Back from lunch with Andrea and Jamie. To distract Andrea from the stress of the final stages of preparations for the Henry VIII exhibition, I bring up the 'Monty Hall Problem' in relation to working out which of our three coffees has the milk in it (there's a crema on all three, so we can't see). I'm not sure that bringing some maths and cognitive dissonance is much of a distraction. Some chocolate or a drink later may have been a better bet.
I mention this, because earlier this week, Professor James Boyle (of Duke University) kindly came to speak to us about his new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind as part of the c21st curatorship project that I help to run. It's a great talk, and may be similar to the one given at the RSA (a podcast should be available soon). The exhibition didn't have anything about copyright or even much on the need to access information in a democracy, although it was one of the unstated themes and part of the rationale for putting it on in a library (along with the associated events and discussions). His talk about the balance between protecting the rights of the creator, the need to provide accessible source material as the raw material for new innovations, whether cultural or economic, the 'enclosing' of most of the cultural output of the c20th, and the current lack of empirical, understanding of the real economic relationship between protection and free access was fascinating.
But, to go back to cognitive dissonance, how many of us would have thought that the uncontrolled, free Internet, with all its problems of libel, pornography and copyright breaches, was the way to go back in 1992, rather than a closed, controlled system like minitel or ceefax. Open access, he suggested, is not always the best or the right thing, but it's the right thing more often than we think. The complicated balance of rights, the need to discuss these things openly, and a concentration on the end result or benefit to society brought to mind one of the lonelier cases in the exhibition - J S Mill's On Liberty.