"David Bollier, a Fellow at the New America Foundation, is author of a paper called "Can the Information Commons be Saved? How Intellectual Property Policies are Eroding Democratic Culture & Some Strategies for Asserting the Public Interest." It examines the paradox of the Internet age -- unprecedented access to information and the simultaneous convergence of "commercial forces ... to make information more scarce, or at least more expensive and amenable to strict market control." [A] shrinking information commons should be of critical concern to the creative sector where a vibrant public domain and viable fair use provisions are essential to the sector's health." From the introduction: "One of the more confusing paradoxes of this Internet Era is that even as more information is becoming readily available than ever before, various commercial forces are converging to make information more scarce, or at least more expensive and amenable to strict market control. More than an oddity, this paradox may be an augury about the fate of the free information ecology that has long distinguished our democratic culture. |
