Open Content

"the idea that the principles of the open source / free software movements can be productively applied to content"

Definition by David Wiley at http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/247

History

Rufus Pollock [1]:

"One of the first printed texts of which we have record is a copy of the Buddhist Diamond sutra produced in China around 868AD. In it can be found the dedication: “for universal free distribution”. Clearly, the idea of open knowledge, that is knowledge you are free to use, reuse and redistribute, has been present since humanity first began to formally transmit and share ideas. It is also likely that the urge to keep ideas secret, particularly those that had ‘commercial’ value, is equally old." (http://www.rufuspollock.org/archives/220)

Examples

1. OPUS(Parallel text corpus collection)
2. VoxForge (Transcribed speech data) (dutch)
3. Archive.org (general archive)
4. Wikipedia and its family of projects: (Wiktionary, WikiCommons, WikiSource, WikiBooks, WikiQuote)
5. Project Gutenberg: (EU) (LibriVox Audiobooks) (MOA American literature) (Project Runeberg Scandinavian literature)
6. WordNet (Lexical data)
7. OpenStreetMap (Geospatial data)
8. OSGeo: geospatial software
9. FreeSound (Audio samples)
10. Mutopia (Sheet music)
11. Music Brainz (Music metadata)
12. OpenSubtitles (Film subtitles)
13. PlanetMath (Mathmatics)
14. WikiTravel (Travel guides)
15. WikiCompany (Company profiles)
16. DBPedia (RDF data aggregation) (See also: LinkingOpenData, Umbel - a subject reference structure, and Bibliographic Ontology)
17. Science Commons (Open Access science portals)
18. Free-Reading (English literacy lessons)

Discussion

Benefits of Openness to producers

Rufus Pollock [2]:

"The main point to make is that in industries which are cumulative, that is new ideas and inventions build upon old, proprietary rights mean having to ask ‘permission’ (and pay for it) — while openness does not. With openness it is easier for subsequent innovators and creators to produce new work while with proprietary rights one have increased transactions costs as well as a whole bunch of bargaining issues — most prominently the risk of ‘hold-up’. Particularly in cases where the initial creator today may be the reuser tomorrow the benefits of openness in freer and more rapid reuse and cumulative innovation may outweigh the losses from lower immediate revenues." (http://www.rufuspollock.org/archives/220)

The Internet, Web and Google as examples of the benefits of openness

Rufus Pollock [3]

"The Internet, and the World-Wide-Web that is built on top of it are two of the most obvious and important examples of the benefits of being open. All of the basic protocols and standards that went into these technologies were open, free for anyone to implement, use, modify and examine. As a result innovation of the Internet and the Web has been phenomenally rapid creating immense wealth and value for society. The centrality of openness here, and the importance of the absence of the need to seek permission is illustrated by the example of Google.

Google, the provider of the planet’s most popular online search engine, is perhaps the best known Internet company in the world. With a market valuation in the tens of billions of dollars it is also one of the most successful. It is therefore the largest and most commercially successful open content company in the world even though it does not, at least at present, own any content at all. For Google derives the vast bulk of its present revenue from advertising. The ‘attention’ that sells the advertising is itself generated from Google’s role as a web search engine, the gatekeeper and organizer of the immense store of information that is the Web. Without the Web, Google, and the business model that supports it simply would not exist.

Thus Google has only been possible because the information on the web is almost all semi-open and anyone may freely access (and copy for their own purposes) the information posted on websites. Imagine if right from the start the web had been ‘closed’, and each website had required payment as well as an agreement not to copy its contents. Search engines, at least in their present form, would not exist and we would have seen neither the benefits of the services they provide nor the revenues they generate." (http://www.rufuspollock.org/archives/220)

Citation

"Free, unencumbered access to a piece of knowledge whether it be a film or a database, is the most obvious way that openness delivers benefits. Because it is cheaper and easier to get hold of open knowledge it may be much more widely used than it would otherwise. Each such extra user, who gains access because open knowledge is cheaper or easier to get hold of than ‘closed’ knowledge, derives a benefit that increase the well-being of society." (http://www.rufuspollock.org/archives/220)

More Information

1. Fair Use
2. Open Access
3. Open Access Books
4. Open Biology
5. Open Business
6. Open Business Process Initiative
7. Open City Guides
8. Open Content Licenses
9. Open Courseware Initiative
10. Open Data
11. Open Design
12. Open Documentaries
13. Open Education
14. Open Educational Resources
15. Open Fiction
16. Open Textbooks
17. Open Genomics
18. Open GeoData
19. Open Knowledge
20. Open Learning
21. Open Licenses
22. Open Music Model
23. Open Music Business Model
24. Open Peer Review
25. Open Peer to Peer Design
26. Open Public Data
27. Open Science Licenses
28. Open Spreadsheets
29. Open Textbooks