From the monthly archives: December 2008

OA, RNA and Wikipedia

On December 26, 2008 By

The recent announcement made on NatureNews that the journal RNA Biology will require authors writing for one of its sections to also post a page describing the work in Wikipedia set me wondering, and debating with a colleague, about the motivation here.  Bloggers at the Fischbowl and O’Reilly Radar see this as [...]

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From foreign courts,

On December 20, 2008 By

come two cases that offer interesting lessons for US observers of the copyright environment.

First, there is a case from Canada that allows us for once to be grateful for at least one aspect of US copyright law. In a case involving a parody newspaper that made fun of the [...]

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Security blankets?

On December 12, 2008 By

The report that some major music companies are considering a blanket licensing arrangement with college campuses whereby the schools would pay into a central collecting agency and the music industry would stop its campaign of litigation, has, quite understandably, generated a lot of Internet buzz. Neither the technorati nor academia really seem [...]

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What is “value” in publishing?

On December 5, 2008 By

The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog sponsored by the Society for Scholarly Publishing, is a source of opinion and debate that I have wanted to point out for some time.  I have finally been prodded to do so, or one might better say provoked, by this post from Kent Anderson called “Are Publishers Anti-Publishing?“  [...]

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Two cases that could shape copyright

On December 1, 2008 By

Two interesting cases were reported in the past weeks by Zohar Efroni, a non-resident fellow at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society.  One could have significant impact on the shape of US copyright law, especially as it serves to encourage or hamper technological innovation, and the other suggests, to me at least, an interesting [...]

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