Boblet Learned things and Japan diary, by Oli Studholme

Knowledge is Power

By Oli
At 3:55 PM · Thursday, 4 September · 2003
To The ‘Net

Recently there has been a lot on the news about Copyright, especially the increasingly long interpretation of Copyright in the USA. In 1790, American Copyright law was 14 years from date of publication, with the option to apply for a second 14 years if the author was still alive. After this time works were to pass into the public domain, to stimulate creativity and advancement in arts and sciences. In the last 40 years the American Congress has extended Copyright 11 times, with the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) advancing it to the life of the author plus seventy years. Of course big business is the chief copyright holder, and the chief lobbier of Congress for Copyright extensions - this occurred just before Mickey Mouse was due to become public domain. The worst thing about the concentration of Copyright-holding power in a few ‘Media Giant’-type companies is a lot of Copyright works just aren’t available. Even if you want to buy them they aren’t produced.

Against this increasingly gloomy background I was delighted to read about two exceptions; the BBC Creative Archive and MIT’s Open CourseWare. MIT and the BBC have decided to make a huge amount of material available over the internet for non-profit use. MIT will make virtually all of its course materials available, even including video presentations of lectures. Anyone unable to attend a university (or uninspired by the one they attend) will be able to access world-class teaching resources. This has an incredible potential to make higher learning truly accessable. The BBC will offer a majority of it’s huge archive of video and audio (the parts it holds sole Copyright on). This includes vast amounts of documentaries, including those of a childhood hero of mine, Sir David Attenborough. It should also include basically a visual history of the Twentieth Century. I think these moves are incredibly enlightened - although it will cost bandwidth and time to set up, these moves are set to make the BBC and MIT the Googles of video/news and education respectively - the once true source of knowledge.

Powerful stuff indeed.

This reminds me of Philip Greenspun (weblog), who has contributed a lot to the common good. He published some of the MIT courses he teaches on his website back in 1996, including several reference books he wrote for them. He created photo.net, a website run by and for phototographers, covering everything about photography. He was also involved in a start-up, ArsDigita (now part of Red Hat), which created an open source community website system . Hell, he even started a free university to teach Computer Science degrees.

I hope that in some small way I can also contribute to the greater good.