Copyright is never just copyright
flickr - Stephen Rees
I have now landed in Canada in my new position at McMaster University, and it wasn’t four hours into my first day where I thought, oh yes, must make a note to educate myself on the details of Canadian copyright law. As I pounded into my students’ heads in Germany, copyright is one of the areas that globalization has passed over (surely for better and worse), and remains a staunchly idiosyncratic domain of nation states. What I know about U.S. and German copyright law gives me a starting point, but it would be foolish to think that Canada applies the same rules. What I can be sure of, however, is that media companies have twisted copyright regulations to their benefit in recent years. That is universal.
On the personal side, I have already discovered that Netflix in Canada is a very different beast than in the U.S. in terms of available content, so I am less than inspired. Canadian readers: are there native alternatives that offer more content?
Some thoughts on Peter Lang
In academic conversations on the topic of “good” and “bad” publishers, someone inevitably mentions the name Peter Lang, accompanied by some awkward gesturing and stammering. Why is this? Perhaps due to the fact that, on the one hand, Lang publishes a large number of titles edited and/or written by eminent scholars. On the other hand, they have unloaded more unrevised or lightly revised dissertations on the academic book market than most other publishers combined (that’s a subjective impression, incidentally, but let’s agree that it is a lot).
Given this, it did not surprise me that the name Peter Lang popped up in the comments to my post on Edwin Mellen. It is not as easy to analyze the role of Lang in scholarly publishing as it is with Mellen, if only for reasons of scale, and certainly far more difficult than stating that publishers such as VDM are entirely without merit. Rather than try to make a definitive case in one pass, this is one where perhaps it is better to peel away the layers one by one.
Have ebooks finally arrived?
In a 2010 piece written for Information Standards Quarterly, I suggested that ebooks may, at least in the near future, remain the elusive next big thing they have promised to be for over a decade.
A year on, I am surprised to see that the latest round of ebook-boosterism started by the Kindle and taken to fever pitch by the iPad has not abated. One could debate how much our reading habits have actually changed, but simply based on the hardware sales, clearly some people are making the switch and finding it worthwhile.
As the saying goes, however, a picture can say a thousand words, and this rather odd and somewhat unattractive ad from the back of a recent New Yorker indeed speaks volumes about ebooks. When an ebook reader–sort of a photoshopped Kindle/Nook hybrid–shows up as a prop in an Olay cosmetics ad, well, something is clearly afoot with ebooks.
The funny thing about this ad is that what the ebook reader is ostensibly doing here, namely, showing research results, is something that most ebook readers cannot really do as yet, other than perhaps the iPad. The scholarly journal information delivered nearly exclusively in PDF form does not play well on most ebook readers, as Lisa Carlucci Thomas pointed out in her 2009 LITA presentation. She showed that other than the iPod touch, which could display 84% of Yale’s available ebooks, readers generally display less than 24%.
She was writing of ebooks, but in this case, much the same could be shown with journals. If one has a Web-enabled device that can display a PDF via HTTP, such as an iPod Touch, any smartphone, or a tablet of some sort, then it is trivially easy to view online journal content. The problem is that the devices that lack a true Web browser–Nook, Amazon, Sony, et al.–will fail more often than not, and transferring PDFs via USB is something only a truly dedicated Kindle-lover would consider.
Perhaps I was wrong that the latest ebook hype was another passing fad, as it was in the past (although it is too soon to say), but the prediction that the iPad and its peers would wipe out the single function readers such as the Kindles and Nooks appears to be a safer bet. It seems that the Kindle and similar monofunctional readers are built around an antiquated notion of reading, i.e.- reading is an isolated act, one does nothing but read when reading, as silly and tautological as that sounds. But I “read” like most people read these days, toggling between email, phone calls, Web searches, videos, music, and so forth. So, there is reading and “reading,” and it would seem that most of us are “readers” these days. Which are you?
Patry’s Moral Panics: a brief book review
William Patry. Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 266 p.
Those who read this blog know my feelings (hostile) toward DRM and the media companies who use these mechanisms to further their monopolistic aims. Anyone who shares these views, regardless to what degree, will find Patry’s latest title a pleasurable read. Clearly, copyright is a topic of both great professional and personal interest to Patry–the jacket bio somewhat megalomaniacally refers to him as “the most prolific scholar of copyright in history,” which, even if true, one should not formulate thusly–and he wields his antimonopolistic stick with some glee here.
The central points of his book are clearly articulated. One is that copyright holders, mainly in the form of large media companies represented in his text mostly by the MPAA and RIAA and their larger members, use inflammatory language laced with inappropriate metaphors in order to demonize their opponents. Further, this is nothing new, and Patry uses “copyright wars” in the plural with good reason, as he demonstrates that these wars have been going on for over two centuries, with remarkably consistent and ill-considered rhetoric employed by those who seek monopolies.
Publishers’ catalogs: does anyone use these?
A massive waste of glossy paper
Presses of all types constantly bombard libraries (and scholars) with glossy and expensively produced catalogs. In my years as a librarian, these have generally been viewed by most of my colleagues with disdain, even in the days before one could pull up a publisher’s title list with the flick of a wrist. So why do they persist?
Certainly, one reason is that old habits die hard. Another is that librarians likely report, when asked on a survey or in a focus group, that they do indeed view these catalogs. Having worked in collection development at four institutions, I say bunkus to that. All it takes is a cursory glance at the trash bin next to the mailboxes to put the lie to that statement. Even if a library does use certain catalogs for its work (a rare and dying breed of library), we certainly don’t need 32 copies of it.
What is particularly comical/tragic about the junk mailing of academic libraries is that we buy an ever-increasing portion of the few monographs we still buy via approval plans, and do less and less firm ordering of individual titles. Those we do order are often ordered by scholars with specific needs who find the new titles in their field by means much faster and more reliable than scanning paper catalogs, I would bet. Apparently, publishers have an outdated view of collection work in libraries, where librarians sit and ponder catalogs, weighing one title against another. I worked at a place that approached that model (while being far more practical in reality), and in the five years since I left, even that library has gone the path of simplification.
From my point of view, this pointless waste of postage, resources, and time should stop, and should have a decade ago, if not earlier. What do other librarians reading this think?
Merry Christmas, FreeFileSync
Breaking my own holiday posting moratorium to toss out a last-minute gift idea: give a few bucks to your favorite open source project. Don’t do this nearly often enough myself, but in the spirit of the season, I just donated $5 to the developers of FreeFileSync. This tidy little application has spared me any number of data disasters and taken much of the pain out of my multiple computer data synching problems.
So, open source software users: let’s spread the joy around this season!
OSI logo used per their guidelines.
Taking Stock: 15 minutes, blogging, and librarians
Taking stock is what one of my favorite literary characters–Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg/The Magic Mountain–managed to do for years on end before he decided to go get himself killed in WWI. Me? I skip the trench warfare and take stock annually rather than full time.
Lately, I’ve found new enthusiasm to write posts for this particular blog. Yes, yes. It’s 2010, and blogging is passé and soooooo 2005ish. Whatever. Sure, the cool kids have moved on, if only to Angry Birds, but apparently half of humanity still writes blogs, and my stats tell me that at least a handful of generous souls read mine, so on it goes. I’ve blogged, for both professional and personal reasons, in one place or another since 2004 and have come to appreciate its myriad uses.
DRM dreams or maybe nightmares
You know you’re a copyright and media law junkie when your concerns about DRM and crossing borders occupies a higher place on your list of things to do before moving abroad than what to do about your personal belongings. I am not having nightmares about it, but perhaps some unpleasant daydreams. All sorts of things are about to change:
- Netflix streaming – I hear it works in Canada, but will it work via our Roku box.
- Roku – will it revert to being an inert plastic box in Canada? Cannot imagine that all of the channels on Roku’s platform offer license for Canada.
- Will my iTunes/iPod life get turned upside down because I have a Canadian address? Almost surely, based on experience.
- Which apps on my iPhone will stop working when I switch it to Rogers from AT&T? That switch gives me the sweats just thinking about it.
Clouds vs. Software: a cage match to the death?
flickr - lordsutch
As a multilingual guy, I depend heavily on dictionaries. For years, I have had Babylon, a not-so-inexpensive multilingual dictionary, installed on my primary computer. Babylon is solid software, and for a time, I loved it. Not only could I have access to my primary languages, but I could load up an odd array of other languages: Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, etc. This was a godsend when I had to do Scandinavian collection development while working at Yale.
For German, I used Babylon mostly as a spellchecker or for those moments when I type a word and then ask myself, does that mean what I think it means? Part of the reason it costs money, of course, is that Babylon licenses its dictionary content from various publishers. Their German dictionary was never as good or as rich as my bound German-English dictionary, but it was way better than any online dictionary back in 2003 or so.
Wikileaks: the end of journalism?
mashup from flickr sources bk-robat and espenmoe
Could there have been a more dramatic demonstration of the dysfunction and duplicity of journalism and the media than the current Wikileaks dustup? Journalism has been on the defensive for the past decade as it faces the challenge of social media, trotting out tired metaphors to defend its role in democratic societies: watchdog, bulwark, and the like. But now, even as they sell papers and gain viewers by writing and talking about the leaked diplomatic cables, the media have turned on Wikileaks and made Julian Assange into a 2010 bin Laden. Thankfully, there are a few exceptions, such:
- Glenn Greenwald: The media’s authoritarianism and WikiLeaks (salon.com)
- Greenwald, again: Anti-WikiLeaks lies and propaganda – from TNR, Lauer, Feinstein and more (salon.com, and the inspiration for the graphic on this post)
- The Guardian’s opinion page
As a librarian, I find the whole saga both riveting and appalling. Our code of ethics (the universal ethics, not the ALA version) dictates that we side, whenever possible, with those who support the freedom of information. One sees many librarians quietly supporting Wikileaks, but the silence from our major professional organizations is disheartening. As we watch objective journalism lose out to government-sanctioned infotainment, who will be left to defend our basic rights?
The Bibliobrary 