Political Economy of Innovation

Here is another interesting book available for download under a Creative Commons BY NC SA license. Its Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets: The Political Economy of Innovation by Peter F. Cowhey and Jonathan D. Aronson. Download it, buy it and check out the blog for extra material.
download-graphic2

Innovation in information and communication technology (ICT) fuels the growth of the global economy. How ICT markets evolve depends on politics and policy, and since the 1950s periodic overhauls of ICT policy have transformed competition and innovation. For example, in the 1980s and the 1990s a revolution in communication policy (the introduction of sweeping competition) also transformed the information market. Today, the diffusion of Internet, wireless, and broadband technology, growing modularity in the design of technologies, distributed computing infrastructures, and rapidly changing business models signal another shift. This pathbreaking examination of ICT from a political economy perspective argues that continued rapid innovation and economic growth require new approaches in global governance that will reconcile diverse interests and enable competition to flourish.

The authors (two of whom were architects of international ICT policy reforms in the 1990s) discuss this crucial turning point in both theoretical and practical terms, analyzing changes in ICT markets, examining three case studies, and considering principles and norms for future global policies.

Liberty for free – later

The title almost becomes a meta-comments for so many things…

Giving away books online for free has worked for many authors. The customers who download tend often even to buty the books. Most of the evidence is anecdotal but Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig & Yochai Benkler have done well by following this principle.

The publisher Faber is now trying this with a twist. It will let readers will let readers decide what to pay for to download a digital copy of Ben Wilson’s What Price Liberty?.The Guardian writes:

In the book, Wilson argues that the contemporary assault on civil liberties in the UK follows a decline in the importance and status of ideas of liberty in Britain’s national culture, and that it is only through an understanding of history that we can fashion a liberty fit for the 21st century.

The recommended price is £14.99 but you can download the pdf for free. Now I doubt that many will pay for the pdf but I don’t think that the free pdf will limit or decrease sales. The smart thing that Faber is doing is releasing the free ebook six weeks before the launch of the physical copy with the main aim “to stimulate debate for the issues at the centre of this book, as well as generating interest for the book itself”.

The annoying thing is that you cannot download the book until April 27 – so this news is not really news its more about something which will be news. Anyway the book sounds interesting so I will be keeping tabs on this. Even if I would have preferred to download directly – this is the generation of instant gratification and I just didn’t get any!

Boyle in Cambridge

James Boyle, author of The Public Domain, writes on Boing Boing:

Just a note to say that I am giving a lecture March 10 at 6pm at London’s RSA on my new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. The lecture hall is gorgeous — Cory has been a frequent speaker there — it has a fabulous series of paintings on the theme of “Progress” by James Barry, featuring earnest waistcoated men with theodolites and many scantily clad young women whose main hope appears to be that The Progress of Human Culture is going to give them something more substantial to wear than a precariously secured bedsheet. The mural is worth the price of admission alone (free but you must register). Following that I’ll be giving the first Arcadia Lecture at Cambridge on Cultural Agoraphobia and the Future of the Library March 12. Hope to see UK BB’ers at one of these events…
The Public Domain: enclosing the commons of the mind (Thanks, Jamie!)

Wish I could be there.

Rushdie on book copyright

In January, Salman Rushdie was 92nd Y in New York attending something called The Moral Courage Conversations together with Irshad Manji. A brief interlude among the questions was whether or not he saw copyright as an impediment to freedom of speech. So while I was waiting for a deep understanding from one of my favorite authors on a topic that interests me deeply.

Question: Have you considered copyright law as an barrier to free speech?

Rushdie: er,…no… but that’s because I write for a living…

Then Rushdie launches into an interesting perspective on book piracy. In particular to the problem of illegal copies of his work being made. Actually he does not throw any light on the role of Internet in this question but it does raise an interesting perspective which we digital copyright activists tend to forget in our focus on file sharing. Rushdie is is as eloquent as ever. humorous in the face of piracy.

The question comes a long way in the video at 1 hour 10 ten minutes 55 seconds (ends about 1 hour, 14 minutes 40 seconds)

Viral Spiral, Bollier's new book

I have been a fan of David Bollier since I read his book Silent Theft so I was happy to see that he had written a new book on the importance of the public domain and the commons. The book, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a
Digital Republic of Their Own
is also available for download under a Creative Commons license. From the website:

One of the big themes of Viral Spiral is the enormous value generated from making one’s work openly available on the Internet. While publishing traditionalists are skeptical of this new reality, a number of pioneering authors and publishers have shown the commercial appeal of posting their books online using one or another Creative Commons licenses. Among the more notable authors are Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle, Yochai Benkler, Dan Gillmor and Peter Barnes. In the same spirit, New Press has authorized the following download of the text of Viral Spiral. I hope that anyone who has the chance to browse through the PDF version of the book will want to buy a hard copy.

Friday at last

It’s been a long week and I am looking forward to leaving the mill for a relaxing break… Maybe a spot of culture and a relaxing book?

Positive Procrastination

While procrastination is often seen as a negative act it does have a positive side. Of course if the procastination we enjoy turns out to be positive and leads to a result – is this really procrastination at all? Hmm an academic Zen koan… but I digress and possibly procrastinate.

Since returning to Göteborg from my Open Access project in Lund there has appeared a small window of opportunity to begin doing something more substantial and long term. So based upon this premise I happily ignore a bunch of more pressing, but smaller, tasks in order to create a meaningful long term project.

Thus far I have located and area, a vague plan of action, a whole bunch of related work and now I am formulating a thesis to be presented, argued and defended. So with the risk of jinxing the project by talking about it at this early stage my idea is to write a book (not very original since I am an academic) on the connection between copyright, culture and innovation.

There! It’s out now. So all I need to do now is to fine tune the thesis and begin purposely bashing the keyboard. Who said that procrastination is all bad?

From Bizzaro by Piraro

My licensing book is out

My short book on open licenses in Swedish Copyright – Copyleft: En guide om upphovsrätt och licenser på nätet is finished and it is online at the IIS, the organisation who commissioned the work. The book covers seven licenses and the Creative Commons system.

The licenses discussed/explained are the Free Art License 1.3, GNU Free Documentation License, the Sparc Author Addendum, the Ethymonics Free Music License, the Common Documentation License, the, the BSD Free Documentation License and the Open Game License.

I am happy that the work is done and I hope that it will serve to help the curious learn more about licensing.

Terms of Use

My friend, collegue and fearless explorer of the public domain Eva has sent me a copy of her new book “Terms of Use

Love the tigers on the front… If it is anything like her last book it will be great. I will be reviewing it here later but I just wanted to give anyone a heads up straight away – this is an interesting book.

Two New OA Books (+1)

This has been a busy week for books on Open Access. On Wednesday I blogged about the book Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors by Kylie Pappalardo. Today Open Access News wrote about two more new Open Access books:

E. Canessa and M. Zennaro at the Science Dissemination Unit of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste have put together an edited book Science Dissemination using Open Access.

From today’s announcement:

The book is a compendium of selected literature on Open Access, both on the technical and organizational levels, and was written in an effort to guide the scientific community on the requirements of Open Access, and the plethora of low-cost solutions available. The book also aims to encourage decision makers in academia and research centers to adopt institutional and regional Open Access Journals and Archives to make their own scientific results public and fully searchable on the Internet. Discussions on open publishing via Academic Webcasting are also included.

The other book is a 144 pp. collection of articles on OA by 38 authors, edited by Barbara Malina entitled Open Access Opportunities and Challenges: A Handbook, the German UNESCO Commission, July 2008. This is an English translation of Open Access: Chancen und Herausforderungen – ein Handbuch (2007).