It is virtually an axiom that information is the lifeblood of modern civilization.  You can make a pretty good argument that it has also been the lifeblood of many pre-modern civilizations as well.  A former history professor of mine once observed that history is the story of continuity and change.  The continuity is human nature; humans are just as curious, gullible, cynical, optimistic, greedy, and fearful today as they have always been.  The change reflected in history, he argued, was a result of evolving and advancing technology.

Thomas Jefferson, defender of public knowledge.

Change, especially the kind that moves a civilization forward, requires easy access to knowledge and information.  The Founding Fathers understood this.  As exponents of the Enlightenment, they saw the availability of knowledge and information as a critical element of a thriving and prospering nation.  Jefferson famously remarked: “The field of knowledge is the common property of mankind.”  When considering the question of copyright law, Jefferson was against it at first, so great was his conviction that it was better to keep knowledge free and accessible.  Later he acquiesced to a limited copyright to provide incentives to authors and inventors.  A new book that argues against the increasing privatization of knowledge by examining the thoughts of the Founding Fathers on this subject has recently been published: Common as Air. Revolution, Art, and Ownership, by Lewis Hyde.  I have not yet read this (I hope to soon), but a review of this book in the New York Times got me thinking about this issue.

The trend in privatizing knowledge, walling it off from the public, has been going on for some time and does not bode well for us.  The music and movie industries continue to try to dictate to those who purchase their wares what they may or may not do with those items even after they own them.  Amazon’s highly popular Kindle reader took a major hit in my view when they deleted copies of Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm without notice, claiming, ironically, problems with copyright issues.  It makes me wonder if they could replace one version of a book with an altered, “sanitized” copy? In the uproar that followed, Amazon promised not to do that again.  Yeah.  Right.  For that reason, even though I may buy a Kindle at some point, I will never trust it or Amazon, or any other reader on a cyber-leash to some major controlling entity.  Hold on to your hard copy books.

An even more disturbing trend, to my mind, is the increasing privatization of once-public schools and libraries.  In many towns, these public institutions are being systematically dismantled in favor of corporate-sponsored replacements, many of whom offer inferior substitutes or, in the case of some libraries, none at all.  Many of the government information resources that used to be free to the taxpayers who paid for them must be bought from private middlemen who have somehow managed to create lucrative monopolies for themselves by selling information that used to be in the public domain.  The privatization of public libraries is particularly disturbing to my way of thinking.  Libraries are the crown jewel of most civilizations.  They are also the heart of a thriving community and a place of resort and ideas when things are less than thriving.  In a related problem, I am dismayed at how it’s extremely difficult to find good scholarly articles on the web that don’t require an expensive membership in some service, or an exorbitant price in order to download it.  Since I can’t afford the fees (and would not be inclined to pay them if I could) ironically, the current incarnation of the Internet has sent me back to the print library, where many of these papers are available using library subscriptions to these databases, but only if you go to the library physically.

Yet another outrage is the quiet dismantling of public technical standards, particularly those of analog television.  The process of putting images on a screen was a public standard.  Anyone could use it, and they did.  Private inventors took advantage of this to give us things like home video recording, home computers that used televisions as a display, and early video games.  Today’s standards for HD are privately owned.  If anyone invents some nifty new gadget for today’s televisions, the owners of the standard will get their pound of flesh, or may even choose to quash the invention altogether.

There is an old slogan from the early days of the Internet: “Information wants to be free.”  I like this phrase, because it encompasses the truth that information should be as free of charge as possible, and that is should be liberated, i.e., free to circulate wherever and to whomever wants to see it.

Finally, consider the following wonderful insight by James Harvey Robinson which forms the introductory quote to the first chapter of Language in Thought and Action by S. I. Hayakawa and Alan R. Hayakawa:

“One cannot but wonder at this constantly recurring phrase “getting something for nothing,” as if it were the peculiar and perverse ambition of disturbers of society.  Except for our animal outfit, practically all we have is handed to us gratis.  Can the most complacent reactionary flatter himself that he invented the art of writing or the printing press, or discovered his religious, economic and moral convictions, or any of the devices which supply him with meat and raiment or any of the sources of such pleasure as he may derive from literature or the fine arts?  In short, civilization is little else than getting something for nothing.”

There are many good developments on this front, such as the Creative Commons License, and other mechanisms that are showing up to refute corporate hoarding of our common intellectual resources.  This is a fight that the corporations cannot be allowed to win.  As Robinson implies, to live in a world where once public knowledge is someone’s intellectual property would literally be uncivilized.