Comments on: [b@10] Charlie Nesson

By: Michael Nielsen » Science and Wikipedia

Michael Nielsen » Science and Wikipedia — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:59:23 +0000

[...] last week. During one of the talks, the founder of the Berkman Centre, Charles Nesson, asked the following question about the relationship between Universities and Wikipedia: Wikipedia is the instantiation of the [...]

By: John A Arkansawyer

John A Arkansawyer — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:19:27 +0000

The more I think about it, the more I think this is the comment that I’d like to have tattooed on the heads of everyone who works in education:

Esther: Education is about more than making info available.

By: Crosbie Fitch

Crosbie Fitch — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:05:51 +0000

The ‘principle’ of being able to control the distribution of one’s published works is not a natural one, but a commercially desirable one – to publishers. But, publishers and their ‘principled’ privileges are only desirable to authors if authors don’t have alternative publishing and revenue mechanisms that are more desirable.

The Internet now provides authors with an alternative publishing mechanism – superior in many ways to traditional publishers.

As for superior revenue mechanisms, the Internet can enable these too.

Considering Esther’s principle “that if someone creates something, they ought to control its distribution” as applied to creators (rather than the publishers who promulgate it on their behalf), I’d be amused if any author, having been amply paid, wished to control how their published work was distributed among the public.

By: John A Arkansawyer

John A Arkansawyer — Thu, 15 May 2008 23:34:05 +0000

Dang! I bet Charlie Nesson really is a bang-up teacher. Those are good questions. I’ll pose one of my own: Why didn’t Google Book Search come from the federal government? It wouldn’t be unreasonable to require works (and not just written works) to be thus available in return for the privilege of copyright.