ILC 2004-5
tonight is led by Mike Carroll, a law prof at Villanova who has been at
the leading edge of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) movement.

Mike says that this issue is as simple as “giving life to the earliest
hopes and dreams of what the Internet can be.”  While eBooks
haven’t been a big deal, there has been an explosion in the
blogosphere, Mike argues, that is part of the realization of this
vision.   Copyright, at this point, may well be standing the way of the progress of science, Mike says.

He wonders: could we just take apart the functions of a publisher —
Registration, Certification, Awareness, Archiving — and put them back
together, more optimally, in the digital space?

It’s a fun and special group in the room tonight for our second-to-last
class of the year.  In addition to Mike, Doc Searls and David
Johnson have kindly stuck around from the Gruter-Berkman event earlier
today and have come upstairs to class.  (I suspect they may be
planning their escape as I type, but I’m glad they stumbled in all the
same.)

Mike’s telling us about OpenAccessLaw.org, that he’s doing with Dan Hunter, which is awfully cool.

Doc, it turns out, was learning out loud.