Friday, April 18, 2008

And over at openstudents...

Some time ago, Gavin Baker of OpenStudents.org (amongst other things), asked me to write a guest post on their blog about my publishing experience with Decoding Liberation. The post went up last week; hope you find it interesting. (Not sure why I didn't link to it earler; possibly laziness; yes, that must be it). Do check the various posts and links at openstudents.org; open access in academia could do with all the help it can get.

Friday, April 04, 2008

Section 108.2.3.5.7, gerritt?

Here is some trenchant commentary by James Grimmelmann on the efforts of the study group convened by the Copyright Office and Library of Congress (back in 2005) to find ways of revising copyright law (especially Section 108, which provides exceptions for librarians and archivists) to "to ensure an appropriate balance among the interests of creators and other copyright holders, libraries and archives in a manner that best serves the national interest". I'm not going to comment at this stage, because James has done a more than adequate job. His views might be summed up, in his own words, as:
This isn’t a matter of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. This is more like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, if the Titanic were sinking because of the absurdly large number of deck chairs it was carrying.
Oh, and also:
Redrafting it [Section 108] would be like helping a hungover drunk pull on enough clothes to go out without being arrested, so he can go to a bar and get even more plastered.