Innovation Under Austerity: Discussion

You seem to acknowledge in this speech that most of mankind’s knowledge is not protected by copyright (or at least not protected anymore). In class, however, you pointed out several times that copyright law remains an important barrier to spreading knowledge. In my opinion, guaranteeing free (and “neutral”) access to the net to everyone remains still a far more important issue in 2012 to fight ignorance than abolishing copyright law. I am not arguing that copyright does not represent a problem in this regard, but the unlimited and uncensored access to the net by everyone appears more important to me today.

My other question (linked to the above) concerns your suggestion that the European Commission should scan all books (in the public domain) in European libraries and enable anybody to access them via the net. I fully agree with your suggestion that Google offering the same service in return for the right to spy on all readers is a bad bargain and that there should be competition from the “free world” on the same service. However (as a citizen of an EU member country, perhaps), I do not see any necessity for such initiative to be conducted by a state body or financed by taxpayer money (even if the amount does not seem to be as high as one could expect). Don’t you think that the same result could be achieved even more efficiently by a decentralized initiative built by readers themselves (a kind of Wikipedia of books where anyone can submit a scanned and OCR-ed version of any work in the public domain)?

-- PeterLing - 01 Nov 2012