This link has been bookmarked by 15 people . It was first bookmarked on 26 Jun 2009, by Jimmy Breeze.
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08 Jul 09
Barbara DieuTEN years ago, a piece of software called Napster taught us that scarcity is no longer a law of nature. The physics of our universe would allow everyone with access to a networked computer to enjoy, for free, every song, every film, every book, every piec
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07 Jul 09
Peter Shankswill we cling to scarcity just so that we can keep capitalism? Or will capitalism have to evolve into some new kind of digital economics? The question underlines many things - from music piracy to the woes of the newspaper industry to Google's efforts to
copyright economics knowledge science business economy free culture learning
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06 Jul 09
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While financial incentives are a very complicated business, two simple points hold true. First, even without payment, some folk will always record music, write software, make their feature films, do their own investigative journalism, occasionally even test their own drugs. You couldn't stop them if you tried. Second, we will all be better off with more, not fewer, professional careers available for knowledge producers. Not having to stick with a day job allows creative workers to be more creative and productive, for the benefit of all.
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Science, and the universities that support it, is the grandest example of a system that has evolved to promote the abundance of knowledge. Universities offer incentives in the form of tenure, promotion and prestige to researchers who can discover and share the information which their peers consider most valuable. Academics are human: they are as greedy, short-sighted and treacherous as everyone else, but the academic environment encourages them to focus those vices and impress their colleagues with their cleverness and cool discoveries published in fancy journals. Sometimes those cool discoveries are imagined or incomplete, but then others get ahead by pointing this out, and when the whole process works, the result is science.
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Science, and the universities that support it, is the grandest example of a system that has evolved to promote the abundance of knowledge. Universities offer incentives in the form of tenure, promotion and prestige to researchers who can discover and share the information which their peers consider most valuable. Academics are human: they are as greedy, short-sighted and treacherous as everyone else, but the academic environment encourages them to focus those vices and impress their colleagues with their cleverness and cool discoveries published in fancy journals. Sometimes those cool discoveries are imagined or incomplete, but then others get ahead by pointing this out, and when the whole process works, the result is science.
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Outside the universities we have some even more remarkable developments. Fifteen years ago, who would have predicted that teenagers would be allowed to edit the world's primary reference source from their homes? Twenty years ago, who would have predicted that teams of volunteers would succeed in writing and giving away software that produces many billions of dollars of economic wealth?
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05 Jul 09
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Academics are human: they are as greedy, short-sighted and treacherous as everyone else, but the academic environment encourages them to focus those vices and impress their colleagues with their cleverness and cool discoveries published in fancy journals.
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04 Jul 09
Shrutarshi BasuA look at the new economics being forced upon us by the information age
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01 Jul 09
patrick andrewsIt makes no sense to limit and control access now we have technologies to give information to everyone. But it is also foolish to pretend we do not need incentives to help produce and publish that information. While financial incentives are a very complic
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28 Jun 09
Tania ShekoNew Scientist article: finding a fair price for free knowledge 24 June 2009
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26 Jun 09
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This is a question about the future of capitalism, the economic system that arose from scarcity. Ours is the era of expanded copyright systems and enormous portfolios of dubious patents, of trade secrecy, the privatisation of the fruits of publicly funded research, and other phenomena that we collectively term "intellectual property". As technology has made a new abundance of knowledge possible, politicians, lawyers, corporations and university administrations have become more and more determined to preserve its scarcity.
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Take the open access movement, which has campaigned to ensure that scientific articles are freely available to the public, who ultimately paid for the research with their taxes. Historically, most scientific writing was confined to expensive scholarly journals and essentially available only to people with university affiliations. Some publishers resisted the open access movement, but trends are against them. In March this year, for example, the US Congress made permanent a requirement that all research funded by the National Institutes of Health be openly accessible, and other countries are following. Within a decade or two, it is safe to say that all scientific literature will be online, free and searchable. Journal publishers will still be paid, but at a different point in the chain.
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25 Jun 09
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