Jack Kapica, Patents, copyright and signals from the sky, Globe and Mail, June 14, 2005. More on Canadian copyright reform, focusing on the consequences for academics. Excerpt: 'Word has it that the revised copyright bill has been formulated with an awful lot of input from Canadian subsidiaries of U.S. corporate interests, pushed further along by an insistent U.S. ambassador. It might make music-sharing illegal, but it's more likely to enrage the academic community, which will find itself incapable of photocopying documents or quoting from them for a much longer period of time than before, unless they are willing to pay their owners a lot of money first. Even with the current law, it's next to impossible to make money in academic publishing. The big worry is that our most important intellectual property might get crushed in the rush to satiate the corporate desire for ever-greater profits from their intellectual property. The principle of protecting one's intellectual property is a good one, but the tough U.S. law has actually thrown the relationship between fair use of intellectual property and rewarding its owners seriously out of balance.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/15/2005 06:06:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
