There is something that people in the book world often don’t understand about copyright. When I say book world I mean librarians, booksellers, reviewers, researchers, authors, and sometimes publishers. A … Read more Something people in the book world often misunderstand about copyright
MIT has posted podcasts from the five plenary sessions at Media in Transition 6, at the Comparative Media Studies program’s podcast page. The plenary sessions were on “Archives and History,” … Read more Media in Transition 6 – Podcasts
Stephen L. Carter, a law professor who writes about democracy, has an article in The Daily Beast entitled, “Where’s the Bailout for the Publishing Industry?” It begins: Like a lot … Read more Stephen L. Carter – Where’s the Bailout for the Publishing Industry?
The Fair Copyright Act is to fair copyright what the Patriot Act was to patriotism. It would repeal the OA policy at the NIH and prevent similar OA policies at … Read more The Conyers Bill is Back (copyright)
New article by Lincoln Cushing: Privatizing the Commons: The Commodification of New Deal Public Art. Lincoln Cushing is an important person in the world of political graphic art, having put … Read more Privatizing the Commons: The Commodification of New Deal Public Art
ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy had its annual retreat this month. Barbara Fister, frequent poster to the ACRL blog and a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, presented … Read more Barbara Fister on Google and OA
I have not been following this, but apparently OCLC has issued proposed new policy guidelines that would allow it to claim ownership of its catalog records, with serious consequences for … Read more OCLC Powergrab?
It’s a new dawn in more ways than one. One of the things I hated most about the Bush administration, from a librarian’s point of view, was their ever increasing … Read more Talk about government transparency and sunshine
Canadian Association for Information Science: Call for Papers The Canadian Association for Information Science invites abstract submissions for its 37th Annual Conference, to be held May 28-30, 2009 at Carleton … Read more Call for Papers: Mapping the 21st Century Information Landscape: Borders, Bridges and Byways
MediaLens is a UK organization dedicated to raising awareness of the way the media system distorts reality as a result of the forces of free-market capitalism. Their analysis of things … Read more MediaLens on journalism’s filtering system in action
Marjorie Heins of the Free Expression Policy Project has some commentary published on the FEPP site about an interesting copyright case. It’s a Fair Use case that even copyright moderates … Read more Blanche survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire, only to face off with the copyright police
I’ve always been appalled by British libel law as long as I’ve known about it. Basically it puts a strong onus on defendants to prove that what they have said … Read more UN says British libel law violates human rights
Public Knowledge, the DC public interest group, has a very informative discussion of ACTA – the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. ACTA is an international trade agreement now being worked out behind … Read more ACTA – Policy laundering IP
A Marxist Analysis of the World Trade Organisation’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (PDF) Policy Futures in Education Volume 4 Number 4, 2006 RUTH RIKOWSKI London South … Read more Ruth Rikowski on the WTO and intellectual property rights
ALA has an important policy, Policy 61, on library services to poor people. This policy was brought about in the mid-90s through the dedicated work of SRRT’s Homelessness, Hunger, and … Read more Survey report on library services to the poor
Want to know if something is in the public domain or under copyright? Use the ALA OIT’s new digital copyright slider to find out. They’ve had an actual slide-rule like … Read more Digital Copyright Slider
A favorite debate of pessimistic sophomores, or perhaps sophomoric pessimists, is as to whether our society and its future is more like George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New … Read more Intellectual Freedom advocacy in a Huxleyan world
In my view, one of the most important documents and position statements that ALA has produced in the last few years was its June 2007 report, “Fostering Media Diversity in … Read more ALA IFC’s Fostering Media Diversity in Libraries, and ALA’s grey literature in general
John Ronald sent me a link to a review of a British pamphlet titled Rethinking Public Service Reform: The Public Value Alternative, from the Trade Union Congress (UK). The review … Read more Democratizing Public Services
Here’s a brief essay in the New York Times by Edward Rothstein that I am afraid I don’t have much to say about at the moment. I think I agree … Read more The problem with cultural property