Filed under: intellectual property
Last week, I purchased a copy of Lawrence Lessig’s book, Free Culture. I first read some of his writings in class and I’ve seen some of his lectures online. If you look at the physical book, there is a copyright notice. However, you can access the book for free on Lessig’s website. Not only is it available in closed but popular formats like PDF, but also plain text and other such formats. I am impressed, but feel vaguely stupid that I purchased it. Yet again, it is easier on the eyes to read a physical book and I do like the aesthetics of actually having the book on a shelf.
Filed under: intellectual property, law | Tags: intellectual property, law
One of the many advantages to living in Canada instead of the United States is the state of Canadian copyright law. It is reasonable that people who create things (like music, books etc) be able to financially benefit from such things for a limited period of time. Balancing against that is the right of fair dealing which protects copying for private research, criticism, news reporting (hmm… I wonder if blog writers are protected like journalists in Canada?) and more. These exceptions are needed to foster greater creativity, innovation and research not to mention education. In the Throne Speech, the federal government said that it was interested in amending copyright law. It was widely suspected that such changes would involve copying American law, such as the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The proposed new copyright act would essentially eliminate all exceptions to copyright, in the interests of greater commercial gains. As with so many things, law professor Michael Geist has good commentary on this. You can also read about yesterday’s development on the CBC. What I find most inspiring here is that MPs et al actually responded to popular unrest about the problem. There are quite a few issues (e.g. increase funding for CBC, lower university tuition fees, introduce carbon taxes, the list goes on) that I care about and that people encourage letter writing about, but I’ve been skeptical about the effectiveness of such campaigns.
Other links to consider:
Online Rights Canada
Fair Copyright
Filed under: Uncategorized
Note: This is the conclusion to an evaluation written regarding Dspace. The document was addressed to the chief librarian of a fictional Canadian university called “MacDonald University”
Dspace is an excellent digital repository system that is worthy of further study. The program meets all of the Library’s fundamental check list of requirements: customizable, flexibility (able to accept different kinds of media formats), penetration (in use by many university libraries, including about a dozen in Canada) and cost (software is free, storage hardware is fairly cheap). The flexibility of the system in terms of language, type of digital materials, access (via a web browser) and security make it very attractive. If used extensively by faculty, Dspace would facilitate the institutional goal of facilitating research and promotes the library’s goal of disseminating information widely. Further, MacDonald University may want to consider granting access to other parts of the university community such as graduate students; otherwise it may give the impression that only faculty perform research worthy of being disseminated. Prior to adopting this system, it is recommended to survey Canadian universities presently using the software – this would offer a fairly low cost of method of doing a usability study. Given the fact that most publications discussing Dspace only vaguely discuss its potential rather than its actual uses, this is an important question.
The most important problem to resolve is one of policy. Given that MacDonald University has not previously used open source software to any significant degree, the library needs to liaise with the university’s computing support department on how the institution develop policies for open source applications which may not have the same type of support available in commercial software. Further, existing university contracts with other software and hardware vendors need to be evaluated to see if there are any restrictions on implementing open source software.
Read the article I discuss below over here (note: this is a PDF file. The article was first published online in November 2005)
Chad and Milller’s article’s is helpful as an introduction to some of the important issues posed by Web 2.0 to libraries. It does well in sketching how Google and Amazon have redefined user expectations in information seeking, which seems intuitively correct but this is not substantiated with any research or evidence. There is also a reasonably worthwhile proposal toward developing a Library 2.0 model, one shaped by the social expectations of Web 2.0 technologies. Further examples of how Library 2.0 might actually work – aside from the example of linking libraries to Amazon – would have made this rather more persuasive. At present, this “White Paper” does not provide much of use if one wanted to implement these interesting ideas. Library managers could legitimately ask what kinds of concrete benefits this would bring to the institution and its users. Finally, the article is fatally crippled by its lack of awareness of the problems of the digital divide (assuming everybody has reliable access and sufficient competency to use the Internet). This perhaps should not be surprising given that the authors are based at a sophisticated knowledge management technology company in Britain, but librarians cannot make those kinds of assumptions due to their loyalty to the principles of universal public access. The article is ultimately useful as a brief introduction to this subject, but its lack of rigour in proposing its model and lack of social awareness place severe limits on its utility.
It may well be an academic prejudice, but I find the sort of vague writing involved in the above article to be quite irritating. This kind of document has the feel of notes for speech or presentation, the sort of document useful for starting a conversation (and a brief one at that) but little more.
Filed under: Uncategorized
As part of my studies at Information School, one of my projects is to start a blog. I’ve kept other blogs for several years now, but I have not yet blogged in an academic-professional manner so this is a new thing for me, after a fashion. My official area of study is “Archives and records management,” but I have a lifelong interest in museums and libraries as well. Part of my previous graduate work has been focused on libraries, as a matter of fact. As yet, I’m not sure what sorts of subjects that I will discuss here, but possible topics include: libraries (library 2.0, librarians as professionals etc), archives (general news and so on) and various other topics that would be of interest to an “information professional.”
A few words may now be in order regarding the mildly provocative title of this blog. The sense in which I use “jihad” here is in the generic, rather than the Islamic theological sense. Rather, I am using the term in the way specified by Dictionary.com: “2.any vigorous, emotional crusade for an idea or principle.” For many years, I have been a news junkie and generally enjoy the opportunity to read a wide variety of periodicals (mostly online these days as this method is friendly to my graduate student budget). This insatiable curiosity to know more combined with the fact that I have tremendously enjoyed teaching and helping patrons find information (at either archives or libraries). Further, I am committed to the idea of providing information to others and to thinking about it. In that sense, this blog will chronicle my interests, commentaries of news and academic articles and whatever else strikes me as relevant. Thus I am on an emotional crusade personally to know and to help others to know more.
