Category: Digital Culture

File in the “my goodness the Internet is a large den of insanity” file: the strangest LiveJournal ever…this reads like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs meets Beavis. Just…wow.

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…but I’ve been overwhelmed by visitors and family and graduation festivities! Graduation is tomorrow here at UNC-Chapel Hill, so the town has been invaded by families of all shapes and sizes.

Ah…who am I kidding. I’m just late posting because I’ve been playing with my new 40-gig iPod for the last 8 hours. 🙂 Yay for graduation presents! And thanks to everyone out there who chipped in for it..Betsy went above and beyond the call to rake in the dough for it. You are all very, very special.

It occurs to me that some of you may have borrowed media of a sort from me over the last couple of years (books, movies, etc…). Before everyone scatters to the four winds, I’d love to get that stuff back. 🙂 You probably know who you are….

…and check out the most excellent article from Eli Edwards on the Internet Archive, soon to appear in Information Technology and Libraries.

A very, very good summary of the issues dealing with the archival of the Internet, as well as some insightful things about the role of libraries/librarians and the public/private dynamic. Great stuff, Eli!

…comes this interesting feedback from our discussion of his recent publication in College and Research Library News. His comments originally were a comment, but I wanted to respond briefly, so I moved them up. His comments quoted, mine in normal text:

First of all, I agree that the behavior of authors and publishers can have certain effects in the information marketplace; what they cannot do is change the fact that information is a)inherently costly and b)not usually a public good. Remember that “public good” is an economic term with an actual definition – it doesn’t just mean what we might like it to mean. Government documents fit that definition (and so, I’ll grant you, does public-domain information). But the whole open access question is really about information that does NOT fit that definition. Too many in our profession want to define all scholarly information as a public good, and that simply doesn’t work.

I think that Rick is correct in saying that his points may not be clear to everyone involved in the Open Access movement. I’m not certain that anyone believes that information qua information is a public good…at least, I do not espouse such a position. What I do believe is that authors should have the option of releasing their creations to the public at as low a charge as possible, without the control of publishers or other intellectual property issues getting in the way. This is especially true in the case of scholarly publication, but is not limited to it. Authors like Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig releasing their most recent works online does not make them a “public good” in the true economic sense (the intellectual property does not belong to the public) but it does have the same effect as far as the information consumer is concerned.

It is also certainly possible for authors/owners to simply donate their work to the public, as in the case of the photo gallery of Justin Watt. His photos have been used in publications, on websites, and who knows how else. He chose to absorbs the “costs” of the creation and dissemination of the works himself, which is the traditional understanding of “open access.” The author is expected to subsume the costs for the public, thus rendering the costs of the information irrelevant to the public.

Addendum…re: public good. From the Wikipedia:

In economics, a public good is some economic good which possesses two properties:

• It is non-rivalrous, meaning that it does not exhibit scarcity, and that once it has been produced, everyone can benefit from it.
• it is non-excludable, meaning that once it has been created, it is impossible to prevent people from gaining access to the good.

In this particular sense, digital information released under a copyleft or Creative Commons license certainly seems to qualify. Could you point me at the definition you’re using, Rick?

Here’s a fabulous new (to me) journal on IT and education…I’ve just spent the last day going back through all their back issues and reading nearly the entire things. It also appears to be at least mostly open. I haven’t compared a print volume to the online, but there is a great deal of content available directly from the website.

Educause

The Department of Justice today announced Operation Fastlink, “the most far-reaching and aggressive enforcement action ever undertaken against organizations involved in illegal intellectual property piracy over the Internet.” According to the press release:

As a result of Fastlink, over 120 total searches have been executed in the past 24 hours in 27 states and in 10 foreign countries. Foreign searches were conducted in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden as well as Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Operation Fastlink is the largest multi-national law enforcement effort ever directed at online piracy.

Who here is happy that there’s an international crackdown on copyright violations? Anyone? Bueler? I mean, seriously…yes, what they are doing is illegal. I’m not saying justifying widespread copyright violations (although I clearly believe that copyright has been twisted in favor of the media companies and away from the public). It’s just that I would hope that there are about a million things ahead of this sort of concentrated effort…terrorism, maybe? The drug trade?

I’m seriously thinking this might be worth the $100 or so, just for the conversation topic. I can just see me at a Library conference: ” Yeah, well…my Erdos number is 5, buddy…beat THAT!” For a better explanation than the auction, take a look at this.

Eric over at Is That Legal came up with a great new noun: Blug. A blug is a plug for a blog. Like, here’s a blug for his post.

Got a cool little writeup of the Master’s Paper attention at UNC School of Information and Library Science News Page.