What does the "free" in "free your information" really mean?

The first Open Space-discussion I participated in (and iniatiated) was meant to adress the big picture around web 2.0 and Open Access. To what degree is Open Access free? What rights are really connected to Open Access? Just the copying or even distributing the information?

In Sweden Open Access just involve the copying and you can´t take the resource and put it on your on server; you can only link to the resource. And for small libraries as my own, World Library, it´s a too big job to check all the links and if they are functioning.

The discussion didn´t clarify the question of defining Open Access. What you could continue to discuss is if you could use Creative Commons in the academic context as well or be inspired by those licenses in developing new Open Access-licenses in line with the Berlin-declaration.

Another track I was suggesting in the begining of the discussion was the question om unpaid labour, the base of all those new web 2.0-business models. As long as play is play (research and communication for the fun of it) it´s free and uncontroversial from my point of view, but when play is used for other purposes like comercial, political, academical ones you could maybe expect some problems to arise.

This discussion ended up in an defence of the Open Access-project -leaving the question as obsolete, as a no-problem - the problem was instead how we, the librarians could get the researchers to see the benefits with publishing themselves without thinking of economic rewards (that anyway is lacking in many cases). I imagine that the majority of researchers are not playing when they do their job, instead they look at it very instrumental: they often want respect and gain prestige and if possible even profit from their activities. Which is funny when a lot of research are publicly funded.

And last. Many of the people who took part of the discussions concluded that their was free as in freedom and not as in free beer that was the most important aspect of the work of defining the word free. I argued that in a time when information is the new cornerstone in the economic, capitalist, system when freedom of speech and free beer rapidly becames quite hard to separate if democracy is something valued.