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Open Networks and Open Society: The Relationship between Freedom, Law, and Technology

Hal Abelson PhD '73 John Wilbanks: April 26, 2005; Running Time: 1:37:59

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Hal Abelson wants to deliver a one-two punch against the privatization of academic discourse. His weapons of choice? New global initiatives based on MIT’s own OpenCourseWare (OCW) and DSpace. Abelson owns to a “real anxiety that people are quick to talk about academic exchange under the rubrics of property and ownership,” along the lines of the motion picture, recording and publishing industries. He sees a profound threat -- that of eventual monopoly control -- to scholarly publishing. Out of self-protection, Abelson says, universities must pursue initiatives to ensure free and open academic publishing. Two coordinated initiatives would “strengthen the information commons,” the body of knowledge on which thinkers continually build and which “forms the progress of science.” One, modeled on OCW, would provide “global access to raw material from which the world’s great learning institutions create educational experiences for their students.” The other, like MIT Libraries’ DSpace, would produce an interoperable and virtual collection of research from the world’s top institutions. Abelson exhorts universities to pursue their true mission of generating, disseminating and preserving knowledge, and defend against the encroachments of the commercial publishing industry, with its near stranglehold on journals and increasingly on ideas themselves.

John Wilbanks hopes to expand on this vision with Creative Commons, an attempt to permit authors and artists around the world to copyright their material with “some rights reserved.” His website provides free tools for licensing music, photos, video or written works, while permitting the dissemination of this work for noncommercial or shared use, for instance. Eventually, Creative Commons may encompass data and datasets, as well as patents and the transfer of biological material.

Lecture Details

Location: 6-120

“Somehow we’re confusing ideas about property with ideas about academic freedom. It’s a real quandary. By and large, the major set of tools provided by the law is phrased in terms of ownership. It’s essentially a bad match for the academic community. ”

Hal Abelson

About the Speakers

Hal Abelson PhD '73

Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, MIT School of Engineering

Harold (Hal) Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor Of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a Fellow of the IEEE. He holds an A.B. degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from MIT. In 1992, Abelson was designated as one of MIT's six inaugural MacVicar Faculty Fellows, in recognition of his significant and sustained contributions to teaching and undergraduate education. Abelson was recipient in 1992 of the Bose Award (MIT's School of Engineering teaching award). Abelson is also the winner of the 1995 Taylor L. Booth Education Award given by IEEE Computer Society, cited for his continued contributions to the pedagogy and teaching of introductory computer science.

He was also a founding director of the Free Software Foundation, and he serves as consultant to Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. He is co-director of the MIT-Microsoft Research Alliance in educational technology.

John Wilbanks

Vice President, Science Commons

John Wilbanks comes to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research & development.

Before founding Incellico, John was the first Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His first technology work was at Fonix, where he researched human-computer interface and pattern recognition. He also worked as a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney (Pete) Stark and a grassroots coordinator and fundraiser for the American Physical Therapy Association. John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Universite de Paris IV (La Sorbonne).

He is a research affiliate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and can be found in the project MAC group space. He serves on the Advisory Board of the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central and the International Advisory Board of the Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities awards.

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