DigitalKoans

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has decided to indefinitely postpone a November 2007 Diplomatic Conference at which the WIPO Broadcasting Treaty could have been approved.

Here’s an excerpt from the EFF’s "Blogging WIPO: Broadcasting Treaty Deferred Indefinitely" posting:

Negotiations on the proposed WIPO Broadcasting Treaty ended on Friday with some welcome news. WIPO Member States agreed to postpone the high-level intergovernmental Diplomatic Conference at which the draft treaty could have been adopted, and have moved discussions back to regular committee meetings, down a notch from the last two "Special Session" meetings. . . .

Before a Diplomatic Conference can be convened, Member States must reach agreement on the core elements of a treaty—the objectives, specific scope and object of protection. While this week’s informal session discussions may have helped clarify Member States’ positions, it does not seem to have brought them closer. There is widespread agreement amongst many Member States, public interest NGOs. libraries and the tech industry that any treaty must focus on the issue of signal theft and not the creation of exclusive rights that will harm those communities. However, it’s equally clear from this week that broadcasters will not settle for anything other than exclusive rights.

Why is this important? Here’s an excerpt from Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing posting on the subject ("Broadcast Treaty Wounded and Dying!"):

The broadcast treaty creates a copyright-like "broadcast right," for the entities that make works available. So while copyright goes to the people who create things, broadcast rights go to people who have no creative contribution at all. Here’s how it would work: say you recorded some TV to use in your classroom. Copyright lets you do this—copyright is limited by fair use. But the broadcast right would stop you—you’d need to navigate a different and disjointed set of exceptions to broadcast rights, or the broadcaster could sue you.

That’s just for openers. The broadcast right also covers works in the public domain that no one has a copyright in—and even Creative Commons works where the creator has already given her permission for sharing! You can’t use anything that’s broadcast unless you get permission from the caster. What’s more, they’re trying to extend this to the net, making podcasting and other communications where the hoster isn’t the copyright holder (that is, where you create the podcast but someone else hosts it) into a legal minefield.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released a series of discussion guides for academic librarians to use with faculty. The guides are under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license.

Here’s an excerpt from the guides’ web page:

This series of Discussion Leader’s Guides can serve as a starting point for a single discussion or for a series of conversations. Each guide offers prework and discussion questions along with resources that provide further background for the discussion leader of an hour-long session.

Using the discussion guides, library leaders can launch a program quickly without requiring special expertise on the topics. A brown-bag series could be initiated by a library director, a group of staff, or by any staff person with an interest in the scholarly communication system. The only requirements are the willingness to organize the gatherings and facilitate each meeting’s discussion.

What was new and interesting during the week of 6/18/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Blogging Toolbox: 120+ Resources for Bloggers"
  

  While in no way definitive—there’s simply too much going on in this space to cover it all—we did our best to bring you a comprehensive list of blogging resources, which should be equally useful to beginners as well as veteran bloggers.

• "Book Scanning: Emory Univ. & Someone’s MPOW"
  

  Speaking of Kirtas, blog.mignault.net has a post about the book digitization efforts at his place of work. . . He says publicly what many say privately—the high cost machines are nice, but not for everyone.

• "Buy By the Chapter"
  

  After many hours of dedicated developer time, [O’Reilly’s] our customers now have the ability to buy our book content by the chapter in PDF format. Pricing per chapter is $3.99.

• "DRM Drags Down Economic Growth"
  

  Digital-rights management (DRM) drags down economic growth, and countries that back the technology are doomed to lag behind, a top Linden Research Inc. executive said Thursday.

• "Educating the Educators"
  

  At this point in time it is accurate to call the emphasis that educational organizations are placing on Scholarly Communications a movement.

• "Email Protected by 4th Amendment, Court Says"
  

  The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday, in Warshak v. U.S., that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their email, so that the government needs a search warrant or similar process to access it.

• "EMI Says DRM-Free Music Is Selling Well"
  

  Early sales indicate that DRM-free music is noticeably more popular than DRMed music, EMI senior VP Lauren Berkowitz recently told Bloomberg.

• "FCC Should Make ISPs Play Copyright Cop, Says NBC"
  

  Not even a week after AT&T announced plans to adopt undefined technical measures to stop "piracy," NBC Universal has asked the FCC to declare that "broadband service providers have an obligation to use readily available means" (emphasis added) to stop copyright infringement.

• "Focusing on Members’ Perceptions of ACRL"
  

  The focus groups showed a distinct generation gap. At one end of the spectrum young librarians long for the retirement of the older generation. But at the other end middle and upper level librarians felt neglected by ACRL, to some extent, while new librarians are getting much more attention.

• "Good Copy, Bad Copy: Superb Copyright Documentary on the Remix Wars"
  

  I [Cory Doctorow] just watched Good Copy, Bad Copy, a stunning Danish documentary on remix culture and copyright, available as a free download.

• "Google Book Search Has a Busy Week"
  

  The first week of June saw Google Book Search (http://books.google.com) add a 12-university consortium. . . . And, if that wasn’t enough, a university in Georgia has decided to out-Google Google by starting its own mass digitization project accompanied by a revenue-producing, print-on-demand service administered by Amazon.com

• "Internet Radio to Go Silent on June 26?"
  

  In protest of the elevated royalty fees Webcasters are poised to begin owing to the record industry next month, Internet radio operators are planning to stage a "day of silence."

• "Judge Deals Blow to RIAA, Says Students Can Respond to John Doe Lawsuit"
  

  In a ruling issued last month but disclosed today by file-sharing attorney Ray Beckerman, Judge Lorenzo F. Garcia denied the RIAA’s motion to engage in discovery. This means that the RIAA will not be able to easily get subpoenas to obtain identifying information from the University.

• "Lessig Switches from Copyright to Corruption"
  

  Last week, at the International Creative Commons Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia, Lawrence Lessig made a stunning announcement: he is going to retire from copyfighting and take up a new career, fighting for a new issue.

• "Maine is First State to Pass Net Neutrality Legislation"
  

  A diverse coalition of Mainers applauded the enactment today of the first net neutrality resolve in the nation.

• "The Mellon Foundation and Evergreen"
  

  Yes, the Evergreen project, by way of GPLS, has been approached by the Mellon Foundation.

• "Microsoft Live Search Books Partners with Ingram"
  

  Ingram Digital Group will work as an outsource partner with Microsoft Corp., helping the company with its Live Search Books Service. Ingram will provide high-volume scanning, content acquisition, metadata management and account management for publishers in Microsoft’s program.

• "Nature Precedings Goes Live"
  

  The site has now gone live with a total of 64 submissions.

• "Pirate-Proofing Hollywood"
  

  By the end of May, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) will report to its member studios the results of tests of a dozen computerized video-fingerprinting systems.

• "Publishers Throw Support behind Adobe Digital Editions"
  

  Today marks the launch of the much-anticipated Adobe Digital Editions 1.0, software created for purchasing, managing and reading eBooks and digital editions of newspapers, magazines and other publications.

• "Q & A on Author’s Rights Now Available"
  

  The University [of Minnesota] Libraries have developed this list of questions and answers to inform University authors who wish to manage their rights as authors of journal articles submitted for publication.

• "Repository Listing: OAI-PMH vs Atom vs Sitemaps"
  

  A basic repository feature is providing a list of all the resources in a collection, and a way to incrementally discover changes. The usual way for repos to enable this is OAI-PMH. . . The way the rest of the world does it is with Atom or RSS.

• "Telling Stories"
  

  I [Andy Powell] spent today at the Telling More Stories conference in Wolverhampton, a one day conference about e-portfolios facilitated by Shane Sutherland. . . .Shane started the day by (re)defining e-portfolio firmly as a noun—an e-portfolio is a purposeful aggregation of digital items that functions as a representation of a person thru their work, ideas, achievements, reflections and qualifications and so on.

• "A View of Regional Digitization Centers"
  

  As a part of work for an OhioLINK strategic task force, I have been exploring the creation and operation of regional/collaborative/shared digitization centers. This is a report of findings to date after an open call for information1.

Library Journal Academic Newswire reports that the University of Maine, the Toronto Public Library, and the Cincinnati Public Library will follow Emory University’s lead and digitize public domain works utilizing Kirtas scanners with print-on-demand copies being made available via BookSurge. (Also see the press release: "BookSurge, an Amazon Group, and Kirtas Collaborate to Preserve and Distribute Historic Archival Books.")

Source: "University of Maine, plus Toronto and Cincinnati Public Libraries Join Emory in Scan Alternative." Library Journal Academic Newswire, 21 June 2007.

EDItEUR has released "ONIX for Serials Coverage Statement Draft Release 0.9 (june 2007)" for comment through September 2007.

Here’s an excerpt from the draft’s Web page:

ONIX for Serials Coverage Statement is an XML structure capable of carrying simple or complex statements of holdings of serial resources, in paper or electronic form, to be included in ONIX for Serials messages for a variety of applications; for example, to express:

• The holdings of a particular serial version by a library
• The coverage of a particular serial version supplied by an online content hosting system
• The coverage of a particular serial version included in a subscription or offering

EDItEUR has also released "SOH: Serials Online Holdings Release1.1 (Draft June 2007)" for comment.

JISC has released its Dealing with Data: Roles, Rights, Responsibilities and Relationships: Consultancy Report, which was written as part of its Digital Repositories Programme’s Data Cluster Consultancy.

Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

This Report explores the roles, rights, responsibilities and relationships of institutions, data centres and other key stakeholders who work with data. It concentrates primarily on the UK scene with some reference to other relevant experience and opinion, and is framed as "a snapshot" of a relatively fast-moving field. . . .

The Report is largely based on two methodological approaches: a consultation workshop and a number of semi-structured interviews with stakeholder representatives.

It is set within the context of the burgeoning "data deluge" emanating from e-Science applications, increasing momentum behind open access policy drivers for data, and developments to define requirements for a co-ordinated e-infrastructure for the UK. The diversity and complexity of data are acknowledged, and developing typologies are referenced.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography archive file has been updated to include version 68. The ZIP archive file is about 38 MB in size.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog, which was established in June 2001, is six years old.

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: Australasian Digital Theses Program: Membership Survey 2006, "The Death of Metadata," "Do You Need a Copyright Librarian?," "The Evolution of Copyright," "Ghosts in the Machine: The Promise of Electronic Resource Management Tools," "Magnifying the ILS with Endeca," Project SPECTRa (Submission, Preservation and Exposure of Chemistry Teaching and Research Data): JISC Final Report, March 2007, "Providing Access to Electronic Journals in Academic Libraries: A General Survey," and "Scholarly Electronic Journal Publishing: A Study Comparing Commercial and Nonprofit/University Publishers."

For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans Flashback posting.

Version 68 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,040 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2006 Annual Edition is also available from Digital Scholarship. Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing.

For a discussion of the numerous changes in my digital publications since my resignation from the University of Houston Libraries, see "Summary of Bailey’s Digital Publications Changes."

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are in italics):

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History
2.2 General Works
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues
3.6 Research
4 General Works
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights
5.2 License Agreements
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
6.2 Digital Libraries
6.3 General Works
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation
7 New Publishing Models
8 Publisher Issues
8.1 Digital Rights Management
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries
Electronic Books and Texts
Electronic Serials
General Electronic Publishing
Images
Legal
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
SGML and Related Standards