The library world has been buzzing for the last few days over an article in a small newspaper relaying a report from two UMass Dartmouth professors that a senior at the school claimed he was visited by, as the article put it, “two agents of the Department of Homeland Security” after getting Mao’s Quotations from […]
A quick pointer to two interesteing articles on the subject:
Piercing the peer–to–peer myths: An examination of the Canadian experience by Michael Geist
First Monday 10:4
Nielsen Rating System At Odds With RIAA’s Claim Of “Lost Sales” by Moses Avalon
MusicDish 4.24.4
And while I’m at it, here’s one of the most well-known articles on the RIAA:
RIAA’s Statistics Don’t Add […]
Timothy K. Armstrong sat in and has a long post detailing the argument. SCOTUSblog also has good info, including:
Several members of the Court — but especially Justices Antonin Scalia, Stephen G. Breyer and David H. Souter — seemed troubled about the potential impact of a tightening of copyright law on small inventors — “the […]
Via BB, a c-span segment with a debate between EFF’s Fred von Lohmann and Solcitor General Theodore Olson (in the RIAA/MPAA ring) on Grokster. Some callers make very good points, including one who notes that indie musicians rely on P2P for exposure. As Cory Doctorow points out, Fred von Lohmann totally schools Olson.
It’s a decent length and covers many of the competing interests and issues. Music file-sharing case before high court. Ruling could have major effect on future of entertainment industry, consumer rights. Benny Evangelista, 3.28.5
Copyfight’s Alan Wexelblat comments on P2P FUD and cites a japanese study (PDF) that didn’t find any negative effect on CD sales due to p2p and, in fact, found evidence that using p2p may increase CD purchases. That’s not the only study to find similar results, and just the other day I mentioned the […]
The Economist is running a story on tomorrow’s Grokster v MGM hearing that gives a short overview of the case and the history of attacks on the tech industry by the content industry.
The conclusion (also cited by BB):
But even if the entertainment business manages to coax more users into paying for legal downloads and succeeds […]
And he makes some important points in his blog post on it:
It wont be a good day when high school entrepreneurs have to get a fairness opinion from a technology oriented law firm to confirm that big music or movie studios wont sue you because they can come up with an angle that makes a […]
The BBC has a great overview on the current state of DRM and ‘trusted computing.’ This is something that will likely have a strong impact on libraries considering how quickly we are moving to electronic publications and restrictive contracts. While I don’t know the details regarding what trusted computing is capable of […]
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), one of the entertainment industry’s most powerful congressional allies, will remain at the forefront of the national debate over copyright and illegal downloading after being named to head a new subcommittee on intellectual property.
from WaPo
It’s a rather unfortunate path we are headed down. /. discussion here
Catalogablog notes that the Open WorldCat deep linking tutorial has been updated. By setting your library up in the system, users will be able to see your holdings when a Yahoo! or Google search matches something in the WorldCat database. See the OCLC Open WorldCat page for more info.
Here’s a PDF link to the EFF brief. As quoted on Copyfight, Eben Moglen lays it out wonderfully:
At the heart of Petitioners’ argument is an arrogant and unreasonable claim–even if made to the legislature empowered to determine such a general issue of social policy–that the Internet must be designed for the convenience of their […]
Bowing to the primary complaint from ILL librarians and staff about the Ariel electronic document delivery software, Infotrieve has announced that they are working on a patch that will make Ariel 4 compatible with older versions of the software. As previously noted here on Bibliotheke, the incompatibility between older versions and the recently released […]
Ren Bucholz thinks we might see a year where file sharing becomes mature and profitable, as he outlines in this San Francisco Bay Guardian editorial.
From Boing Boing
It’s totally in beta mode, but OCLC and Antarctica Systems have a FirstSearch data visualization pilot project. So far, I can’t really get it to work with either Firefox or Safari on Panther, but I’m assuming it has at least limited functionality on Windows.
Via ResourceShelf with additional comments from The Distant Librarian.
Mark Leggott, University Librarian at the University of Winnipeg, makes an excellent proposal:
An EDEN Alternative - Electronic Document Exchange Network
I would propose that the ILL community define an open protocol for exchanging ILL documents as an alternative to proprietary system like Ariel. I understand that OCLC has developed a protocol for their ILLiad system called […]
So the ILL-L interlibrary loan listserv was recently ablaze with discussion about Infotrieve’s mess with Ariel. Ariel is an electronic document delivery (EDD) P2P system for libraries. With it, libraries can scan, send and receive documents and post them online for patrons. It was originally developed by RLG, but was bought by […]