Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Response 2We mostly stumble from one catastrophe to another, avoiding the direst consequences and ignoring the infinite task of squaring theory and policy in the era of the platform. ~ Leif Weatherby, "Delete Your Account:On the Theory of Platform Capitalism" Open access (OA) books are fundamentally open to all readers, human and nonhuman.But the question of how those books can be used and reused, adapted and transformed, editioned and re-editioned, regardless of the user, is tricky and often gray terrain, unless a publisher chooses the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses -CC0 or CC BY-which essentially boils down to authors and publishers having no exclusive rights whatsoever over the content once it is released (the "0" literally translates as "zero restrictions" while the "BY" simply means, when using this content in whatever fashion, please give credit to the original creators).Some OA advocates favor licenses such as these, especially within the academic journals sphere, with no real guardrails on reuse, following the idea that works placed in the public domain without restrictions on use are the sparks that lead directly to the growth of knowledge and innovation, which in turn pays countless benefits to society.This is a sentiment Thomas Jefferson expressed in a memorable way when mulling patent debates in a letter to Isaac McPherson in 1813.As he famously wrote : He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.1 Jefferson's viewpoint was distilled this way by Aaron Swartz, one of the developers of the Creative Commons licenses and a tireless advocate of open, public access to knowledge: "By their very nature, ideas cannot be property," 2 a core belief that has been one of punctum's guiding mottos.This is an admirable ideal-that ideas should never be property-but if we've learned anything about the internet and digital content since the 1990s, it's that Swartz's ideal of an open, global commons where knowledge is shared freely with immense benefits to public society is mainly a mirage, and culture and knowledge corporations, whether film studios, record labels, or academic publishers, have spent decades, via lawsuits and intensive lobbying of legislative bodies, locking every bit of content down as "proprietary" and "copyrighted," not to mention the myriad ways in which even OA publications have been monetized with huge profits for commercial-conglomerate academic publishers.3
Source: Punctum Books
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4414086818