Why access to knowledge? Is access to knowledge a human right? Or is it an economic policy imperative? It is both.That was the consensus at the plenary session of the second Yale Access to Knowledge Conference, held this weekend, 27- 29 April 2007 in New Haven, CT.
Why increase access to knowledge? The question is a strange one, it is both intuitively right, and empirically proven, that generally, appropriate knowledge increases the economic efficiency of an economic actor, and is essential to the full realisation of human potential in almost all contemporary conceptions of human fulfillment.
A2K is a social movement aiming to increase access to knowledge. That is a broad aim, and A2K includes a variety of communities each tackling specific challenges. Although the challenges are diverse, ranging from the problems of interoperability posed by proprietary code being tackled by the FLOSS community, to providing learning materials to school children in developing countries.
Historically, intellectual policy has been considered the primary means of regulating the production of knowledge. More than ten years ago changes to information technologies upset many of the (inarticulate) assumptions of intellectual property, assumptions crafted during the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, a club of multinational corporations (whose business models rely on precisely those industrial revolution assumptions) have successfully (thus far) laid the basis for information feudalism. This attack on the hundred year old balance of intellectual property law has seen some national, and international rule making institutions failing to resist rent seeking behavior.
One of the conversations going on in the movement is focused on finding solutions. There are a number of (not necessarily incompatible) solutions. Commons based peer production is one way of creating and distributing knowledge. Simultaneously there are national and international efforts at law reform, including the extension of exceptions and limitations to current intellectual property regimes. Other approaches include those who wish to abolish, rather than reform intellectual property law. What is often demonized as piracy can also be viewed as protest, mass civil disobedience in defiance of the conscription of law to defend dated business models.
What the various communities share is an understanding that intellectual property as currently configured is all too often a barrier to knowledge dissemination, even creation. More positively they share a vision of a world where regulation, code and technology are configured to maximise access to knowledge, where every limitation on access must be justified on compelling grounds, and carefully crafted to interfere with access to knowledge as little as possible.
Anyone interested in free culture, in commons based creativity, should be concerned with access to knowledge.
This post was originally placed on the iCommons site, on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 and is now archived on that site at http://icommons.org/2007/04/28/access-to-knowledge-too/
