Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Scholarly Publishing Practice: the ALPSP report on academic journal publishers by John Cox and Laura Cox
ISBN: 0-907341-24-1
Publication: June 2003.

This report, from the
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers,
based on a survey of 275 journal publishers, covers everything from new journal launches and pricing to online availability and access to back issues.

One of the most interesting areas, though, is how journals are dealing with authors’ rights and copyright. These policies greatly affect libraries and their ability to select, acquire, organize, preserve, and provide access to scholarly materials. Among the findings listed in the executive summary:

83 per cent of publishers still require authors to transfer
copyright, although nearly 9 per cent would accept a formal licence to publish as
an alternative.

Most publishers allow published articles to be posted to web sites, though
medium-sized commercial companies are an exception.

Publishers are more inclined to allow posting published articles to the authorÕs
own site than their institutionÕs

The print version of the report costs US$200 for non-members, the online
Full report is available to members only for free, and an
Executive Summary is freely available.

An interesting thread on the liblicense-l discussion list in August comments on the survey and its implications.

A couple of stories in the news recently highlight the international dimensions of the copyright issue. Together, the articles demonstrate that copyright law in the United States and the international nature of The Internet create thorny legal and technical issues that U.S. law cannot solve by itself.

The first article,
Blame Canada By Jay Currie,
Tech Central Station August 18, 2003, notes that Canadian law is very different from U.S. law.

While the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may make it illegal to share copyright material in America, the Canadian Copyright Act expressly allows exactly the sort of copying which is at the base of the P2P revolution.

The second,
US backs down on copyright by Simon Hayes, Australian IT AUGUST 21, 2003, notes that

US TRADE officials have backed off from a tough line on music, movie and software piracy, admitting that shoehorning Australia into a copyright regime based on criminal law may be “a bridge too far”.

OMB Watch 08/27/2003 “Seventy-five organizations representing journalists, scientists, librarians, environmental groups, privacy advocates, and others today sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge calling on the Department of Homeland Security to allow public input on procedures for “safeguarding” and sharing a vaguely defined set of information between firefighters, police officers, public health researchers and federal, state, and local governments.”
full text of letter (pdf)

NewsForge: The Online Newspaper of Record for Linux and Open Source.
There is a heated controversy going on in the Linux community because of a lawsuit that claims ownership of some of the code in the open source Linux operating system.
This Aug 22, 2003 open letter is from
Eric S. Raymond, President of the Open Source Initiative, to
Darl McBride, CEO of the SCO Group.

Mr. McBride: Late yesterday I learned that you have charged that your company is the victim of an insidious conspiracy masterminded by IBM. You have urged the press and public to believe that the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat and Novell and various Linux enthusiasts are up in arms not because of beliefs or interests of their own, but because little gray men from Armonk have put them up to it. Bwahahaha! Fire up the orbital mind-control lasers!

beSpacific: DVD Code Copying Decision from CA Supreme Court.
Sabrina I. Pacifici has brought together several useful links about the recent California Supreme Court decision that says that the First Amendment right to free speech does not give anyone the right to put trade secrets on the Web.

This decision is an important one
for libraries because of the continued movement to lock up information content behind contractual and trade secret law and put information outside of copyright.

Another very useful review of this issue can be found in
“Legally Speaking: Trade Secrets vs. Free Speech”
ByPamela Samuelson, Communications of the ACM (v.46, no. 6, June 2003), available

here in pre-print form.

More coverage of the case in

Court Rules That Trade Secrets Can Outweigh Free Speech
BySteve Lohr, NY Times
August 26, 2003, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
Section C; Page 1; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk

Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs press release
GAO report GAO-03-894,
ENERGY TASK FORCE Process Used to
Develop the National Energy Policy

In developing the National Energy Policy report, the NEPDG Principals,
Support Group, and participating agency officials and staff met with,
solicited input from, or received information and advice from nonfederal
energy stakeholders, principally petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas, and
electricity industry representatives and lobbyists. The extent to which
submissions from any of these stakeholders were solicited, influenced policy
deliberations, or were incorporated into the final report cannot be
determined based on the limited information made available to GAO.

…The Office of the Vice PresidentÕs unwillingness to provide the NEPDG records or other related information precluded GAO from fully achieving its objectives and substantially limited GAOÕs ability to comprehensively analyze the NEPDG process.

The complete report can be found here:

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d03894.pdf
and here:

http://www.senate.gov/~govt-aff/_files/gaoenergytaskforce.pdf.

For additional background, including a detailed chronology of GAOÕs efforts to obtain task force records and the White HouseÕs efforts to frustrate GAO, see:

www.house.gov/reform/min/inves_energy/energy_cheney.htm

For librarians interested in all things wireless, you now have a new blog you can tune into to find out the latest goings on with wireless technologies and libraries http://wireless.lisnews.com/

Lawrence Lessig,
Professor of Law at Stanford Law School,
Founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society,
Author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, and
Chair of the Creative Commons project, comments on the role of the U.S. in the recent decision by WIPO to cancel a meeting to discuss open source software and other “open collaborative models to develop public goods.”

Wired 11.09: Learning to Love PowerPoint
by David Byrne. Yes, artist and musician David Byrne.

Wired 11.09: PowerPoint Is Evil Edward Tufte has a short article in Wired which hits the high points of his arguments about PowerPoint’s low points.