Information Research Weblog

An interesting item on The Shifted Librarian caught my eye: "When does 'own' not mean 'own'?" It's a cautionary tale about the US library supplier Baker and Taylor who have plans for the electronic delivery of texts using the .pdf format. No problem you think? Well - read all about it for another example of the desire of business to sell you something and hold on to it at the same time.

The same source has a defense of news aggregators. I never realised that a defense was needed: I can't think how I'd scan as much material as I do without NewzCrawler. However, The Shifted Librarian points to an article by one Steve Bell (presumably not the Guardian satirical cartoonist) on a e-zine called Ex Libris in which, among other things, he notes:

RSS and news aggregator enthusiasts will emphasize that these technologies will save you time as they improve your access to news and information. But does the time required to obtain the necessary skills to use them payoff in the long run? I'm suspicious of anyone who claims something is easy and fast to learn and implement, but tells me I need to first read a four-page article that explains how it works.

Read a four-page article? I've installed Newz Crawler and used it for months now without reading anything at all about how to use it. I also used Amphetadesk for a while and that, too, required no reading - you just get on with using it!

Talking of aggregators, I came across an interesting one - SNARF - which lives on your Internet Explorer 'links' bar and which you can pop up at any time - worth a look.

The Weblogs are buzzing with a report from The Register, which analyses Lawrence Lessig's Weblog and concludes that the legal decisions concentrating digital rights 'in the hands of a few large media companies' will result in the death of the Internet.

Slashdot thinks there's a large element of truth in this. What do you think?

Having a little time to spare on my trip to Loughborough today I spent some of it in the library and found that Communications of the ACM, April 2003 issue, had a number of papers devoted to 'digital rights management'. The drive towards DRM comes, of course, from those with vested commercial interests in intellectual property, especially the (largely US-based) music industry.

In a very interesting paper, Pamela Samuelson (a regular contributor to Comm ACM) notes:

"...even though copyright law confers on copyright owners the right to control only public performances and displays of these works, DRM systems can also be used to control private performances and displays of digital content. DRM systems can thwart the exercise of fair use rights and other copyright privileges. DRM can be used to compel users to view content they would prefer to avoid (such as commercials and FBI warning notices), thus exceeding copyright's bounds."

Now there's a couple of interesting thoughts. I wonder if legislators are aware of these particular consequences of the extension of copyright?

Samuelson adds that DRM technology is misnamed - it is not about "rights" but about '..."permissions" to do X, Y, or Z with digital information.'

If you have access to the ACM's digital library, you'll find this paper here.

You might have heard about Lawrence Lessig's (he of Creative Commons fame) suggestion that a bounty should be placed on spammers - hunt them down and you get a reward.

According to techdirt, the idea has been picked up by a Congresswoman, Zoe Lofgren who plans to introduce a bill into Congress. There's more about this from The Mercury News.

From a personal point of view, I'd be happy to support the idea of bounty hunters - preferably armed! The mailbox I have for my work in Sweden displayed its usual twenty-five messages this morning - twenty-three of them were spam.

Even the musicians are rising up in opposition to piracy prevention! The TechDirt Weblog draws attention to a message from one George Zieman. Zieman also has material quoted elsewhere, which shows that the US music industry cut its production of new releases last year by 25% and then tells us that its drop of 4.1% in sales is the result of 'piracy'. One thing is clear - when companies lobby government in their interests, legislators need to check the facts VERY carefully, these guys will go to any lengths to massage the facts.

For much, much more from Zieman, visit his Website.

Here's an item that chimes in with Terry Brooks's latest column in Information Research, brought to my attention by Current Cites.

It's an article by Clifford Lynch (of the Coalition for Networked Information) on 'institutional repositories', that is, official, mainly university, archives of digital resources:

...a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.

Terry mentioned DSpace as one of the players in this area of activity, and another is ePrints from the University of Southampton in the UK - however, the latter is intended mainly for working papers and similar documents, whereas DSpace is intended for all digital content.

One of Lynch's comments rang bells:

Our institutions of higher education have overlooked an opportunity to support our most innovative and creative faculty for at least a decade now, to the detriment of both the faculty members and the institutions themselves. These faculty have been exploring ways in which works of authorship in the new digital medium can enhance teaching and learning and the communication of scholarship; such innovations are essential to keeping scholarship vital and effective, and they must not only be supported but nurtured. Indeed nurturing these innovations reaches to the core mission of our universities, and to the core values of our universities.

Read the rest - it's well worth the time.

When it was announced in January that Prentice Hall - the technical book publisher owned by Pearson - planned to release a new series of books under the Open Publication Licence (OPL), rather than traditional copyright, other publishers were baffled.

So begins an article in yesterday's Financial Times by Richard Poynder. Prentice Hall's choice of OPL was sensible, given that the book series is about open source software and the publisher is pretty sanguine about the benefits, expecting sales to be maintained because people will want to buy the physical book.

Curiously, I can't find anything about this development on either the Prentice Hall or the parent company (Pearson - publisher of the FT) on either of the Web sites.

Poynder also mentions the Creative Commons development - I use one of their licences in connection with this Weblog. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and hit the Creative Commons button.

Developments such as this give one some hope that scholarly output will become more freely available, but as the copyright legislation in the US shows, the forces of commerce can be relied upon to make it difficult!

Today's Guardian Online supplement includes a report on an interview with Lawrence Lessig - the founder of the 'Creative Commons' movement.

Briefly:

The Creative Commons is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share.

and there is more about the mission at the Web site.

Creative Commons also has a Weblog - and the latest entry gives information on possible innovations in the nature of the license - specifically relating to educational use. This seems to me to a desirable innovation, but for one fact - that is, that education is increasingly seen as a business and students are paying significant sums of money not only to state-financed educational institutions, but to companies. The borderline between commercial use and educational use, therefore, is disappearing and I doubt if the two can be separated.

What do you think? Post a response to this item by clicking on the 'Reply' button.

The more observant readers of this Weblog will have noticed the Creative Commons badge at the bottom of the main page - to see what it means, click on the badge and a brief statement of the nature of the license will be delivered to your screen.

Google is getting its underwear in a twist about the use of 'google' as a verb and Slashdot reports that its lawyers have called upon Paul McFedries who maintains the 'Wordspy' site to cease and desist from entering the word in his lexicon.

However, another correspondent to the American Dialect Society mailing list has pointed out that, in US copyright law, a verb cannot be protected by copyright, so we can all go on happily googling and the lawyers are just trying it on. Isn't it wonderful when the rug is pulled from under the lawyers? :-)

Last year I received a request from an African aid agency to allow Information Research to be distributed by them on CD-ROM. I had to refuse, since it would have meant contacting all of the authors to seek their approval as copyright holders.

However, it seemed to me that the proposal was a very desirable one, since Web access is by no means universal on the African continent and it occurred to me that the authors would, in all probability, agree.

To overcome the problem of the authors being the copyright holders I am considering putting the following paragraph into the Copyright Policy page:

"2. However, in submitting to Information Research, authors agree to the republication of papers for charitable or other non-profit reasons."

This would allow me to sanction the proposal from Africa, while the authors retain copyright for any for-profit purpose.

I'd welcome feedback, especially from those who have published in the journal.

I'm posting this as a 'Reply' to my earlier message because I am reproducing here a message from Euan Semple to the IR-DISCUSS mailing list. Euan says:

"This group may be interested in the project called Creative Commons run by Porfessor Larry Lessig from Stanford University.

Basically it allows creators of content to explicitly state what for which purposes copying is permitted rather than current copyright law which assumes copyright in all circumstances. They have developed a very user friendly web based process which as Larry says produces Human Readable copyright, machine readable copyright and lawyer reader copyright.

The process is explained at Creative Commons and there is a very good flash movie explaining the context."

I've taken a look and it seems to me that, if Information Research authors were to agree, upon submitting a paper, that a Creative Commons licence would apply to their work, it would nicely establish the appropriate copyright relationships. If you've submitted a paper to IR, please take a look at Creative Commons and let me know what you think. In the meantime, I shall 'talk' with Creative Commons to see how it would work.