- Image by captainhagbard via Flickr
I didn’t realize the ramifications of this new territory that is overtaking the technology landscape around the world. Licensing is all about protecting the rights of those who create value that benefits others. Licensing came about principally through the proprietary culture which seeks protection for the sake of money. Now comes along a free culture seeking the same protections for its creations that are distributed for free to ensure that no one else can take those creations and ‘sell’ them to others in one form or another, for personal gain.
With the advent of mashup APIs, this can get complicated because someone may take my idea, information, creations, whatever and add it to their own idea, etc. and create a third thing which combines their idea with mine and ‘sell’ it for their own profit. Creative Commons Licensing is intended to prevent this from happening.
The real impact was not foreseen until more recently. Large publishing companies along with big software developers like IBM, assumed such ‘free’ things would bear no impact on the proprietary world in which we live. Now (and perhaps to late!), they realize how devastating this could become to their own profit-centered worlds. Imagine free wifi enabling access to free content such as music, textbooks, databases, etc. Wow! Even now, how can a company like Microsoft continue to profit selling its Office Suite of products when Open Office offers the same thing with even more versatility?! Imagine.
“Imagine what happens to the textbook publishers, when the whole immense profitable oligopoly of educational publishing collapses in the free educational materials – Wikiversity – model that Jimmy is shooting at them.”
and…
“Imagine that airport book shop selling commercial novels written by robots for reading on the red?eye, if right next to it there’s a guy with Brewster’s bookmobile, reduced to hand cart size, so that Anna Karenina for a dollar competes against everything in the proprietary book shop at $15.95 every time you’re about to catch an airplane.”
I can see why governments want to get control of the Internet. When the world is connected simultaneously and instantly, who needs all the redundancy that 138 nations duplicate in their governing function? So much waste can be reduced. But so much ambition has to be dealt with first. Ouch!
Related articles by Zemanta
- Copyright best practices for communications scholars (boingboing.net)
- Proprietary v open source software: more on removable features (ipkitten.blogspot.com)
- Internet rights and sources of law in cyberspace (slideshare.net)
- Espinel releases Joint Strategic Plan on IP Enforcement (copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com)
- Open Source Vs Proprietary Software (slideshare.net)
- Helpless Mainstreamers Grappling with Intellectual Property (stephankinsella.com)
