Cato Institute Report Denounces DMCA

The Cato Institute has released a report (Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) that is sharply critical of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The following quote is from the executive summary:

The result has been a legal regime that reduces options and competition in how consumers enjoy media and entertainment. Today, the copyright industry is exerting increasing control over playback devices, cable media offerings, and even Internet streaming. Some firms have used the DMCA to thwart competition by preventing research and reverse engineering. Others have brought the weight of criminal sanctions to bear against critics, competitors, and researchers.

The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders—and the technology companies that distribute their content—the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.

And this quote is from the conclusion (links are mine):

When the next breakthrough media device is invented, its inventor should not face a legal system in which the deck is stacked against him, as Streambox and DeCSS did. He should be free to focus on hiring the best programmers, designers, and marketers, rather than on shopping for a good law firm. If industry incumbents attempt to prevent his product from working with theirs, he should be allowed to circumvent the restrictions as Accolade did in the Sega case. And if the device has a "substantial non-infringing use" and is developed and marketed for such use, Congress and the courts should uphold its legality, even if it threatens the business model of an established industry.

HTML Version of the Open Access Bibliography

An HTML version of the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (OAB) is now available.

The HTML version of the book was created from the final draft using a complex set of digital transformations. Consequently, there may be minor variations between it and the print and Acrobat versions, which are the definitive versions of the book.

The OAB provides an overview of open access concepts, and it presents over 1,300 selected English-language books, conference papers (including some digital video presentations), debates, editorials, e-prints, journal and magazine articles, news articles, technical reports, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding the open access movement’s efforts to provide free access to and unfettered use of scholarly literature. Most sources have been published between 1999 and August 31, 2004; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet (approximately 78 percent of the bibliography’s references have such links).

An Important Partial Win for Google and Privacy

U.S. District Court Judge James Ware ruled on Friday that Google does not have to turn over 5,000 search queries to the Justice Department; however, it does have to turn over 50,000 random Web URLs.

The Google Blog posting ("Google Wins!") was ecstatic, stating that:

This is a victory for both online rights activists and users of Google. Google may not always be perfect, but this time they stood up for what is right.

According to an article in Red Herring ("Judge Limits US Data Hunt"):

The government’s subpoena originally told Google it must turn over massive amounts of data in two broad categories: all the URLs available on the company’s search engine as of last July 31, and all search queries entered into Google’s search engine during June and July of 2005. That likely would have included tens of millions of data points.

A San Francisco Chroncile article ("Google Must Divulge Data Judge Cuts Amount of Info Company Has to Give Feds") noted that:

Google, along with privacy advocates, argued that sometimes users can reveal personal information in search queries, including their Social Security Numbers. Or they can suggest the sexual preferences of public officials or use inflammatory phrases such as "bomb-making equipment," which would pique the interest of law enforcement. The privacy advocates said that the Justice Department couldn’t be trusted with access to such sensitive data, despite the administration’s promises to use the queries only for its online pornography case.

Judge Ware expressed concern about the impact of search-term disclose on Google due to user privacy issues:

The expectation of privacy by some Google users may not be reasonable, but may nonetheless have an appreciable impact on the way in which Google is perceived, and consequently the frequency with which users use Google. Such an expectation does not rise to the level of privilege, but does indicate that there is a potential burden as to Google’s loss of goodwill if Google is forced to disclose search queries to the government.

Digital Generation? Latest Breakdown of Web Users By Age Group

What age group uses the Web most heavily? The latest numbers may surprise you.

Here a ranking of unique Web site visitors by age group for February 2006:

  1. 50 and older: 47 million.
  2. 35-49: 42.5 million.
  3. 17 and under: 30.3 million.
  4. 25-34: 19.9 million.
  5. 18-24: 11.2 million.

Seventeen-and-under users are third; traditional college-age students are dead last. Digital generation? Geezers rule the Web.

Source: Etter, Lauren. "Google vs. Justice: Privacy, Pornography, Secrets." The Wall Street Journal, 18-19 March 2006, A7.

dLIST E-Print Archive Adds Use Statistics

Authors who deposit e-prints in dLIST (Digital Library of Information Science and Technology) can now see use statistics for their works (archive users can see use startistics as well). For example, at the record for the "Indian Digital Library in Engineering Science and Technology (INDEST) Consortium: Consortia-Based Subscription to Electronic Resources for Technical Education System in India: A Government of India Initiative," you would click on "View statistics for this eprint" to get the use statistics for this work. You can view use statistics for the past four weeks, this year, last year, or all years.

Archive-wide use statistics are also available from either an e-print record or the dLIST Statistics page. From either one, you can rank all e-prints by use for the same time periods as individual e-prints and show overall archive use by year/month or country.

Disclosure: I am now the Scholarly Communication subject editor for dLIST.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (3/13/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Establishing a UK LOCKSS Pilot Programme," "EThOS: Progress towards an Electronic Thesis Service for the UK," "Long-Term Preservation of Digital Humanities Scholarship," "Net Neutrality Reading List," "Managing Digital Assets in Higher Education: An Overview of Strategic Issues," "Three Gathering Storms That Could Cause Collateral Damage for Open Access," and "Update on the NIH Policy."

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (2/27/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "©1: Term & Extent," Copyright and Access to Knowledge, "Copyright Issues in Open Access Research Journals: The Authors’ Perspective," "Digital Repositories in UK Universities and Colleges," "A Research Library Based on the Historical Collections of the Internet Archive," and "The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition: An Evolving Agenda."

Version 61, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 61 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,610 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by the same author, provides much more in-depth coverage of the open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access journals, and the Open Archives Initiative) than SEPB does.

The "Open Access Webliography" (with Ho) complements the OAB, providing access to a number of Websites related to open access topics.

Changes in This Version

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are marked with an asterisk):

Table of Contents

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History*
2.2 General Works*
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History*
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals*
3.4 General Works*
3.5 Library Issues*
3.6 Research*
4 General Works*
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights*
5.2 License Agreements*
5.3 Other Legal Issues
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata*
6.2 Digital Libraries*
6.3 General Works*
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation*
7 New Publishing Models*
8 Publisher Issues*
8.1 Digital Rights Management*
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author*
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics*

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata*
Digital Libraries*
Electronic Books and Texts*
Electronic Serials*
General Electronic Publishing*
Images*
Legal*
Preservation*
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
SGML and Related Standards*

Further Information about SEPB

The HTML version of SEPB is designed for interactive use. Each major section is a separate file. There are links to sources that are freely available on the Internet. It can be can be searched using Boolean operators.

The HTML document includes three sections not found in the Acrobat file:

  1. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (biweekly list of new resources; also available by mailing list and RSS feed)
  2. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (directory of over 270 related Web sites)
  3. Archive (prior versions of the bibliography)

The Acrobat file is designed for printing. The printed bibliography is over 215 pages long. The Acrobat file is over 570 KB.

Related Article

An article about the bibliography has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

HTML Version of "What Is Open Access?"

An HTML version of my "What Is Open Access?" preprint is now available. This version includes additional links in the body of the document that make it easier to quickly access related information about OA concepts, documents, or systems. While it makes many footnote links available in the body of the document (as well as new ones), it is not an attempt to replicate all footnote links in it.

This paper presents a more nuanced, contemporary view of open access than my "Key Open Access Concepts" excerpt from the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals; however, it had to be very compact to meet the publisher’s needs, and it omits some topics discussed in the earlier document.

Those wanting a more in-depth recent treatment might want to try the first half of my "Open Access and Libraries" preprint, which covers much of this material more fully as a preliminary to discussing the relationship between open access and library functions and operations. However, the "What Is Open Access?" paper reflects some changes in my thinking about OA not found in "Open Access and Libraries."

A PDF version of "What Is Open Access?" is also available, which is more suitable for printing and reading offline.

"What Is Open Access?" will appear in: Jacobs, Neil, ed. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2006. It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (2/13/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Analog Hole and Broadcast Flag," "Delivering Open Access: From Promise to Practice," "The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After," "Google Scholar: Potentially Good for Users of Academic Information," "Open Journal Systems: An Example of Open Source Software for Journal Management and Publishing," Report on Orphan Works, "Research Libraries Engage the Digital World: A US-UK Comparative Examination of Recent History and Future Prospects," "Scholarly Communication in the Digital Environment: The 2005 Survey of Journal Author Behaviour and Attitudes," "Self-Archiving and the Copyright Transfer Agreements of ISI-Ranked Library and Information Science Journals," and "Six Things That Researchers Need to Know about Open Access."

"What Is Open Access?" Preprint

A preprint of my book chapter "What Is Open Access?" is now available. This chapter provides a brief overview of open access (around 4,800 words). It examines the three base definitions of open access; notes other key OA statements; defines and discusses self-archiving, self-archiving strategies (author Websites, disciplinary archives, institutional-unit archives, and institutional repositories), and self-archiving copyright practices; and defines and discusses open access journals and the major types of OA publishers (born-OA publishers, conventional publishers, and non-traditional publishers). It will appear in: Jacobs, Neil, ed. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2006. It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

UH E-Publications Have A New Virtual Home

The University of Houston Libraries’ e-publications have moved to a new server. The old URLs have been mapped to the new ones, but some minor Web page cleanup is being done to accommodate the new venue and searching is temporarily down. Pardon our digital dust.

PACS-L http://epress.lib.uh.edu/pacsl/pacsl.html
PACS-P http://epress.lib.uh.edu/pacsp/pacsp.html
Public-Access Computer Systems News http://epress.lib.uh.edu/news/pacsnews.html
Public-Access Computer Systems Review http://epress.lib.uh.edu/pr/pacsrev.html
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography http://epress.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources http://epress.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepr.htm
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog http://epress.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepw.htm

Update: Migration complete. Everything should be working now.

Open Access Bibliography Author and Title Indexes Are Now Available

Author and title indexes for the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals are now available.

These indexes, which include complete references, were initially generated in EndNote, then refined through a lengthy production process using several text editing programs to produce the final HTML files.

Gary Flake’s "Internet Singularity"

Dr. Gary William Flake, Microsoft technical fellow, gave a compelling and lively presentation at SearchChamps V4 entitled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imminent Internet Singularity."

Flake’s "Internet Singularity," is "the idea that a deeper and tighter coupling between the online and offline worlds will accelerate science, business, society, and self-actualization."

His PowerPoint presentation is text heavy enough that you should be able to follow his argument fairly well. (Ironically, he had apparently received some friendly criticism from colleagues about the very wordiness of the PowerPoint that allows it to stand alone.)

I’m not going to try to recap his presentation here. Rather, I urge you to read it, and I’ll discuss a missing factor from his model that may, to some extent, act as a brake on the type of synergistic technical progress that he envisions.

That factor is the equally accelerating growth of what Lawrence Lessig calls the "permission culture," which is "a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past."

Lessig discusses this topic with exceptional clarity in his book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (HTML, PDF, or printed book; Lessig’s book in under an Attribution-NonCommercial 1.0 License).

Lessig is a Stanford law professor, but Free Culture is not a dry legal treatise about copyright law. Rather, it is a carefully argued, highly readable, and impassioned plea that society needs to reexamine the radical shift that has occurred in legal thinking about the mission and nature of copyright since the late 19th century, especially since there are other societal factors that heighten the effect of this shift.

Lessig describes the current copyright situation as follows:

For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history—between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission—has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture.

How did we get here? Lessig traces the following major changes:

In 1790, the law looked like this:

  PUBLISH TRANSFORM
Commercial © Free
Noncommercial Free Free

The act of publishing a map, chart, and book was regulated by copyright law. Nothing else was. Transformations were free. And as copyright attached only with registration, and only those who intended to benefit commercially would register, copying through publishing of noncommercial work was also free.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the law had changed to this:

  PUBLISH TRANSFORM
Commercial © ©
Noncommercial Free Free

Derivative works were now regulated by copyright law—if published, which again, given the economics of publishing at the time, means if offered commercially. But noncommercial publishing and transformation were still essentially free.

In 1909 the law changed to regulate copies, not publishing, and after this change, the scope of the law was tied to technology. As the technology of copying became more prevalent, the reach of the law expanded. Thus by 1975, as photocopying machines became more common, we could say the law began to look like this:

  PUBLISH TRANSFORM
Commercial © ©
Noncommercial ©/Free Free

The law was interpreted to reach noncommercial copying through, say, copy machines, but still much of copying outside of the commercial market remained free. But the consequence of the emergence of digital technologies, especially in the context of a digital network, means that the law now looks like this:

  PUBLISH TRANSFORM
Commercial © ©
Noncommercial © ©

Lessig points out one of the ironies of copyright law’s development during the last few decades: the entertainment industries that have been the driving force behind moving the law from the permissive to permission side of the spectrum benefited from looser regulation in their infancies:

If "piracy" means using value from someone else’s creative property without permission from that creator—as it is increasingly described today—then every industry affected by copyright today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy. Film, records, radio, cable TV. . . . The list is long and could well be expanded. Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Every generation—until now.

Returning to Flake’s model, what will the effect of a permission culture be on innovation? Lessig says:

This wildly punitive system of regulation will systematically stifle creativity and innovation. It will protect some industries and some creators, but it will harm industry and creativity generally. Free market and free culture depend upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an overregulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an overregulated-regulated market.

New knowledge typically builds on old knowledge, new content on old content. "Democratization of content" works if the content is completely new, if it builds on content that is in the public domain or under a Creative Commons (or similar) license, or if fair use can be invoked without it being stopped by DRM or lawsuits. If not, copyright permissions granted or withheld may determine if a digital "Rip, Mix, Burn" (or as some say "Rip, Mix, Learn") meme lives or dies and the full transformational potential of digital media are realized or not.

If you are concerned about the growing restrictions that copyright law imposes on society, I highly recommend that you read Free Culture.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (1/16/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "The Changing Scholarly Communication Landscape: An International Survey of Senior Researchers," Digital Rights Management: A Guide for Librarians, The Google Library Project: The Copyright Debate, "Learned Society Business Models and Open Access: Overview of a Recent JISC-Funded Study," "Library 2.0 and ‘Library 2.0’," and "Open Access in 2005."

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2005 Use Statistics

There were 1,327,703 successful SEPB file requests in 2005, of which 1,034,745 were page requests. 115,029 host computers were served in 160 domains (excluding unknown domains). From October 1996 through December 2005, there have been 5,564,636 successful requests for SEPB files. See the details below.

SEPB Use Statistics

Requests By Year (October 1996-December 2005)

Year Number of File Requests Average Daily File Requests Number of Page Requests Average Daily Page Requests
1996 (October to December) 19,801 281 14,616 207
1997 156,139 428 109,638 300
1998 230,143 630 150,422 412
1999 254,411 697 170,517 467
2000 317,220 867 215,113 588
2001 405,037 1,109 280,547 768
2002 622,311 1,705 393,251 1,077
2003 1,023,619 2,827 634,607 1,752
2004 1,208,252 3,301 796,953 2,177
2005 1,327,703 3,637 1,034,745 2,834

Total File Requests (October 1996-December 2004)

Year Number of File Requests
1996-2005 5,564,636

Number of Host Computers Served (October 1996-December 2005)

Year Distinct Hosts Served
1996
(October to December)
4,276
1997 29,160
1998 39,145
1999 43,114
2000 51,809
2001 68,391
2002 94,464
2003 117,777
2004 128,218
2005 115,029

"Open Access and Libraries" Preprint

A preprint of my forthcoming book chapter "Open Access and Libraries" is now available.

The preprint takes an in-depth look at the open access movement with special attention to the perceived meaning of the term “open access” within it, the use of Creative Commons Licenses, and real-world access distinctions between different types of open access materials. After a brief consideration of some major general benefits of open access, it examines OA’s benefits for libraries and discusses a number of ways that libraries can potentially support the movement, with a consideration of funding issues.

It will appear in: Jacobs, Mark, ed. Electronic Resources Librarians: The Human Element of the Digital Information Age. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2006.

Postscript: A new preprint is available. I have added more content specific to the impact of OA on electronic resources librarians’ jobs and an appendix on the Creative Commons. Also, I have added another way that OA can save libraries money. I’ve changed the above link to the new preprint; the old one is still available; however, I would recommend reading the new one instead.

Post-PostScript: Having two versions of the preprint available has caused some confusion, so I have taken down the earlier version.

Library 2.0

Walt Crawford has published a mega-issue of Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large on Library 2.0 that presents short essays on the topic by a large number of authors, plus his own view. At Walt’s request, I dashed off the following:

Blogs, tagging, Wikis, oh my! Whether "Library 2.0" truly transforms libraries’ Web presence or not, one thing is certain: the participative aspect of 2.0 represents a fundamental, significant change. Why? Because we will ask patrons to be become content creators, not just content consumers. And they will be interacting with each other, not just with the library. This will require what some have called "radical trust," meaning who knows what they will do or say, but the rich rewards of collective effort outweigh the risks. Or so the theory goes. Recent Wikipedia troubles suggest that all is not peaches and cream in Web 2.0 land. But, no one can deny (ok, some can) that participative systems can have enormous utility far beyond what one would have thought. Bugaboos, such as intellectual property violations, libel, and fiction presented as fact, of course, remain, leading to liability and veracity concerns that result in nagging musings over control issues. And it all is mixed in a tasty stew of enormous promise and some potential danger. This is a trend worth keeping a close eye on.

What Is www.digital-scholarship.com?

I’ve switched to a new domain for everything but DigitalKoans and SEPB/SEPW:

www.digital-scholarship.com

If you enter an old escholarlypub.com address it will automatically switch you to the equivalent digital-scholarship.com address. Due to a peculiarity in the way my blogging software works, DigitalKoans must remain at:

http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/

However, if you enter the digital-scholarship.com address by mistake you will still get to the site, but the URLs will revert to the old domain as soon as you start navigating the blog. Confused? Hopefully not.

My new e-mail address is:

cbailey@digital-scholarship.com

I’ll still check the old one for awhile.

Note to catalogers: Many catalog records for the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals still point to:

http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/oab.pdf

They should be updated to:

http://www.digital-scholarship.com/oab/oab.pdf

The old link will not get users directly to the file.

New Campus Copyright Booklet

Four associations (Association of American Publishers, Association of American Universities, Association of American University Presses, and Association of Research Libraries) have prepared a new copyright booklet, Campus Copyright Rights and Responsibilities: A Basic Guide to Policy Considerations, that, according to ARL, represents "a consensus document" that is "descriptive, not prescriptive." As such, this 30-page document is unique, and it is well worth reading.

Creative Commons Exceeds Fundraising Goal

As I write this, the Creative Commons has raised over $249,000, exceeding its fundraising goal of $225,000. In part, this is due to a check from Microsoft for $25,000. Following the fundraising campaign’s Web page daily, it has been obvious me that a large number of individual contributions have been made in the last week or so. In fact, there have been so many that the December contributor’s page seems to have cratered under the load, since it now shows no one. Anne Marino, Creative Commons Development Director, has posted a blog entry that says, in part:

Because of this tremendous community support, the groundwork for CC’s fundraising program is in place. 2006 will bring many more opportunities for CC to serve the public, create programs for individual Commoners to connect and participate, provide networking forums and events for CC’s new Corporate Commoners Program and encourage and involve continuing institutional support. Stay tuned! 2006 will have many surprises!

Update (1/5/06): The CC campaign had a spectacular finish: there was an anonymous gift of $1 million, plus the total funds raised, excluding this gift, have grown to $346,212.00.