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“We came before copyright. But publishers now think of libraries as customer service departments for their database products.”

Wikipedia marked its 22nd anniversary in January. It remains, in many ways, a throwback to the Internet’s utopian early days, when experiments with open collaboration — anyone can write and edit for Wikipedia — had yet to cede the digital terrain to multibillion-dollar corporations and data miners, advertising schemers and social-media... See more

The second is the idea of “gray swan” events, which are both predictable and unprecedented. Together, these two ideas explain how we will face a rush of extremes, all scientifically imaginable but utterly new to human experience.

“We’ve had artificial-intelligence tools and bots since 2002, and we’ve had a team dedicated to machine learning since 2017,” Selena Deckelmann, Wikimedia’s chief technology officer, told me. “They’re extremely valuable for semiautomated content review, and especially for translations.

“Sharing knowledge is by nature an act of kindness,”

cases of obvious harm should be distinguished from those in which there is a sense of potential harm, or the issue is one of the unexpected uses

As the regime governing intellectual property rights evolved and began disproportionately favoring IP rights owners, the concept of openness became a tool for challenging power relations and striving for more equality. In that sense, the promotion of reuse and access to informational resources was fully compatible with the need to defend human... See more

When a physical book is sold, the “first sale” provision of copyright law says the author and publisher have no control over that volume’s fate in the world. It can be resold, and they don’t get a cut. It can be lent out as many times as readers demand. The information in the text flows freely through society without leaving a trace. Religions and... See more