Information technology and education

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The closing down of the thread I initiated on the discussion of the impact of technology on education because it became distorted into racial issues leaves open, it seems to me, many issues on the original intent that are worthy of investigation.

One issue in particular seems to me to be an extremely difficult one to resolve yet central to the core of the most important mission of any culture to see to it that new generations are well informed and capable and integrated into the beneficial directions of society. That issue is proprietary information. In the early days of copyright it was assumed that a limited period of about 20 years was sufficient to provide the innovator of original material to recoup some worthwhile income from the output of the material. After that the material would fall into the public sector and could be generally disseminated freely to the general benefit and enrichment of society. As time has moved on this score of years has been extended extensively so that subsequent possessors of the original material are getting almost unlimited time to profit from novel productions. I have heard that lecturers at universities had demanded that student notes about lectures given have been requested back by the lecturer to prevent unauthorized views of the material. Technology has rapidly advanced to the point that reproduction and dissemination of material is so simple, quick, and economical that it has come into direct conflict with the genuine necessity that originators of worthwhile material gain some financial recompense for their efforts. This problem has become pointedly acute with the music industry where the main thrust for profit is only partially out of the originators of the material but mainly from the distributors who basically contribute only a service which is being undermined and made superfluous by the emerging technology.

But this problem is very basic and overwhelmingly important for the health of the society and culture in general. I would guess a solution might lie in an alternate system of recompense for producing valuable new material but very powerful forces are obviously in operation to maintain the restriction of new information for selfish and destructive systems of profit.

For certain areas of knowledge (most notably science and mathematics), I believe everything ought to be public domain, and preferably easily accessible over the Internet in a centralized database (see the arXive for an example of an attempt at this). For other areas (music, some software such as games) I would be more inclined to be in favor of the rights of content producers.

Although I agree that content producers ought to be justly compensated the financial organizations that not only merely distribute the material but also, to a very large degree, are in control of what material has the opportunity to be distributed has a very negative effect on the quality of the culture of the entire society merely in the interest of the financial profit of the distributors and I find this very disturbing.