Patent battles have become a strong catalyst for mergers, reducing competition in various domains. The largest corporations, with gigantic patent portfolios, routinely enter into cross-licensing agreements with their largest competitors. James Gleick Read Quote
Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself. James Gleick Read Quote
Because everyone in the world has the power to edit, Wikipedia has long been plagued by the so-called edit war. This is like a house where the husband wants it warm and the wife wants it cool and they sneak back and forth adjusting the thermostat at cross purposes. James Gleick Read Quote
Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper. James Gleick Read Quote
Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society. James Gleick Read Quote
When people say that the Internet is going to make us all geniuses, that was said about the telegraph. On the other hand, when they say the Internet is going to make us stupid, that also was said about the telegraph. James Gleick Read Quote
I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There’s a delicate balance. James Gleick Read Quote
It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover. James Gleick Read Quote
Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia. James Gleick Read Quote
Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the ‘Oxford English Dictionary,’ has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever. James Gleick Read Quote