Hi. I went to the courthouse today to contest a traffic ticket and my bag was searched. The police officer who went through my bag pulled out one of the DVDs I was returning to the library and eyeballed it “Hijacking Catatrophe, huh?” I told him, truthfully, that I hadn’t even gotten a chance to see it yet but it was due at the library. He put it back, and I went inside. These non-events happen more times than people realize, let’s try to keep that in mind when routine checks do sometimes go sour.
Author: jessamyn
DRM isn’t just ineffective, it does active harm
Speaking of DRM, let’s look at what ten years of it have done so far. I’ve been reading the Intellectual Property & Social Justice blog this morning and they have a summary of an EFF white paper on the subject. The IP-SJ blurb does a great job of giving some “in a nutshell” descriptions both of what DRM is, as well as what is wrong with it, especially for libraries and educators and anyone who has an obligation to provide content to all the public. I’ve excerpted the list of negative effects DRM has had for libraries, in the developed world where the EFF states “it has been in wide deployment for a decade with no benefit to artists and with substantial cost to the public and to due process, free speech and other civil society fundamentals.”
- The success of the information society depends on digital content being accessible. Digital content must not locked up behind technical barriers.
- Libraries must not be prevented by DRM from availing themselves of their lawful rights under national copyright law and must be able to extend their services to the digital environment.
- Long term preservation and archiving, essential to preserving cultural identities, maintaining diversity of peoples, languages and cultures and in shaping the future, must not be jeopardized by DRM.
linkdump 27mar
Here are all the sites that have been gracing my sidebar blogroll over the past few weeks, for those of you reading via RSS.
A Wandering Eyre
Dan Green/LibraryMonk
DRMBlog
eLiterate Librarian
fiddling librarian
Inquiring Librarian
IP and Social Justice
libetiquette
Secret Library
the eagle has landed
Eagle found in trash after being stolen from library. Phew!
thousands of hits, good news or bad?
Somehow missed this last week — an excellent point/counterpoint [in the form of a blog entry and comment] over at the OCLC blog. Topic? That ongoing “Do we make the library more like Google, or make Google more like the library?” I think it also points out another hidden conflict area that is fast becoming a favorite topic of mine: to what extent do we let the software dictate the way the user can search, and hopefully find? ALA’s ballots are being distributed over a one week [for e-ballots] or two week [paper] schedule. Why can’t we send them all at once? Because ALA worries about server overload problems. Is this saving the time of the user? Does Google?
Pretend you’ve never ever been in a large library. Pretend you know absolutely nothing about taxonomies. Pretend you don’t know the difference between a magazine, a journal, an index and a book. Pretend you don’t know what you don’t know, and don’t know how to articulate your unknowingness. Once you’ve pretended all this, make a pretend visit to a very large library for the first time.