From the monthly archives: October 2008

Deep impact?

On October 31, 2008 By

That a settlement between publishers, authors and Google over the latter’s Book Search project was in the works was not exactly a well-kept secret over the past few weeks.  Nevertheless, the announcement of the complex agreement has set many people buzzing, even before its provisions were fully digested.  There is a collection of comments [...]

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Just ’cause you’re paranoid…

On October 26, 2008 By

When I wrote a post about a week and a half ago called “Can Copyright kill the Internet?,” I worried that my title might be considered a little bit extreme.  After all, the Internet is a big, sprawling “network of networks;” surely the puny efforts of legal enforcement cannot really do that much harm.  [...]

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What does PRO-IP really do?

On October 22, 2008 By

President Bush signed the “Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008″ — PRO-IP — on October 13, making it Public Law 110-403.  Since then a lot of news reports and blog posts have denounced the law, and I have noticed that a number of them claim negative aspects of the bill [...]

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OA @ Duke — why it matters very much!

On October 17, 2008 By

As part of our Open Access Day celebration at Duke, we held a keynote and panel event on Tuesday, Oct. 14th featuring Duke faculty and a student talking about why open access is important to them and important to Duke.  About 50 staff and faculty members attended, and following is a brief summary [...]

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Can Copyright kill the Internet?

On October 15, 2008 By

The question seems extreme, and it is certainly rhetorical.  But the potential for copyright challenges to significantly limit the range of activities and services available on the Internet is very real, and severe limits on the full potential for digital communications could be imposed.

One of the great strengths of the Internet — its completely [...]

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Chipping away

On October 10, 2008 By

Digital rights management, or DRM, is a delicate subject in higher education.  Also called technological protection measure, these systems to control access and prevent copying are sometimes used by academic units to protect our own resources or to fulfill obligations we have undertaken to obtain content for our communities.  Sometimes such use of DRM in [...]

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Stuck in the middle

On October 6, 2008 By

It was with both a sense of resignation and a deep awareness of the irony of the situation that I read this short article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (and the comments that follow it) titled “Free our Libraries, Cry University Presidents.”  Such a brief report cannot convey (I hope!) all that actually [...]

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Copyright creep?

On October 1, 2008 By

When I first became aware of the lawsuit filed by publishing giant Thomson Reuters against George Mason University to stop the release of the open source citation management program Zotero (hat tip to my colleague Paolo Mangiafico for directing me to this story), I wasn’t sure how it was relevant to issues of [...]

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