Comment. Fritz Hollings? In 2002, Hollings introduced a bill in Congress (the Security Systems and Standards Certification Act, or SSSCA, later renamed the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, or CBDTPA) which would require all computers to contain government-approved, hardware-level DRM to prevent anyone from reading, copying, or downloading copyrighted content without the machine-readable permission of the copyright holder. It would criminalize any attempt to bypass or remove the DRM, build a new computer without it, or log into the internet with an unsecured (i.e. uncrippled) computer. Violators would face 5-20 years in prison and fines from $50,000 to $1,000,000. Fred von Lohmann said the CBDTPA would be like "putting the dinosaurs in charge of evolution." I called the bill "a war against universal Turing machines...to make the world safe for entertainment." Most relevant to the University of South Carolina, Siva Vaidhyanathan said the bill "would fundamentally change the way libraries use electronic databases and CD-ROMs. You could no longer have widespread access to materials....You would have to start paying libraries for access because they would not be able to afford it on their own."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/24/2008 07:18:00 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.
