….sold our house! I guess technically we’re under contract, closing July 23rd. Nearly perfect, since it means that we can move our stuff, and not be homeless while doing it. Very exciting stuff!
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House hunting in Sewanee
Well…yesterday was spent looking at houses around out new school, The University of the South (aka, Sewanee) and boy, did we see some stuff. The pic above is from a freaking amazing house, with the best location I’ve ever seen. Too bad the interior is shite. Take a look at the gallery to see more shots of our travels in home searching.
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Operation Fastlink
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?
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Want a lower Erdos Number?
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.
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A blug for a new meme…
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.
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You mean I’ve got more papers?
Since the master’s paper furor has died down, my drive to get stuff done has just gone through the floor. Finishing the paper, then having such a great response to it…..then realizing that I’ve got like 3 more papers to finish before the 25th…really quite the stab in the face with a sharp stick.
But we’re nearing graduation, so gotta get the stuff done and turned in. Does anyone out there have any drive left at all?
And speaking of graduation…is everyone attending? I wanna see everyone I can there! Come on, people, show just for the silly gowns and hats!
Edit: The text of the article in question is actually online: Open Access.
Comes an interesting article by Rick Anderson titled Open Access in the Real World. I don’t think that several of his points are on target, though.
First point:
“While choices made by authors, publishers, and librarians do have an effect on the information marketplace, their choices and actions have little or no effect on the deeper economic reality in which that marketplace exists. That reality is determined in fundamental ways by two simple facts over which the human players in the information economy have little control, and a productive and intelligent conversation must proceed from a recognition of these facts.”
Those facts are: “There is no such thing as free information” and “Information is not a public good.”
To say that authors, publishers, and librarians have little or no effect on the economic reality of the publication marketplace is a bit misleading. It strikes me that much the same thought must have crossed the members of the recording industry bigwigs when the digital music revolution began. In that case, it was even further down the information pipeline..it was the consumer that was creating the change.
While he does point out an often ignored point in his discussion of “free information,” again, I think we’ve missed something. Of course there are costs associated with the creation of information. There are also benefits of said creation. His discussion of the trade-offs of this binary ignores the ability for information to do dual duty. It isn’t impossible for information to both create a return (economic or no) to the author, and also to be available for free to the public.
As well, the costs for archival and such can be spread to such a degree that it is almost literally no cost, and systems to do such are getting better and better every day. Things like the Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe system from Stanford and the Freenet project provide systems where archival of information is nearly invisible, and the cost is incredibly small. The cost for a system that is capable of running the Lockss system would be less than $250 right now.
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Got a mention at SILS news
Got a cool little writeup of the Master’s Paper attention at UNC School of Information and Library Science News Page.
Thanks for the attention, and I hope you enjoy the Perils of Strong Copyright. I’m somewhere over 1500 hits since this time last week, so I thought maybe people felt funny about jumping in in the middle of the original posts below.
If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it. I thought it would be easier for people just reading it to leave comments here, rather than getting buried in last weeks dialogue. So feel free to let me know what you think….good or bad. Both will help when I try to work this into an article for publication in some (open access) journal.
This is in response to a very thoughtful comment here.
I did indeed contact Rick looking for names at the ALA, early in the writing of the paper in an attempt to gather more copyright statements. The focus of the paper changed several times in the writing, and after examining many options, the most time-expedient thing for me to do was to rely on the web statements. I was certainly not concerned about being lied to or anything of that nature. After the fact, I would guess that speaking with publishers would not have given me significantly more information about the copyright stance of the individual publications than were available on the respective webpages. I would have gotten more detailed information, perhaps, or a more nuanced understanding of the positions, but my assumption was that their position should be contained within their copyright statement. It might have been just as interesting to simply look at whether or not the journals were open…a simple deliniation of “open” or “closed” may have been enough to illustrate my position. The examination of the copyright policies was an attempt to draw further support for the paper.
To say that I had a “preordained conclusion” is partially true, of course. This paper was designed to show something. What that thing was changed several times over the writing of it, but it seems obvious that there is a disconnect between the ALA’s actions and speech. If I had started researching peer-reviewed ALA journals and found Open Access after Open Access, that would have indeed thrown a wrench in the paper. But that’s not what I found.
Do not mistake the fact that I think that the ALA has done marvelous things for information in this country. The cases mentioned in the paper are all positive, to my mind. The ALA has long been a champion of the freedom of information. That is why I was so surprised when I began looking over the actual journals.
It may be that we are of differing opinion on the burden of proof in this case. It is entirely possible that I have failed in the paper to give sufficient evidence for the claim(s) that I make, although I do believe that I am on the right track. I also believe that there is evidence that the ALA needs to examine its own journals, and that it should be “opening” its journals in the same way that it suggests that other publishers should. If this examination is the only result of this paper, then it has been a success.
As I’ve said repeatedly, I am currently working on a revision of this into an article for submission to a journal. In that article, I hope to address many of the concerns brought forward re: Perils of Strong Copyright. As a Master’s Paper, I think it was successful in what I was attempting to do: show that there is a disconnect of a type within the ALA as it pertains to Open Access of information. There are MANY disconnects within the ALA, and indeed, with any large organization. It is only when they are pointed to that they are dealt with…the hope was only that Perils be a signpost pointing towards a better future for the organization.