DigitalKoans

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.

What was new and interesting during the week of 6/11/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "1 Billion PCs by End of 2008"
  

  Acording to a study published by Forrester Research, 2008 will be the year in which a psychological barrier will be surpassed.

• "The 3D Real/Virtual World Hybrid: How Far Away?"
  

  How long will it be until we can stroll through the streets in a virtual world that is identical to our own? Given the state of a number of technologies, not very long.

• "Another Standards Opportunity"
  

  This is a new project proposal to develop an international standard identifier for collections in libraries and related organizations such as archives, museums, and publishers, and is directly related to NISO’s draft standard Z39.91, Collection Description Specification.

• "AT&T Willing to Spy for NSA, MPAA, and RIAA"
  

  In a move that has executives from movie studios and record labels grinning from ear to ear, AT&T has announced that it will develop and deploy technology that will attempt to keep pirated content off its network.

• "The Definitive Collection Of RSS Links"
  

  . . . Stan Schroeder over at Mashable has assembled what might well be the largest collection of RSS links on the web.

• "Digital Curation Blog"
  

  The Digital Curation Centre now has a blog.

• "Digitization Vendors at the SLA Conference, Part 3"
  

  I’ve already blogged about some of the vendors, so let me talk about the rest.

• "DINI Presentations for OA Repository Managers"
  

  Presentations from the DINI meeting Technische und rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen fur die Betreiber von Open-Access Repositories (Berlin, June 5-6, 2007) are now online.

• "FBI: Operation Bot Roast Finds 1 Million Botnet Victims"
  

  The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI yesterday said ongoing investigations have identified more than 1 million botnet crime victims.

• "Fiction Writing 2.0: Six New Ways To Write The Next Great Novel"
  

  Below we’ll explore some start ups that take creative writing into the Web 2.0 era.

• "Google Bows to EU Pressure, Will Anonymize Log Files After 18 Months, Not 24"
  

  Google has agreed to change its policy on retaining server logs after inquiries from Europe’s Article 29 Working Group.

• "Google Custom Search Engine Adds Dynamic Search Capabilities"
  

  Google has quietly updated its Custom Search Engine tools, allowing users to create dynamic search engines that update searched domains on the fly.

• "Google Named Worst Privacy Offender in Study"
  

  A new report puts Google in last place when it comes to privacy protection.

• "Hollywood’s YouTube Frustration Grows"
  

  Google and its YouTube subsidiary are trying Hollywood’s patience.

• "How Hollywood, Congress, and DRM Are Beating Up the American Economy"
  

  The United States traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rust belt. The United States bet wrong.

• "Librarians Respond to Global E-Book Survey with Some Interesting Results"
  

  A recent survey commissioned by ebrary who operate in the library and publishing sectors, has found users of e-books don’t rely on Google to search for content. They received responses from 552 individual libraries, the majority of which were academic.

• "Losing Sleep over Copyright"
  

  I don’t often lose sleep over copyright issues anymore. But last night I could not stop thinking about the Copyright Office’s new resource for children.

• "More Calls to Kill DRM"
  

  Former music industry executive Jay Samit called on the media companies Wednesday to do away with digital rights management software that encrypts content.

• "Now Online: Summary Minutes from the High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries"
  

  The summary minutes (8 pages; PDF) of the 3rd meeting of the HLEG on Digital Libraries, held in Brussels on 18 April 2007, are now published and available online.

• "OCLC’s Eric Hellman Talks with Talis"
  

  In this Talking with Talis videocast, I talk with Eric Hellman, Director of OCLC’s Openly Informatics Division.

• "Publishers Testing E-Books for Young People"
  

  Two leading children’s publishers, Scholastic, Inc., and Disney, will soon discover whether the laptop compares to the lap in the hearts of young readers.

• "Supporting Research in the Arts and Humanities: JISC Reviews Its Services"
  

  Following the decision by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) to cease funding the AHDS2 (Arts and Humanities Data Service) from March 31st 2008, JISC has decided that it is unable to fund the service alone and that therefore its own funding of the service will, in its current form, cease on the same date.

• "UT Offers Help Seeking Permissions"
  

  Now the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin has announced two databases that will help make searching for information about "orphan works" a little easier.

• "US Falls to 24th Place For Broadband Penetration"
  

  According to research done by the consultancy firm Point Topic, the US has fallen to 24th place in terms of broadband penetration, with only 53% of households connected.

What was new and interesting during the week of 6/4/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Apple’s File Labeling: An Effective Anticopying Tool?"
  

  More interesting than the lack of encryption is the apparent lack of integrity checks on the data. This makes it pretty easy to change the name in a file. . . . Worse yet, it would be easy to change the data in a file to frame an innocent person—which makes the name information pretty much useless for enforcement.

• "Ask.com Debuts Ask 3D: Say Hello to Morph Technology"
  

  Why, it’s MUCH MORE THAN a new interface, it’s a major re-engineering of the entire product. What follows is a brief introduction.

• "Blogs: The Many Ways ‘Many’ Come Together"
  

  Just a quick post (wasn’t quick after all) on some examples of different types ways many people come together in the blogosphere. . .

• " Book Recommendation: ‘Ourspace’ by Christine Harold"
  

  Professor Christine Harold of the University of Georgia has a great new book out entitled Ourspace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture that focuses on participatory culture and the movement to subvert mainstream media supremacy.

• "Book Scanners"
  

  MPOW is struggling towards getting digitization off the ground, and one of the things I’ve been looking at are book scanners.

• "Congratulations to Ted and Carl Bergstrom"
  

  Ted and Carl Bergstrom have been named the SPARC Innovators for 2007.

• "Copyright Silliness on Campus"
  

  What do Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke, Howard and UCLA have in common? Apparently, leaders in Congress think that they aren’t expelling enough students for illegally swapping music and movies.

• "Ebooks Gain at Libraries, but Lack of Awareness Remains an Issue"
  

  A survey of libraries done by ebook vendor eBrary found that, while ebooks have become more popular, growth is being slowed by several issues, including complicated interfaces, business models, and a general lack of awareness among students and faculty.

• "E-Mail Senders Pay to Bypass Filters"
  

  In deals expected to be announced Thursday, Goodmail Systems is expanding its CertifiedEmail program to Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner and Verizon Communications. Yahoo and Time Warner’s AOL became inaugural participants last year.

• "The Future of OCLC ?"
  

  Whether you’re a member of the "worldwide library cooperative" or not, there’s plenty of value to be gleaned from spending some time listening to the podcast recordings of OCLC’s most recent Members Council meeting, where a number of the issues we’ve been expounding for a while get the OCLC treatment.

• "Industry Leading Publications Reject Office 2007 Documents"
  

  At least two major scientific publishers, Science and Nature, are both refusing to accept documents in the new Word 2007 format.

• "Microsoft: Silicon Valley Team Building Stealth Search Engine"
  

  Microsoft has gathered a team of twenty or more "rock star" developers who’ve been tasked at building their next generation search engine, a source has told us.

• "Movable Type 4.0 Beta: Popular Blogging Tool to Go Open Source"
  

  SixApart Vice President, Anil Dash, writing on the Six Apart blog, also says that the new version will be released under the GPL, which means MT 4.0 will be open source like its main competitor, Wordpress. . . . Moveable Type took something of a beating in the blogosphere when version 3.0 was released and introduced all sorts of licensing and fees that led many longtime users to abandon the platform in favor of Wordpress, Textpattern and other blogging software.

• "Net Firms Lose in House Spyware Vote"
  

  Over objections from Internet companies and online advertisers, the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a bill touted as an antispyware measure, a move that sets the stage for a political showdown in the Senate later this year.

• "Notes from NASIG"
  

  I’m posting my notes on sessions of possible interest from NASIG 2007.

• "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.

• "PubMedCentral Canada?"
  

  According to Open Medicine sources, CISTI and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) are in discussions regarding the creation of a Canadian version of PubMed Central International (PMCI).

• "Repositories ‘Vital to UK Economy’, Delegates Hear"
  

  A major conference on digital repositories took place this week in Manchester, attracting nearly 200 delegates from around the UK.

• "RIAA Throws in the Towel in Atlantic v. Andersen"
  

  One of the most notorious file-sharing cases is drawing to a close. Both parties in Atlantic v. Andersen have agreed to dismiss the case with prejudice, which means that Tanya Andersen is the prevailing party and can attempt to recover attorneys fees.

• "Scitopia Launched"
  

  Scitopia is a federated search portal—that is, the search terms are sent simultaneously to the publications websites of the member societies, and the returned results ranked and presented on a single page. At present some 3 million articles are covered.

• "Solr-ized MARC Record Catalog"
  

  Rob Casson of Miami University announced this weekend the beta availability of their video catalog. In a subsequent posting, Rob describes the user interface elements.

• "Stallman: Why GPL Version 3 Is Important"
  

  The right to remove digital rights management (DRM) controls and patent protection for free and open source software users are important provisions in the General Public License (GPL) version 3, says the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

• "Systemic Change: CIC and Google"
  

  Much of what I have said revolves around systemic issues: how does the systemwide library resource reconfigure in a network environment which is seeing this type of change. This requires collective responses, which is why I think that this CIC initiative is so interesting. For OCLC, and the other library organizations which operate at the systemic level, it underlines the importance of working with libraries to develop web-scale, or in other words, responses which match what users now expect in a web environment.

• "Treating Downloads Like Drug Deals"
  

  No longer would you need to actually infringe on something to find yourself subject to the full panoply of investigatory tools available to federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies. The government would be allowed to wiretap and read the personal communications of anyone suspected of the vague offense of "attempted" copyright infringement, a crime for which there is no definition.

• "Two Personal Repository Services"
  

  This year has seen the release of two personal repository services: http://PublicationsList.org/1 and the U.K. Depot2. These two services have an admittedly different focus, but I think it is still interesting to compare and contrast them to see what we can learn.

• "U.S. Cracks Down on Copyright"
  

  There will be more criminal prosecutions for intellectual property (IP) violations as a result of Australia’s Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States, according to leading IP academics.

What was new and interesting during the week of 5/28/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Apple’s DRM-Free AAC Files Contain More Than Just Names and Email Addresses"
  

  A couple of recent posts on Ars Technica and TUAW pointed out that Apple is embedding personal information, such as the name and email address of the purchaser, in all of their AAC files (including the DRM-free ones). We got curious, and wondered whether Apple might also be watermarking the underlying audio data in these tracks.

• "Copyright Protection for Successive Versions"
  

  Thus, libraries really cannot rely on donated earlier manuscript versions of published works as freeing them from copyright concerns. The only exception is if the earlier version is so different from the published version that it truly is a separate work.

• "Copyright’s Authorship Policy: How to Make an Art-Neutral Copyright"
  

  Tim’s point is that copyright ends up choosing what kind of authors are allowed to make art, and which ones aren’t. . . . Tim goes on to suggest a simple and cunning mechanism for minimizing copyright’s impact on authorship, a method that will allow the largest variety in art and expression.

• "Copyrights That No One Knows About Don’t Help Anyone"
  

  When some librarians at Carnegie Mellon University tried to request permissions to digitize a collection of out-of-print books, they were unable to find more than 20 percent of the rights holders, despite persistent efforts.

• "Cornell Library Lands Grant To Document Founding of HBCUs"
  

  Thanks to a $450,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Cornell University Library will help produce a digital collection chronicling the founding of America’s black colleges and universities, by "sharing its expertise in digital imaging, preservation and management" with librarians and archivists from the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Library Alliance.

• "Cyberattack in Estonia—What It Really Means"
  

  As senior security researcher at Arbor Networks, Nazario closely monitors network attacks. . . . He spoke with CNET in the wake of the events in Estonia.

• "Digital Photos Piling Up"
  

  The average U.S. household has almost 1,000 digital photos stored on CDs, DVDs, Web sites and hard drives, according to a Photo Marketing Association survey of digital camera owners in 2006 that was published Monday.

• "Google Gears Brings Offline Functionality to Web Apps"
  

  Google has released a new Javascript API this morning dubbed Gears that adds offline support for web applications.

• "Google Photos Stir a Debate Over Privacy"
  

  Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google’s map service called Street View.

• "Internet Radio Companies and NPR File Legal Appeal against New Music Royalty Rates"
  

  National Public Radio is teaming up with online radio broadcasters to appeal new music royalties that they say would put smaller operators out of business and force others to sharply scale back their online music offerings.

• "Microsoft Adds In-Copyright Books & New Features to Live Search Books"
  

  Today Microsoft announced that they have added in-copyright books to Live Search Books. Microsoft said they have only included books that their publishing partners have given permission to include.

• "More Bandwidth Than You Can Use?"
  

  Companies such as Verizon are starting to offer Internet connection speeds that are 5 to 30 times faster than standard cable or DSL lines.

• "New AACS ‘Fix’ Hacked in a Day"
  

  The ongoing war between content producers and hackers over the AACS copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs produced yet another skirmish last week, and as has been the case as of late, the hackers came out on top.

• "New iTunes Steals Your Ability to Turn Apple Music into iPod-friendly MP3s"
  

  If you’re thinking of downgrading to the new iTunes, stop! The new iTunes breaks the ability to convert the music you’ve bought—even "DRM-free" songs sold at a 30 percent premium—into MP3s that will play on your iPod.

• "Planet Cataloging, the Ultimate Blog Resource for Cataloging and Metadata!"
  

  Planet Cataloging is an automatically-generated aggregation of blogs related to cataloging and metadata designed and maintained by Jennifer Lang and Kevin S. Clarke.

• "Public Domain and Smithsonian Images"
  

  If the image is produced by an employee of the Smithsonian, why does it claim copyright?

• "Reed Elsevier Most Obvious Buy-Out Candidate?"
  

  The Times is reporting that Deutsche Bank called Reed Elsevier the publishing sector’s "most obvious buyout target."

• "The REST book Is Out!"
  

  The eagerly anticipated (by me, anyway) O’Reilly book on REST by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby (as previewed by the authors here) has been published.

• "Take Note: Computing Takes Up Pen, Again"
  

  His new company, Livescribe, which he plans to introduce today at the D: All Things Digital technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., has taken some of those technologies several steps further. It has created an ambitious new type of pen-based computer system that, if successful, could bridge the gap between paper and the digital world and perhaps even change the way millions of people interact with the Internet.

• "The Virtual World Just Got a Little More Real"
  

  Second Life may face a new threat, the need to apply and enforce real law in its virtual world.

• "Visual Amazon Browser"
  

  The interface design firm TouchGraph recently released a free visual browsing tool for Amazon’s books, movies, music and electronics inventories.

• "What Lurks Below Microsoft’s Surface? A Brief Q&A with Microsoft"
  

  Minority Report meets the kitchen table in the new Surface from Microsoft.

• "What Next? Part 2: The Open Source ILS"
  

  Libraries and open source are like peanut butter and chocolate to many people. Our altruistic nature, penchant for openness, and shoestring budgets make libraries a virtual Petrie dish for open source experimentation.

What was new and interesting during the week of 5/21/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Action Alert: Fight the Justice Department’s Copycrime Proposal!"
  

  Should ordinary Americans face jail time for attempted copyright infringement? Should the sort of property forfeiture penalties applied in drug busts also threaten P2P users, mixtape makers, and mash-up artists?

• "Citizen Media Law Project Launches Website"
  

  The Citizen Media Law Project—a joint venture of the Berkman Center and the Center for Citizen Media—has launched their new website! The CMLP’s mission is to provide practical legal knowledge and tools for citizen media creators.

• "Copying HD DVD and Blu-Ray Discs May Become Legal"
  

  Under a licensing agreement in its final stages, consumers may get the right to make several legal copies of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc movies they’ve purchased, a concession by the movie industry that may quell criticism that DRM (digital rights management) technologies are too restrictive.

• "E-Book Sales Reach $54M in 2006, a 24 Percent Increase, According to AAP"
  

  E-books saw a 24.1% increase in 2006 at $54 million, with a compound growth rate of 65 percent since 2002 . . .

• "Fair Is Fair. . . or Is It?"
  

  The Sony Betamax Supreme Court decision was one of the most important "fair use" decisions of the last 25 years, but it’s been a constant source of frustration for Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyrights in the US since 1994.

• "Four Sources of Metadata about Things"
  

  I think it is useful to think of four sources of descriptive metadata in libraries. These are not mutually exclusive, and one of the interesting questions we have to address is how they will be mobilized effectively together.

• "Google Print Doesn’t Do Exclusive Deals with Libraries, but Still Holds the Public Domain Tight to Its Chest"
  

  I’m still disappointed that Google puts restrictive notices on their public domain works (these aren’t licenses, just “polite notices”) that tell what you’re not allowed to do with these books. . . . Just because you scan a public domain book, it doesn’t confer the right to control it to you.

• "Google to Scan 800,000 Manuscripts, Books from Indian University"
  

  Google has agreed to index and digitize 800,000 texts stored at the University of Mysore in India as part of its attempt to broaden the Google Book Search program, according to the Indo-Asian News Service.

• "Million Books Workshop Wrap-up"
  

  The three main topics were how to get from scanned documents (especially the complicated ones that scholars sometimes encounter, like Sanskrit manuscripts or early modern broadsides, rather than simply formatted texts like modern English books) to machine-readable text that can be searched and analyzed; machine translation of texts; and moving from text to actionable data (e.g., extraction all of the place names from a document or summarizing large masses of text).

• "Museums and Misleading ‘Copyright’"
  

  Public.Resource.Org has posted 6,288 images currently sold by the Smithsonian on Flickr (a book of the images can be downloaded for free from Lulu.com), arguing that the U.S. institution is overreaching by claiming copyright or control over images that are in the public domain.

• "New Tool Screens Spam, Digitizes Books"
  

  A group of Carnegie Mellon University programmers has launched a service called ReCaptcha that can help cut down on spam while letting people digitize books

• "New York Times Column Advocates Eternal Copyright"
  

  According to Mark Helprin’s incendiary opinion piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times, copyright shouldn’t last until 70 years after the death of a work’s creator—it should last forever.

• "Newspapers Want Google News’ Quarter"
  

  For years now, newspapers have quietly watched Google index their headlines and offer users a synopsis of their stories without paying them a dime.

• "Overview of the Identity Landscape"
  

  Last week, I attended the Internet Identity Workshop. . . . In this post I will walk through the information covered, because it has served as a useful framework as I’ve thought about the issues—and I believe will also be useful to the R/WW community.

• "A Professor Pokes Fun at Copyright"
  

  Copyright law, a constant thorn in the sides of scholars and researchers, is generating a lot of public discussion this week, thanks in part to a new 10-minute video that parodies the law. "A Fair(y) Use Tale" has been downloaded from YouTube about 145,000 times since it was posted online Friday.

• "Sony Debuts Flexible TV Screen"
  

  The company claims to have developed a new technology that uses plastic instead of glass to make OLED screens that can actually bend (hopefully without breaking), according to Pink Tentacle.

• "Standing Up for Open Access"
  

  Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were perplexed: How could a membership organization that gladly accepts and archives their scholarly work turn around and limit transmission of the material?

• "Stop the Broadcasting Treaty Flip-Flop!"
  

  But now the US WIPO delegation has flip-flopped, and the WIPO Chair just released a draft that once again endangers innovators’ and users’ rights. On June 18-22, WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) will be holding a special session to determine whether there’s enough agreement on this new draft to go forward with an already-scheduled inter-governmental Diplomatic Conference in November, at which the new draft could become international law.

• "Time for Academic Librarians to Tune in to the Semantic Web"
  

  Three years ago, Campbell and Fast asked what academic libraries and the Semantic Web could offer each other. At the time, the Semantic Web was years away from offering anything tangible. Now, for those of us wondering if the successor to AACR2 will be RDA or something less library-specific, the events at W3C and O’Reilly are calls to prick up our ears.

• "Windows Media Center DRM—Now with More Bugs!"
  

  There was some Slashdot buzz earlier this week about Microsoft Windows Media Center users suddenly facing restrictions forbidding playback of recorded analog cable TV content.

• "What’s Hot Today?"
  

  And today we’re introducing a new toy we are calling Hot Trends. It’s a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time.

• "Zeutschel Book Scanner and Book Copier"
  

  Announced earlier this month, the Zeutschel OS 12000 C is the book scanner and the Zeutschel OS 12000 is the book copier.

What was new and interesting during the week of 4/23/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Announcing TAPoR version 1.0"
  

  We have just updated the Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) to version 1.0 and invite you to try it out.

• "CCi Affiliate Scholarship Campaign Launches Today"
  

  This year’s iSummit (taking place in Dubrovnik, Croatia from June 15th through 17th) will bring together more than 250 key players for two days of intense discussion and debate about our digital freedoms and the future of the Internet. It is critical to assure that a truly global legal perspective is represented at this important conference. . . . In order for Creative Commons to provide affiliates with scholarships to attend this critical conference, we need your help in raising $50,000 within the next two weeks. This is a daunting task, but we strongly believe that you, our community, will help us reach this goal.

• "Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes"
  

  On a personal level, I [Roy Tennant] am leaving the California Digital Library for OCLC.

• "DC Collections Profile Reviewed"
  

  One of the items on the UB agenda was to review an updated version of the Dublin Core Collections Application Profile prepared by the Collection Description Application Profile Task Group, and I’m pleased to note that—as Ann Apps reports here—the UB approved the profile as "conforming" to their current criteria for a DC application profile (DCAP): essentially, it’s compatible with the DCMI Abstract Model (DCAM); it’s internally consistent; and the documentation conforms to current guidelines.

• "Dell Will Once Again Offer XP on Home PC and Notebook Models"
  

  Dell will again offer the Windows XP operating system due to high customer demand on the company’s community feedback forum, IdeaStorm. Dell, like most major PC manufacturers stopped selling Windows XP licenses with its PCs after the launch of Windows Vista.

• "European Digital Library Suggests Model License to Cover Orphan Works"
  

  A European Union "High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries," including stakeholders from the British Library, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Federation of European Publishers, and Google, has prepared an advisory report suggesting a voluntary license scheme to deal with copyright issues hampering the progress of library digitization efforts.

• "European Science Foundation Report Examines Peer Review Issues"
  

  The European Science Foundation (ESF), France, has published a report which reveals some concern on the shortcomings of peer review and outlines some possible measures to cope with them.

• "European Travels and the ICA-AtoM Roadmap"
  

  ICA-AtoM is an open source archival description application. The name is an acronym for "International Council on Archives—Access to Memory."

• "Head of MPAA Calls for DRM That Allows for ‘Managed Copying’"
  

  Most of Glickman’s comments focused specifically on allowing "managed copying"—the ability for consumers to move content from disc to PCs and portable devices—for high-definition DVDs, which he said he expects will happen later this year. But some of his comments make clear that some sort of "managed copying" is the goal for content delivered in any digital format, including online downloads and streams.

• "‘Ignore the US Copyright Bullies’"
  

  Internet law professor Michael Geist says countries should resist US bullying tactics over copyright and intellectual property.

• "IPRED2 Slips Through, Fight to Continue"
  

  The European Parliament has just voted to pass the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED2) without substantive amendment, despite growing public opposition from across the European Union.

• "Judge Denies RIAA Request to Reconsider Attorneys’ Fees Award"
  

  A federal judge has denied the RIAA’s motion for reconsideration of his attorneys’ fees award in Capitol v. Foster.

• "Killed By DRM: e-Books"
  

  After years of hype, e-books may yet be the next big thing. Even with decent handsets (like the Sony’s Reader, pictured) and stabler standards, however, it’s a technology tainted by a history of aggressive DRM.

• "Knowledge Beyond Authority Interview with Michael Hemment"
  

  Michael Hemment is Research Librarian and Head of Scholarly Research Initiatives at Widener Library, here at Harvard University. Recently, MediaBerkman producer Colin Rhinesmith sat down with Michael to discuss a number of pressing issues in the research field.

• "Lawmakers Propose Reversal of Net Radio Fee Increases"
  

  A bill introduced in Congress Thursday aims to overturn a controversial royalty fee increase that Internet radio advocates say threatens to cripple their services.

• "LC Launches Blog"
  

  The Library of Congress turned 207 years old yesterday, and for the anniversary launched its first-ever blog, which is either proof that blogging has become indispensable or maybe just that blogging has jumped the shark.

• "Meet More Digitization Pioneers: The LOCKSS Team, Vicky Reich & David Rosenthal"
  

  History is so important but often overlooked when it comes to online info retrieval and digitization. That’s why a big kudos goes to the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress with their new series honoring digitization pioneers.

• "Net Neutrality Advocates Thank AT&T CEO for Shooting Off His Mouth"
  

  Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), one of the driving forces behind the Senate’s Dorgan/Snowe Net neutrality bill, joined the call to offer his thoughts on why a bill is needed. He recalled reading a quote last year from Ed Whitacre in BusinessWeek in which Whitacre complained about companies that used "his pipes" and did so "for free."

• "OCLC’s WorldCat Local: A Promising Development for Library Patrons"
  

  The core of the service consists of a triple-tiered display of catalog search results from the local library, then from any consortia, and finally from the whole WorldCat. Relying on the expanding content collection in OCLC’s WorldCat.org (www.worldcat.org), the new service even reaches millions of periodical articles, plus government reports, medical scholarship, and educational material.

• "Ohio University Restricts All P2P File Sharing Software"
  

  Citing the burdens of responding to the RIAA’s flood of pre-litigation letters, Ohio University has decided to monitor its network in order to block all use of P2P file sharing software. Students caught using the software will have their network access disabled.

• "Siva Vaidhyanathan Questions Google Book Search"
  

  Friday at the Drexel University Libraries’ Scholarly Communication Symposium, Siva Vaidhyanathan raised some serious questions about the partnership between libraries and Google in a powerful and provocative analysis of Google Book Search.

• "Thomson Reports 1st Q"
  

  Thomson reported an 11% top line gain and an 8% operating profit gain to start off the year.

• "Wiley Threatens Scientists with Copyright Law—UPDATED"
  

  "We [Society of Chemical Industry] apologise for any misunderstanding. In this situation the publisher would typically grant permission on request in order to ensure that figures and extracts are properly credited. We do not think there is any need to pursue this matter further."

• "YouTube Is Not a Crime: EFF and Viacom Settle Up"
  

  The EFF has dismissed its lawsuit against Viacom. The suit was originally filed last month on behalf of MoveOn and Brave New Films after Viacom sent a massive number of DMCA takedown notices to YouTube which resulted in the removal of content that was in no way related to Viacom.

What was new and interesting during the week of 4/16/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Adobe Unveils Desktop Media Player"
  

  The Adobe Media Player is a standalone desktop version of Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash Player browser plug-in.

• "Books Are Technology Too"
  

  In some of the more reflective discussion I am interested to see a particular strand emerge. And that is the acknowledgement that the book, in its material form, is itself a designed and evolved technology, rather than a permanent or unchanging feature of our experience.

• "