> I think you're missing something. Owners of intellectual property are
> entitled to due reward for their work - and copyright legislation provides
> protection for this.
Copyright legislation in the world of paper does NOT ONLY concern itself
with rewarding traders in intellectual work. It sets out a carefully
balanced set of rights and duties so that writers may receive some reward
for their effort, while not destroying society through dividing it into
separate groups of information rich and information poor. For example,
during the industrial revolution many municipalities set up public
libraries so that those too poor to buy books could read them. This had
the effect of reducing the income to the publishers. However, this was
accepted as their duty to ensuring that we had a sufficiently educated
workforce to develop industry. They accepted that they would have to
renounce some worldly goods to serve the poor. This was added to the
existing understanding that scholarship would be impossible if people
could not use, reproduce and quote short parts of others' work.
There is a concerted attempt in the world of electronic publishing to
remove all exceptions for fair use or even the idea of fairness. Pamela
Sanderson, Bruce Sterling and others have documented this in a number of
articles in Wired and Communications of the ACM. The pressure is coming
mainly from US music and film publishers. We saw the effect of their
lobbying on MEPs, when they recently passed a plan to outlaw even
temporary digital copies of any works, so making caching proxy servers
illegal.
> As the costs of providing web services increase, service providers are
> increasingly looking for ways of covering their costs. In the case of
> London Transport I think it is reasonable for them to receive advertising
> revenue to cover their costs. The simplest way of maximising hits on
> advertising is to request institutions link to the main entry point.
> I don't see anythink wrong with this.
They are a public service, with a duty to serve to poor (if not renounce
all their worldly goods). They are not a private company. As libraries
become replaced by electronic kiosks, are people going to be stopped from
consulting the underground map in these kiosks? If Translink in Northern
Ireland had any on-line maps of their bus and rail routes, they would
never dream of stopping our local community networks from linking to them.
> I also don't agree with David Newman's assertion that this is an
> infringement on academic freedom.
I did not make an assertion. I quoted an extract from one of series of
serious, peer-reviewed articles published in a legal journal, in the hope
that some of the members of the list would look there to study the serious
discussion on the issues of electronic copyright, rather than merely
sticking to their existing prejudices. I also changed the title, to show I
was not specifically refering to the LT map.
It is not a case of agreeing or disagreeing. It is not a matter of
opinion. It is a case of doing research, or studying other research, to
carefully tease out the nature of a problem and the perspectives of
different interest groups. One way my students get poor marks is by
demonstrating that they only understand one point of view, and have never
made an attempt to understand any other. Unusually for him, Brian Kelly
has demonstrated that in this case he only understands the complete
private ownership of information perspective (52% - a low 2.2 - at least
he expressed his case clearly, if with little evidence for why we should
share his values).
My comments on what we should campaign about concerned firstly the
difference between quotation practice in academic publications versus
films and TV. As stated in articles by Tim Berners-Lee, the hypertext
reference was explicitly modelled on the academic reference. When
commercial interests started to join our club, they accepted this as part
of the rules of the club. Now their lawyers are trying to change these
rules. That should be fought. But even more important is the potential EU
directive that will outlaw temporary copying without permission of the
copyright owners. That will need a serious campaign to match the high-paid
lobbying of Hollywood.
I am seriously worried that at many levels the "Information Society" is
being seen only as a vehicle for electronic commerce, not as a means by
which 100% of the population learn to think for themselves so that they
can deal with a world where they are always being made redundant. The
rich can stick up for themselves. Those of us in the public sector have
other duties (see, e.g., the recommendations in "Beyond Access and
Awareness", http://www.qub.ac.uk/mgt/cicn/beyond/).
----------------------
Dr. D. R. Newman, Queen's University Belfast, Queen's School of Management,
BELFAST BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland (UK). http://www.qub.ac.uk/mgt/
FAX: +44-1232-249881 Tel. +44-1232-335011 mailto:[log in to unmask]
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