Leo Pollak's Should higher education course materials be free to all? [84 kB PDF] in a monthly publication of the influential Institute for Public Policy Research passed me by. Abstract:
"In recent months, UC Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have, respectively, announced and achieved their intention to make entire lecture and course materials freely available online – to anyone. Leo Pollak argues that while British universities lag far behind in online course provision, the UK is uniquely placed to innovate further than MIT, and to once again radically redefine the basis of opportunity, learning and social mobility."
A footnote in Pollak's paper:
"The Cambridge economist Rufus Pollock has argued convincingly that there exists a calculable opportunity cost to a wide range of restrictive intellectual monopolies; not merely to individuals, innovative firms, to jobs, consumers and to the wider economy, but, most crucially, to the providers of the ‘first copy’, the original content producers (Pollock 2006)."
took me to Pollock's January 2008 Innovation and imitation and with and without intellectual property rights [250 kB PDF] which provides a "welfare economics" based argument for Open Content. Abstract (emphasis added):
"An extensive empirical literature indicates that returns from innovation are appropriated primarily via mechanisms other than formal intellectual property rights and that `imitation' is itself a costly activity. However most theory assumes the pure non-rivalry of `ideas' with its implication that, in the absence of intellectual property (for example under an `open source' regime), innovation (and welfare) is zero. This paper introduces a formal model of innovation based on imperfect competition in which imitation is costly and an innovator has a first-mover advantage. Without intellectual property, a significant amount of innovation still occurs and welfare may actually be higher than with intellectual property."
[As an aside, today's Open Education Skeptic: We Are All Prof. Gradgrind Now, by Michael Feldstein, gets to the heart of a weakness in Leo Pollak's paper, namely that access to course materials is not the same as access to education.]
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