U of T is in very good company after recently joining the Open Content Alliance, a consortium of internet and software companies, national archives, and academic institutions dedicated to making digital content available and free online.
One of the great promises of the internet is the ability to quickly find, sort, and use the collected wisdom of humanity. Most of that wisdom, even today, remains imprisoned between the yellowing pages of a moth-eaten stack of dried tree fibre at your local library.
Books are great; books are necessary; but it’s time to supplement this time-tested technology with a modern alternative. The Open Content Alliance will do just that, by scanning, cataloguing, and making available online hundreds of years worth of rare, fragile, or inaccessible texts, films, and audio recordings. It’s about time, so bully for them.
The Open Content Alliance has positioned itself in contrast to a similar scheme to scan and post books online, the robust but controversial Google Print. Google, the closest thing we have to the collective consciousness of the human race, has caught hell from book publishers for scanning copyrighted material without their explicit permission.
The Association of American Publishers shrieked that Google Print was pirating the text of their books and launched a lawsuit to bring it down. Google maintains that it doesn’t make the full text of copyrighted books available unless the publisher agrees to it, but it uses an opt-out program that has angered copyright owners.
In contrast, the Open Content Alliance positively glows with righteous assertions of fairness and obedience to the strictures of copyright law. Publishers have responded in kind, loudly congratulating the Alliance for its plucky determination to awkwardly contort itself to fit the absurd legal boundaries of 21st-century intellectual property law.
Copyright, as a concept, must be reformed. The intellectual and cultural heritage of the 20th century has been taken hostage by commercial concerns bent on curtailing the free exchange of knowledge and ideas. That’s not “free” as in “free speech”; that’s free as in “doesn’t cost money.” More and more business depends on monetizing “intellectual property”-writing, music, film, and other ephemeral content that can’t be stacked on a store shelf-and that business model is dependent upon the ability to stop people from sharing culture without paying for it.
Copyright holders have pushed aggressively to extend their control over how their work may be used in the culture, and though it has made a lot of people rich, it has made us all culturally poorer. The seminal civil-rights documentary “Eyes on the Prize,” for instance, can no longer be distributed because the filmmakers cannot clear all their film clips for copyright. American artist Mark Chamberlain was recently sued by DC comics for a gallery show of watercolors depicting a model wearing a Batman costume. Companies like the software firm SCO have been founded whose only business plan revolves around suing other businesses for patent infringement-almost always on dubious grounds-simply to settle out of court for cash. Amazon, the online retailer, owns the patent (U.S. Pat No. 5,960,411) on “1-Click” buying; no other website may use this “patented business method”-otherwise known as “an idea” by sensible people-without paying Amazon for the privilege. This is madness.
No reasonable person can argue, by the way, that people who make their living from writing, painting, singing, or otherwise creating cultural content shouldn’t be able to profit from their endeavours; copyright is a necessary protection for artists who have to eat too. But the current maniacal thirst by commercial interests for the expansion of the most restrictive possible copyright laws is eroding the greater cultural good.
The Open Content Alliance is supposed to throw open the doors of human knowledge, but it apparently has no critique of how that knowledge is controlled and disseminated in the culture. By meekly agreeing to play by the copyright rules-no matter how idiotic and damaging those rules are-the Alliance is neglecting an important part of its job as an advocate for, and protector of, the cultural heritage to which everyone is heir.
U of T has noble goals in joining the Open Content Alliance, and its participation is a step in the right direction. But if it does not challenge the cultural monopolists who believe that every scrap of human knowledge has a price tag, it is failing in its mission as an educator and as a steward of the intellectual ecosystem on which all learning relies.
