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If someone closes off OER, someone else can reproduce it elsewhere
ad infinitum at no cost. This bears no resemblance to roads with
their physical limitations.
I did address this in my text, but having heard from several people
on this point now, I conclude my analogy may be been too subtle.
This was not an argument I hadn't anticipated. Here it is restated
in my analogy: "You can always
take another road," declared the proponents of the new "Free Road"
movement. "Nothing prevents you from you from taking one of the
more restrictive roads that do not allow the construction of toll
booths."
I did answer it at length (though none of the critics
gives me credit for even trying).
In order to reproduce something (let it be a road or an OER) one
must first have access to the original. Once a commercial
version of the resource exists, there is significant incentive on
the part of the commercial owner to block or limit access to the
original, so that the only available version is the
commercial version.
I have over the years identified (and linked to in my newsletter)
numerous examples of how access to the original free resource may be
limited:
- legal challenges and FUD - making it too much of a risk to use the
non-commercial resource
- poisoning - using technical and legal requirements requiring that
resources in some way be 'certified'
- flooding - making the free resource just one out of hundreds of
versions, pushing the free resource down in search results
- book-storing - creating self-contained environments in which links
to free versions are not available
- salting - adding 'extra value' to the commercial resource not
available in the free resource
I could add many more but you get the point. These are clear and
obvious to anyone who actually looks for them; the evidence is as
plain as day.
In my analogy I represented this response as follows: "Eventually people
just used the new 'Free Roads,' paying their tolls every few
miles, because there was really no alternative. The 'Free Roads'
wouldn't connect to the 'restrictive' No-Toll roads, partially
because of the intersect-alike clause, and partly because NT roads
really did connect to other places, and the Free Road owners
simply didn't want the competition.
"Not that it would
have mattered. The Free Road owners could always depend on
exclusivity. Often, the only way to get from point A to
point B was to use a Free Road - they would obtain the concession
(and often public financing) to build a Free Road over a river or
through a mountain pass, and if you wanted to use it, you had to
sign up for a Free Road Account and you would be billed for the
full distance traveled, whether you used Free Roads or NT."
Again - maybe too subtle.
A great deal is made of the fact "non-rivalrous goods like
data on the Internet" can be reproduced at will. But in publishing
and commerce generally, there are rivalrous goods. The time
and attention of readers, the trechnology at their disposal, the
balancing of rights and regulations - all these are rivalrous
elements in what would otherwise nonriovalrous market. It is from my
perspective a naive and unsupportable argument to suggest that
people can just reproduce free copies of these newly-commercialized
resources.
Indeed, if the business model of publishers of CC-by content were so
easily disrupted, there would be no return on their investment, and
they would never get into the business. The very fact that there is
a pro-commercial lobby for the use of (otherwise) free resources is
itself proof that the "you can just make free copies" argument is
fallacious.
OK, that's it, I'm done. No more arguing from me on this. If you
continue to support the "everyone must support CC-by" position, I
will simply regard you as being against free and open access to
learning and learning resources, and working instead for people
trying to privatize the education system, puting your own narrow
self-interest ahead of wider social values (putting you in my mind
on par with banks and the oil industry).
"Let's see someone close off the route to Europe from America. As
long as the air and water are free they can close off what they want
and who would pay attention!"
Indeed. There are millions of would-be immigrants around the world
who would only wish that were the case. They wish nobody had thought
of a way of defining 'free' in terms of borders. I do know that
anyone attempting to cross from Europe to North America by means of
a purely non-commercial route will be arrested for immigration
violations. The Open Road has truely been closed.
