million are already on the internet, and we expect another million per year from now until all the easy-to-find books are done. 10 million or so will be done before people start to think about the facts telling them the rate cannot continue to double as they come up to the point of already having done half. New copyrights lasting virtually for ever in the U.S. will bring the growth process to a screeching halt when The Mickey Mouse copyright laws, literally, copyright laws on Mickey Mouse, and Winnie-the-Pooh, etc., stop all current copyright from expiring for the forseeable future.”
= Copyleft and Creative Commons
The term ”copyleft” was invented in 1984 by Richard Stallman, a computer scientist at MIT (Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology), who launched the GNU project to develop a complete Unix-like operating system called the GNU system.
As explained on the GNU website: ”Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. (...) Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pa.s.s along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has freedom. (...) Copyleft is a way of using of the copyright on the program. It doesn't mean abandoning the copyright; in fact, doing so would make copyleft impossible.
The word 'left' in 'copyleft' is not a reference to the verb 'to leave' - only to the direction which is the inverse of 'right'. (...) The GNU Free Doc.u.mentation License (FDL) is a form of copyleft intended for use on a manual, textbook or other doc.u.ment to a.s.sure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifications, either commercially or non commercially.”
Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessing, a professor at Stanford Law School, California. As explained on its website: ”Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.”
There were one million Creative Commons licensed works in 2003, 4.7 million licensed works in 2004, 20 million licensed works in 2005, 50 million licensed works in 2006, 90 million licensed works in 2007, and 130 million licensed works in 2008.
Science Commons was founded in 2005. As explained on its website: ”Science Commons designs strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. We identify unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develop technology to make research, data and materials easier to find and use. Our goal is to speed the translation of data into discovery - unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing.”
ccLearn was founded in 2007. As explained on its website: ”ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources. Our mission is to minimize legal, technical, and social barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials.”
2002: A WEB OF KNOWLEDGE
= [Overview]
The MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative launched by MIT (Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology) in 2002 to put its course materials for free on the web, as a way to promote open dissemination of knowledge. In September 2002, a pilot version was available online with 32 course materials. In November 2007, all 1,800 course materials were available, with 200 new and updated courses per year. From 2003 onwards, in the same spirit of free access of knowledge, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) launched several high-quality online periodicals. New kinds of encyclopedias were set up, for the general public to both use available articles and contribute to their writing. Wikipedia, launched in 2001, became the leading online cooperative encyclopedia worldwide, with hundreds and then thousands of contributors writing articles or editing and updating them, leading the way to other initiatives like Citizendium. launched in 2006, and the Encyclopedia of Life, launched in 2007.
= Culture, from print to digital
More and more computers connected to the internet were available in schools and at home in the mid-1990s. Teachers began exploring new ways of teaching. Going from print book culture to digital culture was changing relations.h.i.+p to knowledge, and the way both scholars and students were seeing teaching and learning. Print book culture provided stable information whereas digital culture provided ”moving”
information. During a conference organized by the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) in September 1996, Dale Spender gave a lecture about ”Creativity and the Computer Education Industry”, with insightful comments on forthcoming trends.
Here are some excerpts:
”Throughout print culture, information has been contained in books - and this has helped to shape our notion of information.
For the information in books stays the same - it endures. And this has encouraged us to think of information as stable - as a body of knowledge which can be acquired, taught, pa.s.sed on, memorised, and tested of course. The very nature of print itself has fostered a sense of truth; truth too is something which stays the same, which endures. And there is no doubt that this stability, this orderliness, has been a major contributor to the huge successes of the industrial age and the scientific revolution. (...)
But the digital revolution changes all this. Suddenly it is not the oldest information - the longest lasting information that is the most reliable and useful. It is the very latest information that we now put the most faith in - and which we will pay the most for. (...) Education will be about partic.i.p.ating in the production of the latest information. This is why education will have to be ongoing throughout life and work. Every day there will be something new that we will all have to learn. To keep up. To be in the know. To do our jobs.
To be members of the digital community. And far from teaching a body of knowledge that will last for life, the new generation of information professionals will be required to search out, add to, critique, 'play with', and daily update information, and to make available the constant changes that are occurring.”
Russon Wooldridge, a professor in the Department of French Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada, wrote in February 2001: ”All my teaching makes the most of internet resources (web and email): the two common places for a course are the cla.s.sroom and the website of the course, where I put all course materials. I have published all my research data of the last 20 years on the web (re-edition of books, articles, texts of old dictionaries as interactive databases, treaties from the 16th century, etc.). I publish proceedings of symposiums, I publish a journal, I collaborate with French colleagues by publis.h.i.+ng online in Toronto what they can't publish online at home. In May 2000, I organized an international symposium in Toronto about French studies enhanced by new technologies (Les etudes francaises valorisees par les nouvelles technologies). (...)
I realize that without the internet I wouldn't have as many activities, or at least they would be very different from the ones I have today. So I don't see the future without them. But it is crucial that those who believe in free dissemination of knowledge make sure that knowledge is not 'eaten' by commercial ventures for them to sell it. What has happened in book publis.h.i.+ng in France, in linguistics for example, where you can only find textbooks for schools and exams, should be avoided on the web. You don't go to Amazon.com and the likes to find disinterested science. On my website, I refuse any sponsors.h.i.+p.”
= A few leading projects
# MIT OpenCourseWare