update: Republicans suggest and withdraw shockingly sensible ideas for reforming copyright
UPDATE: That Was Fast: Hollywood Already Browbeat The Republicans Into Retracting Report On Copyright Reform, by Mike Masnick, Techdirt (Nov 17th 2012)
...as soon as it was published, the MPAA and RIAA apparently went ballistic and hit the phones hard, demanding that the RSC take down the report. They succeeded. Even though the report had been fully vetted and approved by the RSC, executive director Paul S. Teller has now retracted it...The link below to house.gov is now broken. A copy of the file is available here. David Weinberger points to a Republican House policy paper "that nails three myths about copyright law and suggests four areas of reform."
- RSC Policy Brief: Three Myths about Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix it. The Republican Study Committee Jim Jordan (chair), Derek S. Khanna (Staff Contact), November 16, 2012. [PDF, 9 pages] This paper will analyze current US Copyright Law by examining three myths on copyright law and possible reforms to copyright law that will lead to more economic development for the private sector and to a copyright law that is more firmly based upon constitutional principles.
- The purpose of copyright is to compensate the creator of the content
- Copyright is free market capitalism at work
- The current copyright legal regime leads to the greatest innovation and productivity
- Statutory damages reform
- Expand Fair Use
- Punish false copyright claims
- Heavily limit the terms for copyright, and create disincentives for renewal
The future of libraries and the value of libraries is content — including free content
Today I was re-reading an article from a few years ago and was struck by how prescient it was in providing a formula for the success of libraries. Here are some of its main points:
- Find a niche with growth potential (serve a community).
- Organize information to make it useful
- The internet is a distribution channel -- not a product (add value!)
- Turn words into math (sophisticated mathematical formulas can find patterns in content and make it more discoverable)
- Separate the signal from the noise (Type the word "jaguar" into Google's search engine and you'll get 64 million results. Fix this!)
- Computers can't do everything (humans indexers and editors make the difference that algorithms cannot)
- Print's not dead, it just needs online help
- Westlaw rises to legal publishing fame by selling free information, By Erin Carlyle, City Pages, (April 29, 2009).
Compilations of public laws
The U.S. House Office of Legislative Counsel produces a number of compilations of public laws for use by the committees. Recently, they made them over 250 of these compilations available to the public on their web site:
- Statute Compilations: A list of our frequently requested compilations in PDF format.
[T]he frequently requested compilations of those public laws that either do not appear in the United States Code or that have been classified to a title of the Code that has not been enacted into positive law. They have been prepared by our Office for the use and convenience of the Members and committees of the House.
- Unofficial documents: The compilations of public laws, as amended, provided at this site are unofficial documents and should not be cited as legal evidence of the law.
- Status: Please note carefully the date of the last amendment compiled, as some of these files have not yet been updated to reflect the most recent amendments enacted.
When bits go bad: the Atlas of Digital Damages
Ever heard the term "bit rot" or wondered what actually happens when electronic files go bad? The Atlas of Digital Damages is a collection of files with corrupted bits, so you can visually see what happens. The Atlas is a flickr album, or rather "a staging area for collecting visual examples of digital preservation challenges, failed renderings, encoding damage, corrupt data, and visual evidence documenting #FAILs of any stripe." So, in addition to viewing these examples, you too can contribute examples to help build the Atlas' collection. A blog post by Barbara Sierman, from the National Library of the Netherlands, first posed the question and well, folks ran with the idea and created this "crowd sourced effort" to document digital degradation. See, "Where is our atlas of digital damages?".
I discovered this nifty item while reading through the November Digital Preservation Newsletter from the Library of Congress (there's lots of great project updates and information, especially on the geospatial digital preservation front in there - so go check it out!)
and check out the LOCKSS project for digital preservation approaches and methods to prevent bit rot on a large scale.
[This post was nicely sent to us by our pal Kris Kasianovitz, International, State and Local Government Information Librarian at Stanford. If others want to send us items of interest, please send them to freegovinfo AT gmail DOT com. Thanks Kris!!] Continue reading
Ironic CRS report on government transparency
The Congressional Research Service has a new report on government government transparency, which, ironically, does not mention the fact that the report is available to the public in spite of the congressional policy that bars CRS from making this report public. Thanks and a big hat tip to Secrecy News, a publication of the Federation of American Scientists, for making the report available!
- Government Transparency and Secrecy: An Examination of Meaning and Its Use in the Executive Branch, by Wendy Ginsberg, Maeve P. Carey, L. Elaine Halchin, Natalie Keegan, Congressional Research Service, R42817 (November 8, 2012).
- The Meaning of Transparency, and More from CRS, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, (November 13th, 2012). It also does not consider in any depth how technological changes are affecting government information policy, perturbing or mooting longstanding official positions on disclosure and non-disclosure. Nor does it explore political obstacles to greater transparency (such as the congressional policy that bars CRS publication of this very report on transparency).