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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.