Wired News: The Answer to Piracy: Five Bucks?
EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann, speaking as part of a panel on peer-to-peer music sharing, proposed that music fans pay a small monthly fee — perhaps $5 — to share files with impunity, using whatever software they like. The money could be collected by a central organization and [...]

Wired News: Privacy Is in the House
…the Patriot Act shows that the Justice Department in particular needs a strong privacy officer, an idea that at least one committee member said he would be looking into.
Please!

Wired News: MySQL Profits From Open Source
“Lack of budgets forced everyone to take serious stock of what they were running and if it was worth the money,” he said. “Compared to running MySQL, a lot of commercial databases couldn’t hold up to the scrutiny.”

Information Needs Are Legitimate, Interview with Kay Raseroka, WSIS, First Phase, Geneva, 10-12 December 2003
Copyright was meant to assist authors, the people that created the material, so that they could be acknowledged appropriately. Yet what is happening now is that it is no longer the authors that benefit, but the publishers. That in itself raises [...]

RIAA sued under racketeering laws
Online chat rooms and bulletin boards populated by file-swapping fans are filled with postings comparing the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to a Mafia-like syndicate. Now, one target of the group’s lawsuits against alleged music pirates is asking the judicial system to back that assessment.

Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News)
In a joint statement the Reed Elsevier chairman, Morris Tabaksblat, and the chief executive, Crispin Davis, said they saw no need to change.
Haven’t we heard this song before?

Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News)
Oxford University Press is encouraged by the results of its experimental use of an OA business model for Nucleic Acids Research, a journal rated by ISI as one of the top 10 “hottest” of the decade in biology and biochemistry.

The Shifted Librarian:I Second that Emotion
The idea is for a library conference devoted to …planning a library services architecture that can support next-generation library services, and bring together the best hackers we have to bang together some prototypes over the course of a few days to a week?
I love the idea and I think it [...]

Content Delivery in the ‘Blogosphere’ is an article discussing the use of blogs in teaching. The authors make some good points both theoretically and practically. They also reminded me of Dr. Elizabeth Lawley, a librarian and tenured professor, who has integrated blogging software into her technology classes.
Dr. Lawley has posted links to her class [...]

FindLaw’s Writ – Karl: How the Current Congressional Database Protection Bill Would Go Beyond Current Law,
…the Framers drew a line between copyrightable and uncopyrightable material. Yet the DCIMA would cross that line.
Excellent source of legal information.

Manhattan User’s Guide > Archives > Medical Privacy
According to yesterday’s front-page story in the Times, Justice Department attorney Sheila M. Gowan argued before Judge Richard Conway Casey (U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York) that “Individuals no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential.”
First librarians, now doctors. [...]

Prospect Magazine – Britain’s Intelligent Conversation
For many popular desktop applications, such as word processors, open source software often follows the innovations made in proprietary software. And so Microsoft Word remains a more polished product than its open source rivals. But it is by no means clear that all buyers, especially organisations, choose software solely on [...]

Embracing open access
The more successful open access becomes, the more irrelevant our traditional view of library budgets will be. This is an issue of institutional economics, not library economics, and we need to engage our institutional leaders at that level if we are to continue to play our crucial role in information management. Now, more [...]

I’ve added two new categories, “Open Access” and “Career Info”, and moved some entries over to them from the Library Links page. For accessability reasons, I’m trying to keep that section from becoming a “catch all”. Links to the old versions in the original category should still work for quite a while.

Caveat Lector: Februarii 08, 2004 – Februarii 14, 2004 Archives: A thousand publishers blooming
Dorothea responds to critisisms of Open Access.

Factors affecting the use of open source software in tertiary education institutions
Open Source Software (OSS) is software that has been released under a license which requires the distribution of the software’s source code with any binaries. It is often available at no cost and is mostly supported by developers providing their services for free. Considerable [...]

TechnoBiblio: Ahhh, filtering….
See, I’m not the only one.

OpenEnterpriseTrends.com: Open Source vs. Shared Source – Hunt for Value
In a nutshell, shared source is a take-off on the open source model without all the benefits that open source offers. Shared source licenses do not allow developers to modify the source code and certain portions of the source code remain hidden and it cannot be [...]

PCWorld.com – Web Stars: Best of the Web
rustrated by the growing number of pay-per-view Web archives? Your local library’s Web site might be able to help, though you may need a library card to enjoy full access. For example, New York Public Library cardholders can read issues of The New York Times online for the [...]