Check out the message for president Obama from Professor Cornel West of  Princeton University on BBC.

The controversial Google project to scan books from libraries, index them, and make them full-text searchable (books.google.com) has been known by several names in its short existence: the Google library project, Google book search, Google books, and now Google Editions.  The popular press has repeatedly referred to the project as a “library” even “the Google library.” (See a list of sample quotes here.) But the project is clearly not a “library” but a bookstore, as the recent announcement of “Google Editions” makes clear.

In a recent story on the PBS News Hour, Pam Samuelson, professor at the University of California Berkeley, says this specifically: “It’s basically turned this project into a bookstore, rather than a library.”

January 1st NY Times ran a story titled Why Twitter Will Endure along with a modified image of Hokusai’s famous woodblock print. I thought it was  an interesting juxtaposition between the two images.

South Korea was the first country to pass a “Three strikes” or “graduated response” law on March 3, 2009. France was the first country to introduce a similar three-strikes bill called Hadopi but it is still being litigated (BoingBoing has been tracking the French law but has not as yet written about the Korean law). The provision gives the Minister of Culture, Sports, and Tourism the authority to order ISPs to send warning letters to users who violate copyright, and to order them to suspend users’ Internet connections for up to six months.  The law has been in effect since July of 2009.  The bill was modified later but originally it was for permanent termination of users’ internet connection.

The South Korean government has been boasting about being the most wired country in the world; at the same time the country has been increasingly tightening its IP laws.  Most of their posts are in Korean, but an organization called 정보공유연대 IP Left (Chung Bo Yun Dae IP Left) has been following the changes in Korean IP law and mobilizing and educating about these IP issues. It’s good to see civil society organizations put forth resistance toward these shifts away from democratic ideals.

When you spend too much time on the web you experiment with all kinds of things. Today is one of those days for me. I was wondering what words do not have Google ads so I’ve tested with various search terms including capitalism, anti-capitalism, intelligent design, feminism etc. So far, I found the search for the word  commodification doesn’t have any ads.  How long will it take until commodification is commodified by Google?

This space has been dormant for a while. When we were in San Diego (oh so many years ago) Shinjoung had a blog called “Expect Resistance” and I had one called “Library Autonomous Zone” (Which @Declan so rudely deleted when I left UCSD). We parked our combined archives here, always thinking we’d continue as a joint project. Well, life got in the way and we’re only now bringing this space back to life. We’ll still continue to blog about issues pertaining to government information over at Free Government Information but will use this space for larger issues surrounding librarianship, information commodification, copyright, civil rights and the like (see the categories on the right for more of what piques our interests). Stay tuned for more.

Why the FCC Will Get Media Ownership Wrong Again, And What They Should Do to Get it Right, by Mark Lloyd, Center for American Progress, January 26, 2007.

Whatever happened to the FCC’s obligation to consider the public interest? Well, that depends on what the meaning of the public interest is. As long as the FCC defines the public interest as some sort of competition in media markets, then the FCC can assure Congress that letting Clear Channel get bigger is in the public interest….

But what if the FCC did something that was really new? What if it defined the public interest in a way that actually seemed to coincide with what most of us think that means? What if the FCC defined the public interest to mean the best interests of a democratic public? What if the FCC created an index that could really show the relationship between media ownership and what local citizens know about government?

Mark Lloyd is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

There is a fascinating article in Science News about how scientists are investigating ways to identify individuals based on the rhythm of their keystrokes when they type and their individual patterns of using a mouse. This research goes beyond, but is complemented by, research in text analysis that can sometimes identify authorship of a piece of text when a large body of text is available for comparison.

• Digital Fingerprints by Julie J. Rehmeyer, Science News, Vol. 171, No. 2, Jan. 13, 2007, p. 26.

As people type messages on their computer keyboards and browse Web sites, they leave a trail of electronic fingerprints. Scientists are investigating those keystroke and mouse-use patterns to develop methods to strengthen security and reduce online fraud.

I have been trying to find out what happened with the 6th Korea/US FTA negotiation which just ended. However, there is little coverage in the western media except one tiny article (With New Urgency, U.S. and South Korea seek Free Trade Deal) from the NY times (Jan 16, 2007)
I found more detailed information through a few Korean news sources and it doesn’t look good for Korea. Like any other typical FTA “negotiation,” the U.S. has been strongly demanding Korea to open various markets such as agriculture including beef, services, intellectual property rights etc.

Korean Alliance against KorUS FTA told that Korea dosen’t have any proposals to leverage the negotiation. A report written by 17 experts indicates that about 15 percent, or 169, of the 1,163 domestic laws conflict with the contents of the FTA negotiations which means that Korean domestic law will need to be amended to align with the FTA.