... Today I am going to focus on the fact that the [copyright] landscape will change, but not because Congress will have implemented a different public policy by then. Rather, Congress has already become sidelined and will likely stay that way, by its own modus operandi: “negotiations among the stakeholders” are a sham. We can no longer pretend that locking the powerless in a room with the powerful will produce a compromise in the public interest. And when the powerful are locked in a room with each other, the result is no better. There are moneyed interests on both sides of the policy debate surrounding the scope and length of copyright protection, and neither of them has a clear advantage anymore. Something else has got to become the tie-breaker. ...
In short, the copyright industries’ inability to implement their visions of copyright policy in an
environment where polarized forces nullify nearly every effort since the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act], has created a legislative vacuum that the industries themselves are filling by practical adaptation to the realities of the digital networked environment. They didn’t come to this strategy willingly. They have been resisting it for more than a decade. They will be, in the end, forced by consumer resistance, mass digitization projects and the sheer enormity of the mass of freely available online content, to come to grips with their futures. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 9/14/2008 02:51:00 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.
