The various movements based on digital openness – free software, open content, open data, open science, open government etc. – have made huge strides in recent years, and transformed many aspects of the modern world dramatically. But that is just the beginning. The key drivers of openness – the shift from analogue to digital, and global connectivity – imply much more: digital abundance. And that, in its turn, requires us to re-examine ancient intellectual monopolies born of analogue scarcity.

3. against refusal to share digital artefacts

4. against artifical scarcity of information

7. 1,000 years ago – 400 million

8. 700 years ago – 450 million

13. afterwards, knowledge released

14. formalised in the Statute of Monopolies (1624)

16. very few inventions

17. trade secrets easy to keep (trade guilds)

19. to get them revealed for wider use, rather than hoarded

21. patent thickets

23. the total cost of litigating in US was $3.9 billion per year

24. software patents = overall net loss of $3.8 billion per year

26. 3,000,000 genome-related patents filed

27. ”patent-stacking” allows single DNA sequence to be patented in several ways

28. whole-genome scan: impossible with the huge number of gene patents

30. in 16 th and 17 th century England, the Stationers' Company had exclusive and perpetual state monopoly over producing printed copies of every registered book (their ”copy right”)

31. aim was to *control* what was printed by establishing responsibility - instrument of censorship

33. gave limited monopoly (14 years + 14 year extension)

34. text became freely available after that period – created modern public domain

35. strongly influenced US copyright law

37. typesetting slow

38. printing presses were expensive

39. binding was slow

40. distribution slow

43. somebody to print the sheets

44. somebody to bind the book

45. somebody to distribute the book

47. in an age of scarcity, copyright made infringement even more risky

49. upload it

50. sell it globally

52. upload it

54. tomorrow: 1 Exabyte hard disc 50 €

55. implicit *abundance*: 150,000 MP3 files today, 150,000,000,000 MP3 tomorrow

57. 13 million tracks on Spotify

58. 100 million blogs

59. ” hundreds of millions” videos on YouTube

60. 5 billion pictures on Flickr

61. one trillion URLs (2008)

62. but...this is only a part of today's abundance

64. by definition, dark abundance negates the scarcity that lies at the heart of copyright

65. challenges 18 th -century business models built on scarcity

66. like dark matter, dark abundance has visible consequences

68. ACTA; TPPA

69. ”PROTECT IP” Act; ”voluntary” Website blocking

70. places protection of intellectual monopolies and their scarcities above protection of human rights

71. rather break the Internet than allow it to be used for sharing

74. they must then pay for access to most of the world's knowledge, often at near-Western rates – even though the marginal cost is practically zero

76. means access for all humanity – not just the developed world, or the richer classes elsewhere

77. sounds socialist or worse: actually conservative

79. copyright not about protecting old business models

80. copyright not about enshrining authors' or publishers' ”rights”

83. educating them through access to knowledge will generate even more creativity in the system

84. self-fuelling, positive feedback

86. however, society *does* have that right - just as it had the right to strengthen copyright, repeatedly, by extending its range and its term, diminishing public domain

87. not necessarily one-way

88. society decides which direction and the quid pro quo

90. rights to control the change of ownership of a particular copy end once that copy is sold

91. society decided this was a fair limitation on copyright

95. if not, the war on digital sharing becomes a war on the ability of the mind to take flight through knowledge

97. the ratchet went the wrong way – should have decreased the term of copyright as more creators arrived, less incentive needed

98. for analogue content, could bring it back to 14 years + 14 years with renewal

100. famously, one calendar year is seven Internet years

101. digital content lives on Internet time, so for that, should measure copyright on Internet time

102. 14 Internet years = 2 calendar years

104. as for copyright, there are two kinds of patents: analogue and digital

105. analogue patents operate on calendar time, so could leave the current term (typically 20 years)

106. digital patents – software patents, gene patents – just don't scale, so abolish them

108. copyright industries will cling to scarcity by waging war on sharing

109. if analogue patents still exist, clever lawyers will employ the ”computer-implemented invention”/”purified gene” trick, yoking digital and analogue together

111. there is only one non-arbitrary term for an intellectual monopoly: zero years

113. in an age of digital abundance, no longer rational or necessary

114. should no longer put up with the high price that intellectual monopolies exact - hindering progress, holding back billions of lives and the loss of fundamental freedoms

116. ”We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.”

118. how would open projects function without copyright?

119. what would the key issues be in a world without intellectual monopolies?

120. what new roles might open projects play in such a world of abundance?