It is easy and necessary to functionality on the Web for many parties to crawl, copy/cache, transmit and manipulate data, as well as for everyone to make digital copies of works to post online. There are financial and reputational incentives for each type of party to claim some ownership of the works manipulated in this way. I argue that OA needs to participate in efforts to resist this trend as it leads to expanding enclosure, permissions culture where every small part of a use invokes permission and/or tolls.
To illustrate the danger: every day Google crawls a very large portion of the world wide Web, manipulating results using proprietary algorithms, and providing a service largely based on ad revenue. If this type of service creates a new copyright, in effect Google could claim copyright ownership on the Web. This thought piece is presented to illustrate the dangers of expanding copyright and encourage OA advocates to counter this trend and not encourage it through such means as advocating for CC licenses on public domain material. CC is a waiver of copyright, so use of CC is an assertion of copyright. If service A claims copyright on their public domain work in order to waive it, the free works are a good thing but the precedent of digitizing public domain works is problematic. Service B in the same sector could point to this practice to justify their copyright assertion for toll access. That is, both services claim copyright but make different decisions about what to do with it. This is not a critique of Google. In this respect the company models its don't be evil philosophy. Best, Heather Morrison
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