DigitalKoans

What was new and interesting during the week of 8/27/07?

Copyright

• "Anti-Open-Science Hypocrites Infringe Copyright"
• "Australia Drafts Further Tightening of Copyright Laws"
• "Birthmarks for GPL"
• "Fair Use and Licensing"
• "Fair Use and Misuse"
• "Judge Sides with RIAA: File-sharing Apps Lead to Direct Infringement"
• "Newsmaker: Hollywood's Copyright Enforcer"
• "This Time Viacom Is Accused of Violating Copyright"
• "Universities Need to Resist the RIAA, Not Bully Their Students"
• "TorrentSpy to MPAA: Log This! Site Blocks US Searches"
• "Why Copyrights Would Kill the Fashion Industry"

Digital Rights Management

• "Controlling Access—Activation and DRM"
• "Coupons.com DRM Likened to Sony Rootkit"
• "A Digital Game of Cat and Mouse"
• "Does Google Own Your Content?"
• "Gigs & Bytes: DRM Slowly Exits the Building"
• "Green Groups and Social Justice Orgs Fight DRM"
• "WGA Failure: 12,000 Systems Affected, Caused By 'Human Error'"
• "WGA Failure Highlights Major Flaw in Microsoft's Anti-Piracy Strategy"

Digital Technology

• "Body Heat Touted as Future Mobile Power Source"
• "Fragile Media: The Myth of the 100 Year CD-Rom"
• "Google Web Toolkit—Build AJAX apps in the Java language"
• "How Much Paper Would It Take to Print out Wikipedia?"
• "Media Obsolecence"
• "New DVD-sized Disc to Hold 1 to 5 Terabytes of Data"
• "'Second Life': The Promise and Paradox"
• "The US Rural Broadband Crisis"
• "Vint Cerf, aka the Godfather of the Net, Predicts the End of TV as We Know It"
• "Will Podcasting Survive?"
• "Wired Ethernet on Its Way Out Says Analyst"

Other

• "Dangerous Ruling Puts Interactive Web Services at Risk"
• "The Freedom to Read Online"
• "Public Library Blogs: A Few Metrics"

Scholarly Communication

• " 2.0 Be or Not 2.0 Be: Creation and Computers"
• "A Bit More on PRISM"
• "Digitization of Canadian Medical Journals—1911-2007"
• "Duke University Press Announce Participation in SERU"
• "From Hand-crafted to Mass Digitized"
• "Legal Information Management in a Global and Digital Age: Revolution and Tradition"
• "Linking Open Data"
• "Marquette Will Launch 8 OA Journals in 2008"
• "More OAI-PMH vs Atom vs Sitemaps or 'Why I’m a Bit Down on OAI-PMH'"
• "New Approaches to Textbooks"
• "Open Education Search"
• "The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM)"
• "PLoS and Partners Offer Video Communications with SciVee"
• "Publication and Evaluation in the US"
• "PRISM Doesn't Speak for Rockefeller University Press"
• "PRISM Promotes the Interests of Scientific Publishers: Is it Better to Lobby or to Change?"
• "Publish or Perish"
• "Thomson Scientific Launches the New Face of Research"
• "Unintended Consequences of Digital Books"
• "Why Don’t Researchers Like to Comment on Journal Articles?"
• "Zotero Has a New Version"

What was new and interesting during the week of 8/20/07?

Copyright

• "Behind the Scenes at the Copyright Determinator"
• "Big Webcasters Agree to Royalty Cap Deal, DRM to Be 'Discussed' Later"
• "Foundation on which RIAA Builds Cases in Danger of Being Undermined"
• "Microsoft: We're Not Google, and We're Proud of It"
• "More Authors, Less Copyright"
• "Online CD Seller Fights Universal's Bogus Infringement Allegations"
• "RIAA Targets 503 New Students at 58 Colleges & Universities; Continues to Avoid Tangling with Harvard"
• "U of Tennessee Student Says RIAA Subpoena Violates Federal Privacy Law"

Digital Rights Management

• "Are Digital Music Watermarks a Blessing or a Curse?"
• "Is It a DMCA Violation to Tell People to Delete Some Files from Their Hard Drive?"
• "New DRM Scheme Will Let Consumers Stream Cable TV over Home Networks"
• "Wal-Mart Offers DRM-Free Music Downloads"
• "Where Can You Get DRM-Free Tracks?"

Digital Technology

• "Google Exec Touts Universal Search Model"
• "Japanese Researchers Aim to Replace the Internet"
• "Microsoft Uses Silverlight for Experimental Search Site"
• "A New Competitor to Second Life"
• "Paramount to Drop Blu-Ray HD DVDs"
• "The Road to WiMAX"

Other

• "Oklahoma Library Meets the BOSS"
• "I-Schools Form iCaucus to Brand the Field"
• "WHOIS Privacy Reform Reaches Dead End"

Scholarly Communication

• "And while I’m Being Cranky"
• "Anthropological Growing Pains"
• "AnthroSource Moves to Wiley-Blackwell"
• "Bentham Open Access "
• "Dispelling Five Myths about E-books "
• "Electronic Books with Musty Book Smell Launched"
• "The Google Exchange"
• "JASIS Pushing to Liberalize Author Agreements"
• "Library Literature: Academic and Generally Useless?"
• "Making Digital Books into Page Turners "
• "The Metrics of Social Scholarship"
• "Publishers Launch an Anti-OA Lobbying Organization"
• "Publishing and Values"
• "SciVee Launch = Scientific Publication and Video Presentation"
• "Washington U Reaffirms Its BMC Membership"

What was new and interesting during the week of 8/13/07?

Copyright

• "Allofmp3.com Acquitted of Copyright Infringement by Russian Court"
• "Copyright in Works in Public Places"
• "Debate Heats Up on What's Protected by Copyright Laws"
• "Europe’s Digital Library Experts Set to Focus on Copyright Today"
• "A Fight That Feels Futile"
• "Kids Sued by RIAA Seek to Rope Sharman, AOL into P2P lawsuit"
• "Lyrics Sites Out of Tune with Copyrights"
• "Major Copyright Case to Test First Sale Doctrine, Possibly Shrinkwrap EULAs"
• "RIAA Stiffs Former Defendant on Legal Fees"
• "Strict German Computer Crime Law Now in Effect"
• "Tanya Andersen Brings Class Action against RIAA"
• "Universal to Track DRM-Free Music Online via Watermarking"

Digital Rights Management

• "Google, Universal Music Partner to Sell DRM-Free Music"
• "Google Selleth Then Taketh Away, Proving the Need for DRM Circumvention"

Scholarly Communication

• "Analysis of Google Scholar and Google Books"
• "'The Bookish Character of Books': How Google's Romanticism Falls Short"
• "Can Google Inherit Quality?"
• "Conference Papers of Association of Librarians and Information Professionals in the Social Sciences"
• "Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants Awarded"
• "Fading Away: The Problem of Digital Sustainability"
• "Google Book Search Handout"
• "Google Books: Champagne or Sour Grapes?"
• "Haworth Acquired by Taylor & Francis"
• "An Interview with Open Medicine's Publisher—John Willinsky"
• "Metadata Editor"
• "OAICatMuseum—Coming Soon to a Server Near You!"
• "On Literary Criticism in the Digital Age"
• "Preserving Virtual Worlds—TinyMUD to SecondLife"
• "Scan This Book!"
• "Shakespeare’s Hard Drive"
• "University of Pennsylvania Libraries Put Rare Books and Historical Documents Online with Olive Software"
• "What Is BioMed Central?"
• "Why Are NISO and ALPSP Working on Version Control?"

Other

• "Compact Disc Hits 25th Birthday"
• "In Their Own Words: Search Engines on Privacy"

What was new and interesting during the week of 8/6/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Amazon on Demand"
  

  CustomFlix, Amazon's on-demand DVD distribution service, has just been rebranded as CreateSpace, and will now serve up self-published media of all types.

• " Book Circulation per U.S. Public Library User Since 1856"
  

  From 1978 to 2004, book circulation per user declined approximately 50%. The growth of audiovisuals circulation, estimated at 25% of total circulation in 2004, accounts for about half of this decline.

• "Eric Schmidt Defines Web 3.0"
  

  He said that while Web 2.0 was based on Ajax, Web 3.0 will be "applications that are pieced together"—with the characteristics that the apps are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, the apps can run on any device (PC or mobile), the apps are very fast and very customizable, and are distributed virally (social networks, email, etc).

• "Flattening of the U.S. Output of Scientific Articles: 1988–2003"
  

  As reported in the Aug. 3 Science, a recent NSF analysis of U.S. scientific publishing output during the time period 1988-2003 shows that the number of articles produced has remained fairly constant in all areas of science.

• "Google News Rolling Out Expert User Comments"
  

  Users of the U.S. version of Google News will now be able to comment on a story, that is assuming they're somehow involved in it. The process is not for everyone, and in fact requires a lengthy verification process of sending off your comment and credentials to a special Google e-mail address, and later verifying your identity via domain name and an e-mail follow-up from Google staff.

• "Internet Radio Equality Act: Not Dead Yet, Could Be Revived This Fall"
  

  July 15 did not prove to be the "day the music died," as royalty—collection entity SoundExchange neglected to enforce the new royalty rates on Internet radio set by the Copyright Royalty Board earlier this year. Instead, after versions of IREA had been introduced in both the House and the Senate to strike down the new rates, SoundExchange opted to negotiate with webcasters instead.

• "Just Before Recess, Senate Approves FOIA Reform Bill"
  

  The day before adjourning for August recess, the Senate unanimously approved S.849, the OPEN Government Act, a bipartisan bill that is the first significant update to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in more than a decade.

• "Legal Code Is More Like the Windows Kernel Than Project Gutenberg"
  

  The law has more structural similarities to software code than to the prose in Gutenberg's 17,000 books:

• "More Publishers Jump into YouTube Infringement Lawsuit"
  

  Just recently, the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) joined an ongoing, class-action lawsuit against YouTube, one triggered in part by publisher Bourne Co.

• "A New Way to Mix PowerPoint and Audio"
  

  On the Web 2.0 Teaching Tools blog, Alan A. Lew, a professor at Northern Arizona University, points to another solution. The Web site Slideshare, where people can upload and share PowerPoint presentations, has a new feature called Slidecasts.

• "New Zealand ISPs Fight Back against Proposed DMCA-Like Takedown Policy"
  

  However, the good news is that ISPs there are fighting back against the proposal, questioning why they should need to waste their time on this. Instead, they suggest a much more reasonable "notice and notice" process, whereby the ISP would pass on notification to the user responsible and give them a chance to respond, contest the charge, remove or change the content in question.

• "On the Necessity of Open Access and Open Data"
  

  As this report was being prepared, the publishing service Crossref announced that it would begin a pilot program to index the contents of the journals produced by a number of academic publishers in order to expose them for the verification of originality.

• "Printer Health Risk Report Triggers Response from HP, Researchers"
  

  HP is presumably correct in indicating that its printers comply with all regulations that are currently in place to limit known hazards. But the study has identified a previously unknown source of pollution that may also be a hazard, one that cannot possibly have triggered a regulatory response yet.

• "Report Tracks Search Engine Privacy"
  

  A report published recently by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) tracks the efforts of the leading Internet search companies as they begin to compete aggressively with one another to offer stronger privacy protections.

• "Researchers at MITH Partner to Preserve Virtual Worlds"
  

  The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games, interactive fiction, and shared realtime virtual spaces. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games and electronic literature, as well as Second Life, the popular and influential multi-user online world.

• "RIAA Lobbying Expenses Cross $650,000 During First Half"
  

  The RIAA spent $658,000 on lobbying efforts during the first half of 2007, according to public documents unearthed by the Associated Press. The expenses covered opinion-swaying efforts related to copyright protection and funding for enforcement campaigns, among other issues.

• "The State of Broadband in the US"
  

  The short takeaway is that the US is a second-tier country— at best—as far as information infrastructure. That is largely due to the fact that the market for broadband is not competitive in the US.

• "Survey Says: Only DRM-Free Music Is Worth Paying for"
  

  What makes this survey important is the fact that it was aimed squarely at the music-buying public, not the anti-RIAA crowd, not the techno-libertarians, and not our general readership.

• "Too Old for Facebook?"
  

  Those born in the 1970s and earlier are discovering that the social-networking site can be a compelling way to communicate.

• "U.S. Senate Approves FOIA Amendments"
  

  The most notable aspect of the draft legislation from our perspective is its expansive definition of "the news media," which appears to encompass bloggers and other online journalists.

• "Web-Based Collection Plans Help Libraries Build Digital Collections"
  

  The California Digital Library has recently published a selection of Web Collection Plans that will help libraries build collections in the digital age.

• "Yale vs. BMC"
  

  For around $65K, Yale gets about 40 articles published OA, that is,available free to everyone everywhere forever, plus a "subscription" (that is, Open Access, like everyone else) to 179 journals. The average biomed journal subscription is around $1000-1500/yr; choosing the lower figure to be conservative, those subscription-equivalents are worth $179K/yr. Even if Yale only wanted to subscribe to around a third of the BMC journals, that would still cost about the same as the OA charges—and this comparison ignores the page, color and miscellaneous charges that many journals levy.

What was new and interesting during the week of 7/30/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "ALA 2007: Metadata Presentations"
  

  Over on the LITA Blog, Rebecca Guenther provides information about an ALA Annual 2007 program that was sponsored by the LITA Standards Interest Group, Using Metadata Standards in Digital Libraries: implementing METS, MODS, PREMIS and MIX. . .

• "ALPSP Adopts a Hybrid OA Policy"
  

  ALPSP has launched an experimental hybrid OA program for its journal, Learned Publishing.

• "Are People More Polite in Virtual Worlds?"
  

  Do people behave better in virtual worlds than on blogs, forums and chat rooms on the Web?

• "A Catalogue in Your Face"
  

  I was interested to see the Page Tools in the University of Alberta catalogue. . . A reader can send a correction or suggestion to the library. . . . Folks will notice that I am looking at this through the library's new Facebook application.

• "Data Visualization: Modern Approaches"
  

  Let’s take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools.

• "Drive-By Thoughts on the Ithaka Report"
  

  Some provosts need to unpack their heads from their you-know-wheres. "Don’t change, university presses, we love you just the way you are—but don’t expect us to fund you unless you change, because you’re relics of a bygone age!" Yeah, that’s a winner.

• "DRM Scorecard: Hackers Batting 1000, Industry Zero "
  

  I put together a scorecard, which shows that every single significant attempt at consumer-music DRM has been cracked.

• "File-Sharing Is a 'Petty Offense,' Say German Prosecutors"
  

  The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has run into another roadblock in its legal battles against suspected file-sharers in Europe. German prosecutors have begun denying requests to force ISPs to identify the subscribers behind IP addresses, saying that the alleged file-sharing was a "petty offense."

• "FTC Complaint Flags NFL, MLB, Studios for Overstating Copyright Claims"
  

  The CCIA's complaint fingers the NFL, Major League Baseball, NBC Universal, Morgan Creek, DreamWorks, Harcourt Inc., and Penguin Group (USA) for deceptive trade practices, accusing them of systematically mispresenting the rights of consumers to use copyrighted material.

• "HighWire Press Archive Passes 1.7 Million Free Articles Available Online; PubMedCentral Passes the One Million Article Mark"
  

  Congrats to the HighWire team at Stanford for passing the 1.7 free article mark in the past couple of days.

• "House Panel Approves Legal Shield for Bloggers"
  

  A congressional panel on Wednesday voted, against the Bush administration's wishes, to shield journalists including advertising-supported bloggers from having to reveal their confidential sources in many situations.

• "How Do You Build a New Internet?"
  

  Researchers in the US want at least $350m (£175m) to build the Global Environment for Network Innovations (Geni), touted by some as the possible replacement for today's internet. In Europe, similar projects are under way as part of the EU's Future and Internet Research (Fire) programme, which is expected to cost at least £27m.

• "Hybrid Journals and the Transition to OA"
  

  As many publishers develop hybrid models of journal publishing—where much of the journal content, print or digital, is still available only upon subscription but some proportion of that content is freely available online because the authors have paid a special “supply-side” fee to make their work open access—many librarians question how such supply side income will impact traditional subscription rates.

• "Libraries Join CCIA in FTC Complaint Challenging Copyright Warnings"
  

  This week, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) an international association of computer and communications industry firms. . . That complaint was backed this week by the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA), which filed a letter of support with the FTC. LCA consists of five major library associations: the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Medical Library Association (MLA), and the Special Libraries Association (SLA), collectively representing over 139,000 libraries in the United States.

• "Malware Hunts Down and Deletes MP3s"
  

  Security experts have discovered a worm that might just be the recording industry's dream application: it hunts down and deletes MP3s on infected PCs.

• "Multiverse Launches Platform for Creation of MMOGs"
  

  This software solution will enable developers to essentially build their own virtual worlds. There are no upfront fees, and the software provides a common set of tools for developers to create their own massive games, lowering the technical barriers as well.

• "Open or Closed? Jimmy Wales Discusses the Future of Search"
  

  It's Wikipedia and Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales talking about the future of the search engine. Wales' newest project is Search Wikia, a project that aims to use open-source software and development methods to build a search product that improves upon the current offerings from players big and small.

• "Perspective: Recording Industry Threat Looms over Net Radio"
  

  Now, the recording industry is threatening the survival of Internet radio. Behind closed doors, the record companies are turning a fee negotiation into a bid to control what applications and file types you can use to play online music.

• "RIAA Backtracks after Embarrassing P2P Defendant"
  

  When the RIAA filed a file-sharing lawsuit against a sergeant in the US Army earlier this year, it included the customary exhibits with screenshots of what it alleges are the defendant's Kazaa library. Along with the 367 sound recordings that Sgt. Nicholas Paternoster is accused of illegally sharing, the exhibit also contained over 4,200 other files—including pornographic images. . .

• "Radio: Should It Pay to Play Songs?"
  

  . . . webcasters, satellite radio, and those music stations transmitted through your cable connection all have to pay performance rights 1) to the composers who wrote the song and 2) to the performers who played it. Terrestrial AM/FM radio stations, though, only pay the composer; the performer allegedly gets "free promotion" and so doesn't see a cent.

• "Rush to AJAX a Security Threat"
  

  Software developers using Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) techniques to jazz up corporate Web sites are failing to pay attention to some very fundamental security issues, security researchers warned at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

• "Sailing from Ithaka"
  

  The Ithaka Report may very well turn out to be a turning point in the recent history, not only of scholarly publishing, but of scholarship itself. And yet only a few people have commented on the proposal so far—a situation that appears, all things considered, very strange.

• "Two Modest Proposals for Performance Rights"
  

  In my last post, I covered some of the worse arguments being made by broadcasters and record labels in the fight over performance rights. In this one, I’d like to address arguments each side should be making, if they were serious about their current positions.

• "VMWare Fusion for Mac to Arrive on Monday, August 6"
  

  Fusion, which has been in beta since it was first released to the public at the end of 2006, enables Intel-equipped Macs to run over 60 operating systems as virtual machines, including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux or Sun Solaris. But Windows virtualization is where Fusion really shines.

• "The Worst Technology Laws"
  

  Five ways legislation has made a mess of technology, plus five problems that desperately need a legal solution.

What was new and interesting during the week of 7/23/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Announcing ccLearn—The Education Division of Creative Commons"
  

  Creative Commons is pleased to announce the launch of a new division focused on education: ccLearn.

• "Ask.com Takes the Lead on Log Retention; Microsoft and Yahoo! Follow"
  

  Thus, it's exciting to hear that Ask.com plans to take a leap into the lead of search engine privacy by expressly allowing users to opt-out of tracking-as the Associated Press and Ars Technica report, Ask has pledged to launch a service called AskEraser that allows users to decline to stop their search histories from being logged.

• "Book News: University of Rochester to Launch Open Letter Publishing House"
  

  The University of Rochester July 20 announced the creation of a new international literature publishing house dubbed Open Letter to be run by Chad Post, focusing on "modern classics and contemporary works of fiction."

• "Building Publishing Services in the Academic Library"
  

  This presentation will look at various examples of library-supported publishing efforts, some of the issues and considerations in launching such efforts, and some of the open-source tools that can support scholarly electronic publishing.

• "A California Initiative to Protect Images "
  

  State Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), a television star in the 1960s, has won preliminary approval of legislation that would bolster the "postmortem right of publicity" held by the heirs of famous people to control the use of their images, voices, signatures and likenesses for commercial purposes.

• "Conference 2007: Powerpoint Presentations"
  

  Here are the Powerpoint presentations from both days of the [JISC Digitisation Conference 2007]. . .

• "Copycrime Bill Raises Its Ugly Head, Again"
  

  H.R. 3155 makes matters worse by allowing a judge to dole out damages for each separate piece of a derivative work or compilation, rather than treating it as one work—for example, copying an entire album could translate into damages for each individual track, even if the copyrights in those tracks aren't separately registered.

• "Copyright Board OKs Levy on iPods, MP3 Players"
  

  The Copyright Board of Canada is again backing a tax on Apple Inc.'s iPod and other MP3 music players that could boost the price of the devices by almost 30 per cent.

• "Daily News Lost on Facebook Generation"
  

  According to a report from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, only a third of teens said they seek out news on the Internet. The other two-thirds of teens said that they read the news when they happen "to come across it."

• "Massive £12m Boost for Digitisation of National Scholarly Resources"
  

  JISC today announced the successful bids in a further £12m investment in the digitisation of major resources of national importance.

• "New Review: Jacso Shares Comments on the dLIST Depository"
  

  Reference guru Dr. Péter Jacso from the University of Hawaii is back with a look at dLIST, a resource we visit often as we compile ResourceShelf and DocuTicker each day.

• "Online Newspaper Audience Rising Twice as Fast as General Internet Population: Report"
  

  Newspapers' online audiences are rising at twice the rate of the general internet audience, according to research by Nielsen//NetRatings for the Newspaper Association of America.

• "Online Video: 57% of Internet Users Have Watched Videos Online and Most of Them Share What They Find with Others"
  

  The Pew Internet & American Life Project's first major report on online video also shows how many video viewers have contributed to the viral and social nature of online video. More than half of online video viewers (57%) share links to the video they find with others, and three in four (75%) say they receive links to watch video that others have sent to them.

• "Open Library Launches with Library as Wiki Service"
  

  If we all—librarians, readers, writers, publishers, etc.—pulled together, could we create an online library that included every book, every journal, every instance of every type of content a traditional library might contain? Even if we failed to reach that grand goal-almost as grand a goal as Google's vaunted mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful")—we could make something wonderful in the attempt.

• "Peer Review in Peril?"
  

  The increasing tendency of high-profile scholars to bypass the traditional peer-review system could ultimately have an "unraveling" effect on the process in economics, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology writes in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper analyzing various explanations for why economists from top-ranked departments are publishing fewer papers in many top journals.

• "Photosynth"
  

  Here's a truly astonishing demo of what his code now does in combination with another piece of software created in collaboration with U of Washington under the moniker Photosynth. I won't even attempt to describe what it does—suffice it to say it involves lashing together a heterogenous bunch of flickr images into cohesive and immersive whole.

• "Question on Approaches to Curating Textual Material"
  

  I get annoyed when I hear people say (what I probably also used to say) that institutional repositories are not for preservation. It's like Not-for-Profit companies; they may not be for profit, but they'd better not be for loss (I used to be on the Board of two).

• "Reed Elsevier 2007 Interim Results"
  

  12% growth in online information and digital services which now account for 45% of revenues.

• "Shannon's Thirst"
  

  As we stand on the threshold of a world where Google and the publishers may well sell us back access to the information whose acquisition for libraries we—as a society—have already publicly supported, it seems increasingly risque to note that we may be losing some cultural forms fundamentally crucial to our well-being. Their departure may be profoundly damaging in ways that we cannot yet imagine, for they have served as the silent sources of liquidity for social change.

• "U. of Kansas Will Not Forward RIAA Letters"
  

  The University of Kansas recently stiffened its policy for dealing with students caught downloading movies or music. But that doesn’t mean the institution is getting especially chummy with the Recording Industry Association of America, as an article in The University Daily Kansan points out.

• "The UK Says No to Over 50 Year Music Copyright"
  

  The British government turned down a request by the UK music industry to extend copyright for sound recordings beyond 50 years to 70.

• "Web Radio Firms Cry Foul over DRM Proposal"
  

  Internet radio broadcasters have claimed that a last-minute record company deal offered to them is a ruse to force them to use digital rights management (DRM) technology.

What was new and interesting during the week of 7/16/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Almost 65 Percent of New Book Titles Reportedly in E-Book Format"
  

  Nearly 65 pecent of new titles are in e-book format, according to InfoWorld, perhaps relying on stats from the Association of American Publishers.

• "APP and Repositories"
  

  Pete Johnston blogged recently about a very nice use of the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) to provide digital library repository functionality.

• "ARL Releases White Paper on Interlibrary Loan"
  

  ARL has released a white paper on interlibrary loan (ILL) written by Anne K. Beaubien, Director, Cooperative Access Services, University of Michigan Library. The paper analyzes trends in ILL activity in US academic and research libraries over the past two decades. ILL activity has increased over this period, primarily due to growing requests for returnable items (e.g., books, audiovisual items, microfilms) as opposed to non-returnables (e.g., copies of journal articles, conference papers).

• "Arts and Humanities Data Service. . . Next Steps?"
  

  In an earlier post, I mentioned the decision by the AHRC (and later JISC) to cease funding the AHDS from March 2008. Since then the AHRC have re-affirmed their decision. On 28 June, the Future Histories of the Moving Image Research Network made public an open letter to the AHRC, to no avail it would appear.

• "Confirmed: Microsoft's Windows Media DRM Cracked (Again)"
  

  Ars Technica has been able to confirm that the latest attacks on Microsoft's Windows Media DRM work as proclaimed. Via an update of the Individualized Blackbox component (IBX), FairUse4WM can now remove DRM for Microsoft IBX versions 11.0.6000.6324 and earlier, on both XP and Vista.

• "Copy-Editing and Citation-Linking"
  

  There’s an interesting debate going on at present about the value added to journal articles in the course of copy-editing.

• "Dangerous Ruling Puts Interactive Web Services at Risk"
  

  The ruling came in a housing discrimination lawsuit against Roommate.com, which runs Internet forum where users can search for potential roommates. A three-judge panel held that Roommate.com could be held liable for the activity of its users because it "suggested, encouraged, or solicited" and then sorted and categorized content that may have violated fair housing law. But this reasoning threatens both current and future Internet innovators with potentially insurmountable liability problems—impacting everything from search engine functionality to the ability to tag content on media sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr—and is directly contrary to federal law.

• "Ebooks Face Triple Threat"
  

  A survey of libraries done by ebook vendor ebrary found that while ebooks have become more popular, growth is being slowed for a number of reasons.

• "EU's Top Court Deals Blow to Music Industry's Fight against File-sharing"
  

  Today, an advocate general for the European Court of Justice, the highest court in the EU, released an opinion saying that ISPs are not required to disclose information that could identify subscribers in civil copyright infringement cases.

• "Full Text: Keen vs. Weinberger"
  

  This is the full text of a "Reply All" debate on Web 2.0 between authors Andrew Keen and David Weinberger.

• "Great Strides for Intute—One Year On"
  

  Intute, the free national online service funded by JISC, celebrates its first birthday today by renewing its commitment to enable lecturers, researchers and students to discover and access high quality Internet resources.

• "If Libraries Had Shareholders"
  

  And one has to think: if libraries had shareholders, would they, like newspapers, be in the midst of a gut-wrenching, brake-screeching exercise in redefinition?

• "JISC Launches RepositoryNet to Connect Existing Projects"
  

  JISC has launched RepositoryNet, an umbrella initiative to unify four of its existing repository projects.

• "More on the DSpace Foundation"
  

  HP and the MIT Libraries today announced the formation of the DSpace Foundation, a non-profit organization that will provide support to the growing community of institutions that use DSpace, an open source software solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly works in a digital archive.

• "Moving Images: Digitization for Access: Lot 49"
  

  This last Friday (the 13th!), at U.C. Berkeley, the Digital Library Federation was honored to host a landmark meeting of a group that we have labeled "Lot 49" on the topic