LISNews: Librarian News

Attention Librarians and Library Lovers: We Need Your Support!

Dale Askey is an Associate University Librarian at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. He is being sued for $4,000,000 by Edwin Mellen Press because he critiqued the quality of the information they produce. If Mellen wins the case, the professional right to academic freedom possessed by librarians, professors and others in the academic community will be in jeopardy. Let’s spread word about the injustice that Dale Askey is facing, and let’s not let one company’s interest in profiteering outweigh our need for academic freedom.

To show your support for Dale Askey, please visit the Facebook support page we created. You can find more information about the lawsuit on the page and updates will be provided as they arise. Be sure to “like” the page and ask all of your librarian colleagues to “like” it as well. The more supporters the page receives, the more likely a major news media company will present this issue on radio or television. Here is the page link:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dont-Punish-Dale-Librarian-Being-Sued/313371185432030

Welcome back! After hopefully debugging a problem with feed generation that has possibly left subscribers hanging for about five weeks, we have a new episode. Previous episodes remain available for manual download and an experimental initiative is underway to additionally deposit copies with the Internet Archive, California's digital virtual library.

In light of the Dale Askey and Jeffrey Beall cases in Canada for libel, we talk in this episode about the dangerous possibility of challenges erupting in those cases to the notion of librarianship actually being a profession. The case is laid out as to how librarianship may not necessarily be considered truly a profession in contemporary terms on a level with medicine or law. Following that a new miscellany is presented and the show is concluded with USDA Radio's Susan Carter presenting a feature about the Agriculture Department's Rural Utilities Service working to bridge the Digital Divide in parts of the United States.

Related links:

• Librarian.net: Should it be okay to sue librarians for saying your books are bad?
• LISNews: Colorado Librarian Jeffrey Beall Slapped With Canadian Libel Claim
• Zero Hedge: Households On Foodstamps Rise To New Record
• PJ Media Tatler: Obamanomics: 20 New Food Stamp Recipients for Each New Job
• The Register: Perky smartphone figures can't stop droop of worldwide mobe sales
• The H: Oracle to bulk up Java update on 19 February

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/.

Two new developments in the two big cases concerning book scanning and fair use: first up, we've got the somewhat unsurprising news that the Authors Guild is appealing its rather massive loss against Hathitrust, the organization that was set up to scan books from a bunch of university library collections. As you may recall, Judge Harold Baer's ruling discussed how the book scanning in that case was obviously fair use. It was a near complete smackdown for the Authors Guild.

Supreme Court seeks a way around "perpetual copyright" on foreign goods
"If you were the lawyer for the Toyota distributor, [or] if you were the lawyer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or you are the lawyer for a university library," said Breyer. "Your client comes to you and says, 'My God, I just read the Supreme Court opinion. It says that we can't start selling these old books, or lending them, or putting them in our word processor, or reselling the Toyota, [or] displaying the Picasso without the permission of the copyright holder.' What, as their lawyer, do you tell them? Do you tell them, 'hey, no problem?' Or, do you tell them, 'you might become a law violator?' Or, do you tell them, 'I better litigate this?' What do you tell them?"

Notably, Olson didn't back away from the more extreme consequences of his client's win at the 2nd Circuit. If Wiley wins, he said, institutions like museums and libraries might need to get licenses from copyright owners for their activities.