STEPHEN DOWNES: So welcome to week two of your course
and the 10% of your students who remain.
No, I'm kidding.
I'm sure it's a lot higher than that.
But George and Dave, again, here we go with more on open learning
and open content.
Today's topic is copyright, the public domain, and the commons.
These are issues that we all have our own perspectives on.
I'm going to take them one at a time.
Copyright, the public domain, and the commons.
I think they are three separate things.
Copyright, as you know, is today something that is automatically
assigned to an artifact on creation.
It wasn't always that way.
It used to be that you had to register for a copyright,
basically putting in a claim, a declaration
that you were the creator of some original content that
was worthy of being protected.
This had the effect of making most content by default not copyright.
You know, our conversations with each other, for example.
Things that we came up with in common, in the community.
Images that we shared with each other.
You know, popular culture.
But now, anything that gets created in our society,
right from the beginning of its creation, is owned.
And it's shaped, I think in a negative way.
The underlying presumption and values of our society, the value that everything
is owned.
And this leads us to the idea of the public domain, which
is sort of the opposite.
It's the idea that some things are unowned.
Well, what's unowned?
There are some things that just can't be owned.
At least we're told.
Like ideas, maybe mathematical equations or things like that.
I'd like to think that software or algorithms can't be owned.
But that's a subject of discussion, of course.
Another kind of thing that can't be owned is something that's really old.
At least so we're told, right?
Depending on where you live, copyright on something
might expire 75 years after the death of the author or 95 years
after the death of the author.
Although, if we look at this from a historical perspective,
that term is going to be extended and extended as long as Mickey Mouse
proves to be a profitable commodity for Disney.
So how is it then that anything comes to be public domain?
How do we treat that?
What do we do with it?
That's the nature of the commons.
When we talk about the commons, we're brought back
to this idea of a resource held in common, hence the name.
You know, a meadow where people could send their cows to eat and drink water
out of the common brook or whatever.
These commons were enclosed, much like the creation of copyright laws
that automatically copyright content when it's created.
But that's a different thing.
But the word the commons also brings up this expression, the quote unquote
tragedy of the commons.
This idea that if we hold a resource in common, somebody will overuse it.
But I'm more concerned about a different kind of abuse of the commons.
Because I don't think we have a shortage of content or creative ideas
or anything like that.
In fact, we have the opposite.
We have a surplus.
We have trouble finding the good ones.
The big problem is even where there is a commons, what
happens is that it becomes enclosed.
Just like the original commons, only this time with ideas.
The classic example is the universe-- or not the universe.
The museum that has a 500-year-old painting
but won't allow anyone to take photographs, only
allows images to be purchased through the gift shop.
And because these images are new, those become copyrighted.
So you sort of wonder, how did this happen?
This thing that is 500 years old has become enclosed.
The same sort of thing happens to content and the same sort of thing
happens to ideas.
So when we talk copyright, we're talking not just rights.
We're talking about the removal of rights as well.
And that's where I get really concerned.
So that's my five minutes.
Have a good week, guys.