"the idea that the principles of the open source / free software movements can be productively applied to content" - David Wiley [1]

Definition

Monica Mora [2]:

"Open content is an asset with a structure that is different from that of Open Source Software and Open Source Hardware.

Open content refers to any kind of creative work, such as articles, pictures, audio, and video, or engineering work such as designs, published in a format that is royalty free, share alike and may or may not allow commercial redistribution. Open content explicitly allows the copying and the modifying of the information by anyone. Content can be either in the Public Domain or under an open license like one of the Creative Commons licenses. The largest open content project is Wikipedia. The phrase open content was coined to be similar to open source." (http://www.osbr.ca/archive.php?issue=10&section=Ar#A5)

Open Educational Resources are an example of open content.

History

Rufus Pollock [3]:

"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

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

Benefits

"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)

Discussion

Benefits of Openness to producers

Rufus Pollock [4]:

"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 [5]

"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)

More Information

FOSS: Open Content, written by Lawrence Liang

Related Concepts

Open Content

Contents