Tom Zeller, Jr., Permissions on Digital Media Drive Scholars to Lawbooks, New York Times, June 14, 2004 (free registration required). On the insufficiency of "fair use" for art and scholarship, with a glimpse forward to the conference this Friday in Philadelphia, Knowledge Held Hostage: Scholarly versus Corporate Rights In The Digital Age. Quoting Zeller: "Edward W. Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton University, was at the center of a legal battle in 2001, when representatives of the recording industry threatened to sue him and the university over the publication of a paper analyzing a set of digital watermarking technologies designed to secure music files. The recording industry based its claim on the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it a crime to circumvent antipiracy measures built into digital media. 'After a long legal fight involving withdrawal and later resubmission of our paper, and our filing of a lawsuit against the parties who tried to suppress our work,' Professor Felten wrote in response to a call from conference moderators for tales of copyright woe, 'we won the right to publish our paper. Attempts to create a research exemption to the D.M.C.A. have failed thus far.' "
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.
