interesting article on information rights and intellectual freedom

Julie E. Cohen, Information Rights and Intellectual Freedom, in Ethics and the Internet 11-32 (Anton Vedder ed., Intersentia 2001).

A combination of technology and strengthened legal protection enables vendors of digital content to exert tighter control over access to and use of that content, and enables trademark owners to exert tighter control over critical and even discursive references to their names, marks, and products. This increased control over inputs to creation and communication — and thus over social "meaning-making processes" in turn seems likely to concentrate ownership of culture in the hands of large producers of standardized, mass-market content. ...

... These conditions do not square with traditional assumptions about intellectual freedom, which presume a rich substrate of publicly accessible information and a substantial degree of autonomy, and of anonymity, for both authors and speakers, on the one hand, and readers and listeners, on the other. Preserving intellectual freedom in a networked information environment therefore requires reconsideration of arguments that equate intellectual freedom with strong intellectual property rights and weak informational privacy protections.

Intellectual property laws do not exist in a vacuum. As our society becomes more of an "information age", information rights - of accessing and using information - will become an important human right.

12:46:36 PM    Comments []  

GATS and public libraries

Public libraries are in the public domain, supported by public taxes. Imagine an information services company entering a market and demanding the same subsidies and tax support that public libraries get. It would be entitled to do so under national treatment rules, providing it can prove itself to be the same kind of operation. The government's most likely response would be to cut back on or eliminate public funding to libraries so as to avoid similar claims in the future.

Wow, this is something I definitely plan to investigate further.

9:53:44 AM    Comments []  

trademarking the public domain

As more  properties created during the birth of mass media in the early 20th century fall into the public domain, we will see an accelaration in the development of the jurisprudence of the interplay between use of public domain material and trademark (the owners of properties such as Peter Rabbit and Tarzan have been litigating these issues already).

One possible argument could go like this: "Yes your honor, while this illustration of  Winnie the Pooh is in the public domain as a copyright, we have been using it as a trademark for 20 years on our 'Classic Pooh' line of towels, and this survey shows that 75% of all respondents who see a product bearing this illustration of Pooh on a towel, believe that it originates with us."

5:02:28 PM    Comments []  

LexisNexis name changes

LexisNexis Relaunches Entire Roster of Academic Products [The Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk]

I just checked some of the changes, and Congressional Universal will become "LexisNexis Congressional."

10:22:01 AM    Comments []  

more blog navel-gazing

Says Ernie:

"The media can't keep up with this.  In fact, I predict that in about 3 years the mainstream media will rely almost exclusively on lawyer-bloggers to cover local legal events."

I rather doubt it.  For one thing, they won't rely on anyone who could be here one day and gone the next. As in any other of life's endeavors, people focus their interests on one area for a time, then they lose interest and wander away to do something else.

Some individual logs will crest after a time and then begin to decline.  There are so many disappearing weblogs that they now have their own FuckedWeblog site. 

From an overall perspective, there is a distinct possibility that the current interest in weblogs will generally abate as well. 
[The LitiGator]

I agree with the invocation of Sturgeon's Law in this Wired article. If 90% of blogs suck, who cares? For me, blogging is just like any other creative outlet. I don't write short stories because I want to be widely published and become a famous author. It's about saying what I want to say in the truest possible way. If anybody else likes it, that's just gravy. Blogging is similar. I plan to develop the idea of the Exploded Library as well as I can. If people like it and read it, that's nice, but it's not the point of it. That's why I don't care if some people think that the blog or the web is trendy or not.

10:16:57 AM    Comments []  

New Blog: Current Copyright Readings

Like Copyfight but prefer a more stripped-down, just-the-facts-M'am blog style? Check out Current Copyright Readings by M. Claire Stewart, head of Digital Media Sources at Northwestern. (Thanks Hylton!)

Looks like a good resource, but wish it had an RSS feed.  I've been using Mark Paschal's Stapler so I can aggregate sites like this, but wonder if there's an easier way.

[Leah's Law Library Weblog]

Looks interesting. Thanks also for the link about aggregating non-RSS feed sites. I've been thinking about how I might do this.

9:42:13 AM    Comments []  

That's why I changed my colours to ranter red :) Thanks Jessamyn, it's nice to be noticed by one of my favourite blogs.

9:38:50 AM    Comments []  

Working on Saturday

Well I'm working on this breezy Saturday and had yesterday off as a comp day. If I knew how to do LiveJournal-style polls on this blog, I'd ask about academic librarians working on weekends: do you get overtime pay, 1:1 comp time, time and a half comp time or double time?

9:32:42 AM    Comments []  

Clarence Darrow's "Crime and Criminals: Address to the Prisoners in the Chicago Jail"

This is in the public domain and can be found here.

The English people once punished criminals by sending them away. They would load them on a ship and export them to Australia. England was owned by lords and nobles and rich people. They owned the whole earth over there, and the other people had to stay in the streets. They could not get a decent living. They used to take their criminals and send them to Australia — I mean the class of criminals who got caught. When these criminals got over there, and nobody else had come, they had the whole continent to run over, and so they could raise sheep and furnish their own meat, which is easier than stealing it; these criminals then became decent, respectable people because they had a chance to live. They did not commit any crimes. They were just like the English people who sent them there, only better. And in the second generation the descendants of those criminals were as good and respectable a class of people as there were on the face of the earth, and then they began building churches and jails themselves.

As an expat Aussie, this bit naturally caught my eye. I wouldn't say that I agree with the conclusion of his talk but it raises interesting questions that are still relevant today. I can't believe that it's 100 years old.

6:26:17 PM    Comments []  

Article about law library web sites

Kent Milunovich, Designing and Maintaining Law Library Web Sites: Some Practical Considerations, 94 L. Lib. J. 487 (2002)

I know some people don't like links to pdf files, but there's no alternative here - and anyway, the link is for my benefit for when my paper copy gets lost in the clutter.

5:52:13 PM    Comments []  

New colour scheme for the exploded library + joining the blawg ring

I wanted a more startling colour scheme.

The downside about the red is that it obscures the link to the < ? law blogs # >
ring, which I joined today. I would have joined right away, but I wasn't sure how to add the link for the ring. I learn a little bit everyday...

5:06:52 PM    Comments []  

Public Knowledge

11:24:36 AM    Comments []  

Teaching students how to use search engines

Teaching Students How to Search. Teachers relate an experimental exercise on teaching MIS students how to search. Find some interesting observations. [TVC Alert]

The general consensus from students was that although many of them used search engines prior to this lesson, they did not realize that all search engines do not return the same results. Furthermore, they believed that search engines searched the entire Web as it existed at the moment the search was conducted. Once students learned and witnessed the differences among search engines firsthand, they found the concepts of recall and precision useful in their comparison of search engine effectiveness. (My emphasis)

11:21:28 AM    Comments []  

Shrinkwrap, books and the UCITA

Shrinkwrap licenses for books. Sometimes husbands, especially ones who work in the computer field and are going to library school, can be helpful.  Mine just sent me an e-mail concerning this interesting article from InfoWorld on shrinkwrap licenses for books. The books the author discusses appear to be specialty items, but I think I've seen one or two come into our library.  This is another reason to be very wary of UCITA.   [Leah's Law Library Weblog]

Well that certainly woke me up - how dare they! But the link to information about the UCITA is very helpful.

11:05:04 AM    Comments []  

Clarification re the TWEN rant

10:47:05 AM    Comments []  

Rant of the Week: Surveillance of students on TWEN

Law professors, have you ever wanted to login into the library system and find out which students have borrowed books or course reserves on your reading list, or how long they borrowed them for? Well, now you can do the equivalent of this and so much more on Westlaw's TWEN!

The days of pesky librarians guarding this information are over. You can just bypass them and those oh so twentieth century library privacy concerns. TWEN easily allows you to find helpful usage statistics about each of your students. Now you can find out how often a student has logged into your TWEN Course, or how many of the documents on your course she has read or how many posts he has made on your discussion board. This information can be very helpful for assigning class participation grades, and help make them more objective.

Does anybody else find this remotely troubling? I don't yet know if LexisNexis Web Courses offers a similar surveillance feature. My advice to all law students would be to log onto each of your TWEN courses every day - ten times a day if you can. And make sure you select all of the documents that your instructor has assigned for you on TWEN, even if you only glance at it for a minute. Finally, increase your "post count" by sending lots of well intentioned "I don't know that one either" and "golly, I never thought of that answer" posts. If your instructor allows anonymous posting, ask dumb questions and have your friends answer your questions and then you can ask dumb follow-up questions and create a nice long thread. This way, your instructor will be most impressed when it comes to giving participation grades. Better yet, if every law student optimizes their TWEN statistics, together you will be able to render the statistics meaningless for everyone!

5:51:34 PM    Comments []  

Morgan Wilson (mentioned in yesterday's Alert as the creator of explodedlibrary.info) authors a two-part article on blogs for the MALL Newsletter. The first part appears now at ExplodedLibrary.info. The second part will follow later. Morgan provides many references to existing library and law-related blogs, reviews the pros and cons about blogging ... [TVC Alert]

Thanks, Genie!

4:57:27 PM    Comments []  

Pseudonymous blogging

Two topics under discussion in the blogosphere today. Two topics under discussion in the blogosphere today: Pseudonymous blogging (see here) and weekend blogging (see here and here). On these two subjects the author of "How Appealing" votes no and yes, respectively. And, although I don't practice pseudonymous blogging, I did write a blog entry just the other day that mentioned pseudo-feces. [How Appealing]

I don't use a pseudonym for this blog, but I also have an anonymous LiveJournal diary. If I couldn't make my LJ pseudonym sufficiently anonymous (I realize there are no more absolutes here), there's no way I would ever, ever use such a thing. I'd have to worry about potential employers googling everything I'd ever written in it. I see the author's point about the perils of pseudonymous blogging, but who's to draw the line between public and private blogs? And what about the moral right of an author to withdraw her or his work from the public? I know that moral rights aren't yet a part of US law (and never will be if the Big Content lobby has its way - for all their talk about ordinary people stealing music, hell would freeze over before record companies would allow individual artists to have unassignable moral rights!). My point is that this is a complex issue where different ideals collide.

4:50:28 PM    Comments []  

Highest courts of Texas split over "do not publish" designation. Highest courts of Texas split over "do not publish" designation: law.com offers this report. You can access here my most recent column on the controversial issue of non-precedential appellate opinions, published in The Legal Intelligencer, Philadelphia's daily newspaper for lawyers, on January 14, 2002. [How Appealing]

Make sure you read Howard's column on this issue - a frustrating issue which I wish would be absolutely resolved one way or the other.

4:20:19 PM    Comments []  

Library Stuff turns 2. - On August 4th, LS officially turned 2 years old. Thanks for your continued support by returning on a daily basis. Cheers!! [Library Stuff]

Happy birthday!

4:14:27 PM    Comments []  

Sometimes You Get What You Pay For. Commercial resources and information professionals better serve those seeking business information. [TVC Alert]

More than two-thirds of the publications used most often by knowledge workers either don't have Web sites or don't make their material available on the Web for free, according to a study by Outsell, a global market research firm that focuses on the information industry.  

This sounds right to me. It had better be because some of this information can be so expensive.

4:12:25 PM    Comments []  

I found this quite hilarious.

4:05:34 PM    Comments []  

There's quite a lot of news today - I'll be updating later this afternoon. In the meantime I need to put on my Systems Librarian hat and look into both EZproxy, Obvia, Transparent Proxy and other possible solutions for libraries. Does anybody have any favourites? I don't yet have the comments feature set up on this blog, but I definitely plan to. In the meantime you can just email me.

Next week our fall semester begins and the fun will begin - and I'll need to work out how I can make this blog sustainable, timewise.

11:28:47 AM    Comments []  

Exploded Library Weblog. - "information disintermediation & overload, academic law libraries, alternative legal theories, library creativity" (via Virtual Chase)

LS Thoughts - A new library weblog, brought to you by Morgan Wilson. Morgan uses Radio to blog, so of course there is an RSS feed. Welcome to the "library weblog land" Morgan.
[Library Stuff]

Thanks! :-) Doesn't the person behind Library Stuff also have a law library background?

12:29:31 PM    Comments []  

NY Times: "Pet food stores weren't the killer app for the Web, but peer-reviewed scholarly journals might be." [Scripting News]

"Journals sink or swim based on whether they attract the top authors," said Rick Johnson, enterprise director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington. "Journals that don't embrace electronic tools to speed their processes will ultimately be at a competitive disadvantage."

This doesn't surprise me. I wonder how long e-journals will persist as separate entities. Is there a chance of some fusion between e-journals and blogs? I'm particularly interested in publications developed for the web medium, rather than just being HTML translations of the paper format. Btw, here's the Law Library of Congress' list of law reviews available on the web.

12:26:31 PM    Comments []  

Anonymous-Friendly Libraries. Check out this discussion: Building Anonymous-Friendly Computer Libraries?... [LibraryPlanet.com]

A very interesting discussion on Slashdot.

10:34:09 AM    Comments []  

Chris Dobson, Beyond the Information Audit: Checking the Health of an Organization's Information System, Searcher.

Your people know that they can't get truly reliable information only from the Web and that they shouldn't waste time trying. That may all be true today, but what about next week? Let's suppose one of these scenarios occurs:

• You get a new boss who never worked for a company with a library. 
• You get a new boss from a department that has never used the library. 
• A vendor sells management on desktop delivery of information so easy it doesn't require an information professional. 
• The company hires a new batch of MBAs/Ph.D.s used to doing their own research. 
• The division that encompasses your primary customer base is sold. 
• Management decrees a 15 percent across-the-board budget cut. 
• The IT department gets the OK for a knowledge management system that will provide "all the information anyone needs." (my emphasis)

Contains helpful information on "information check ups", including planning and surveying for special libraries. Thanks to EG for passing this my way.

10:49:09 AM    Comments []