Life in the Network

I think that on a collectively authored thing like Wikipedia, a contributor is knowingly putting their work out there with the expectation that people are going to use, alter, and benefit from it without compensation. My sense is also that if these authors were capable of/interested in trying to make money from their writing, they would pursue that rather than writing for a wiki.

Copyright seems to be used mostly to protect profit rather than motivate creativity. How strange that there was not an easy way to opt-out of this before Creative Commons, the assumption being that every creator wants to profit from, or take credit for everything s/he does. The only similar thing I’ve seen is in zines (little homemade magazines); sometimes authors put an anti-copyright sign on the inside cover. Creative commons does a good job of publicizing the idea that it’s okay to not make a buck at every possible opportunity. As a character in Bound By Law explains, “Demanding payment for every use can hinder the very creativity that copyright is supposed to encourage.” (Aoki p.58)

Barlow tells us that the digital age has changed the way we ought to think about "owning" information. He argues that old intellectual property laws are neither sensible nor enforceable (since they’re centered around the physical manifestation of ideas rather than the ideas themselves), and that an entirely new set of laws is what’s needed to protect/ support "soft" products. Barlow points out that freely-moving information can be just as lucrative, if not more so, than tightly controlled information: “Information that isn't moving ceases to exist as anything but potential...at least until it is allowed to move again…The practice of information hoarding… is an especially wrong-headed artifact of physically based value systems.” (The Economy of Ideas p.6)