explodedlibrary.info

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.

GATS and public libraries

Rory Litwin and Fiona Hunt have reorganized and expanded their GATS and Libraries web page. If you don't know about the General Agreement on Trade in Services and how it could negatively affect you and your library, you should read it.

[librarian.net]

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.

trademarking the public domain

About Three Conundrums After Eldred.

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."

[The Trademark Blog]

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."

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.

New Blog: Current Copyright Readings

New Copyright Blog.

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.

Blogwatch: ExplodedLibrary.info. A ranter, just like yours truly. [ thanks chuck ]

[librarian.net]

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

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?

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.

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.

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...

Public Knowledge

"Public Knowledge is a public-interest advocacy organization dedicated to fortifying and defending a vibrant "information commons" - the shared information resources and cultural assets that we own as a people. This Washington, D.C. based group speaks in a single voice for a wide spectrum of stakeholders - libraries, educators, scientists, artists, musicians, journalists, consumers, software programmers, civic groups and enlightened businesses. Despite varying concerns in their respective fields, the constituency leaders who comprise Public Knowledge are united in a core conviction, that some fundamental democratic principles and cultural values - openness, public access, and the capacity to create and compete -- must be given new embodiment in the digital age." (via LII) [Library Stuff]

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)

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.

Clarification re the TWEN rant

TWEN does not allow professors to check up on students' borrowing of print books and course reserves. The operative word I used is "equivalent." If a professor has an electronic copy of a text - they can upload it to their TWEN site and the students can access it that way - and this is what TWEN can track. I imagine that as TWEN becomes more popular, there will be fewer paper reserves (which are generally disliked by faculty, students and librarians) and more usage of the documents feature on TWEN. This will lead to more potential for law faculty to monitor their students' reading in a way that would have been unethical (from a librarian's point of view) and often illegal in the equivalent print medium.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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!

Absolute Control. Absolute control means demolishing the rights we users of copyrighted material have enjoyed for centuries, such as the fair-use right... [LibraryPlanet.com]

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.

Gitalong, Li'l Blawgies. Life is good for the Blawg Patrol this summer. Within the last few weeks, Ernie has established his way-cool law blogs outline, and JCA has set up what is, to my knowledge, the first blawg webring (now up to 18 entries). This was all good news for the agents, who still are managing to squeeze in some investigatory work, but also are realizing the importance of fun in the great outdoors. Thus, after dragging home from the Azores, they all insisted on heading southwest for the Big Summer Blawg Roundup. Here's who they've recently roped:

Larry Lessig!! [Thanks, Doc]

Garrett Moritz, a Harvard law student with a penchant for handstands, Britney and Harry Potter, and the more than occasional rant. [Via The Volokh Conspiracy]

Drumroll please: Agent Altreuter bagged one of the BP's Ten Most Wanted: a blogging legal secretary, Joni Mueller. As added bonuses, Joni does appellate work and is partial to things red. Like Garrett, Joni's blog is part of a larger site ("2 Fools And A Modem"), with much to explore.

Broc Romanec blogs for R.R. Donnelly's RealCorporateLawyer.com, primarily about the SEC and securities issues. [Via Genie Tyburski's TVC Alert]

Brian Peterson hails from West Virginia and serves up legal news and commentary. He was corralled by Director Svenson, whose blawg-tying skills have earned many awards down on the Ranch.
Ernie's Outline also yields,

Alvin Borromeo, Carey Gage, Dilan Esper, Seth Farber, Michael Fox, Michael Lopez, Damian Penny, Michael Wade, law student Alice W. (very fun site) and "exploded" law librarian Morgan Wilson,
while the following blawgers are new to me from the Blawg Ring,

law students Anthony Santagati III (more here via Ernie) and J.M. Branum.

Phew, with that I'm bound for some grub, stargazin' and blawgy ballads... [Bag and Baggage]

A very helpful account of new law blogs, which also happens to mention this one.

Well, it seems there are some librarians who are in favor of both the PATRIOT Act and the TiPS program, wink.
[librarian.net]

I found this quite hilarious.

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.