Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Tech heavyweights explain how to destroy the Internet
By Thomas C Greene,
The Register
April 2004 23:10.

“A group of tech celebs gathered on Capitol Hill this week to brief Congressional aides on how Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) can, and probably will, make a complete mess of the Internet in about a year’s time.”

“[Entrenched interests] claim all they are advocating is a deregulated environment where the market can reign supreme. But in reality, they are seeking government help to allow a few companies to turn the Internet from a place of competition and innovation, into an oligopoly. Power over the Internet would then reside with the network owners, who could use choke-point power to constrain consumer choices, limit sources of news and information and entertainment, undermine competitors, and quash disruptive new technologies.” — Michael Copps, FCC.

IEEE SCORES FIRST AMENDMENT VICTORY FOR SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING

IEEE scored a victory for freedom of
the press and the scholarly publishing community with the ruling it
received Friday from the U.S. Department of Treasury Office of Foreign
Assets Control (OFAC). The ruling exempts peer review, editing and
publication of scholarly manuscripts submitted to IEEE by authors living in
countries that are under U.S. trade embargoes, such as Iran and Cuba. OFAC
determined that IEEE’s publications process is “not constrained by OFAC’s
regulatory programs.”

See also:
OFAC ruling

IEEE & OFAC - Information Update

previous post

The very useful
BENTON’S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES reports in its April 5, 2004 issue that the New America Foundation has a new publication:
The Decline of BroadcastersÕ Public Interest Obligations
New America Foundation, Spectrum Policy Program,
Policy Backgrounder, March 29, 2004. Benton describes the publication this way:

The indecency debate and the transition to digital television have sparked
renewed interest in defining how broadcasters should fulfill their role as
trustees of the public’s airwaves. The New America Foundation — an
independent, non-partisan, non-profit public policy institute — has
published a new paper on the history of broadcasters’ public interest
obligations. The paper looks at the Fairness Doctrine, Ascertainment,
License Renewal Procedures, Children’s Television Rules, and Political
Advertising Rules. Also covered are the recommendations of the Presidential
Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television
Broadcasters and broadcasters’ own voluntary codes on conduct. The defining
court cases in these areas are also addressed as are rules for cable and
satellite TV.

Guardian Unlimited | Feedback | The joke’s on us

The Guardian removed its April Fool’s Day hoax from its website. “It’s gone. Removed. Try a litter bin instead - or your local library.”

Why? Among other reasons,

Google doesn’t have a sense of humour.

Type “Peter Mandelson” into the Google News search and our spoof story turns up at number two in the list of recent articles. And as if that weren’t misleading enough, most of the other articles cited consist of speculation about the former cabinet minister’s next career move.

blogwithoutalibrary.net.
These three feeds list new library blogs. One each for public, academic, and special libraries.

This search looks into every* CRS report on the Web and only into CRS reports.
Peter Suber
reports
that “Steve Stoft has rigged up a custom Google search to search “just about every CRS report available on the web”.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the public policy research arm of the US Congress. With its $80 million budget and 800 employees, it issues about 3,000 briefs, reports, short issue papers and longer position papers per year.

An arm of the Library of Congress, CRS is renowned for its non-partisanship and in-depth analysis, but it does not make it reports available to the public. However, it cannot prevent congressmen from giving them out individually and some government agencies from posting reports they find relevant. Perhaps 1000 have become available on the web.

Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford
and author of the new book Free Culture,
is “guest blogger” at Glenn Reynolds’ Slate Blog.

Lessig is making his book available free online under Creative Commons license,
and it is widely available.
In his March 30, 2004 entry,
“Amazon helps free culture,” Lessig writes about this.

The basic assumption is this: (a) ebooks are a poor substitute (just now) for printed books. If that’s true, then there are only two numbers you need to think about to decide whether giving a book away for free makes sense: (1) those who would have bought the book but won’t because the book is now free, and (2) those who would never have seen the book had it not been available for free, but now because they see it, and given assumption (a), they buy it.

The only question a publisher needs to decide is whether (2) is greater than (1): If there are more who will buy it because they see it because it is free and will now buy it because it is free, then making it free makes sense for the publisher.

Cory Doctorow said something similar in his presentation
Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
delivered at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004. Cory went a bit further, though:

There’s a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to
bringing it home from the store, but that’s the wrong metaphor.
Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of
the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking
at the cover and reading the blurbs….
Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred
thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and “only” ten
thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that for
ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that would
be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: if
one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my
book bought it, I’d be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads
cost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the
sales are healthy.