After finishing Carr's new book - which talks about crowdsourcing and photography specifically - I found this, from Scoble:

I was just reading feeds before heading to the second day’s events at LeWeb3 conference in Paris. Along comes Susan Mernit’s blog, who quotes Lane Hartwell , who is pissed that people steal her photographs.

...

Me? I’m the opposite of Lane. I WANT YOU to steal my content. In fact, next year I’m going to do stuff to make all my content available via Creative Commons license so you can use it wherever and whenever, including my video shows. I’d like a credit, yes, but don’t demand it. I’d rather just add to the human experience and if that means that other people make money off of my work, so be it.

Carr takes this trend as terrifying - I take it as being akin to the demise of an industry as technology changes. I really don't think this is much different than it ever has been. People talk a lot about the new level of global connectivity (in a business sense) but hey - one could easily argue that things were tied just as tightly just before WWI. For all the talk of instant communications, some perspective is in order: in 1800, it took weeks for a message to cross the Atlantic. In 1870, the telegraph had dropped that to minutes. That was a far bigger change, IMHO.

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