Harnessing Openness to Improve Research, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

Abstract

In many many ways, the Internet has changed our lives. For those concerned with public policy, one of the most important of those changes has been in the treatment of intellectual property, and the ways we view both the process of innovation and the process of deriving value from creative acts. As the Internet grew, and as all forms of information increasingly became digitized , the sale of digital information in its many forms has been replaced by various licensing agreements between the rights holder and the consumer. These changes have led to what the National Academy of Sciences labels the "digital dilemma": A digital information product, unlike a physical good, can be created, modified, perfectly duplicated in innumerable quantities, and distributed to millions of people around the world at little or no cost. But its creator, or those who owned the rights to it, could control it completely, lock it down or make it inaccessible , at least temporarily. This paradox is visible in two different and contradictory phenomena. The rise of Napster, and other file-sharing networks using the Internet, allowed millions of users to download billions of digital audio and video files, many of which they were sharing without the authorization of the rights holders. At the same time, rights holders were using licenses and digital rights management systems to