LISNews: Librarian News

(as seen at oss4lib.org)

If you\'re a librarian and you haven\'t thought through what napster means yet, get thinking. Many folks are perturbed about how easy it is to violate copyright using napster. \"Docster: Instant Document Delivery\" describes a napster-like system for libraries which builds copyright compliance in from the start.
btw Blake suggested reposting this here -- so it isn\'t entirely shameless promotion on my part. :)

JS Online in Milwaukee, has This Story on legal troubles brought on trying to exclude from the library religious services or instructional meetings.

\"The City of West Allis, WI violated a man\'s First Amendment rights when it refused him permission to use the public library\'s Constitution Room for a presentation about creationism, a federal judge ruled in a decision made public Tuesday.

\"The Library\'s Constitution Room is a designated public forum, and no compelling state interest has been advanced to support the exclusion of plaintiff from using it,\" U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman wrote in his decision. -- Read More

The Standard has a great round up on the battle between Mattel and two hackers, Eddy Jansson of Sweden and Matthew Skala of Canada who wrote CPHack, a program that lets people see a list of the sites that Cyber Patrol blocks. This is a very important case, it has issues in The DMCA, the freedom to link, copyright law, the First Amendment, and other info science interests.

\"The argument rests upon the anticircumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA prohibits trafficking in devices whose primary purpose is to circumvent a technology meant to protect copyrighted works. CPHack would constitute such a device; mirroring it, as the law has been interpreted, would constitute a violation of the DMCA. So Mattel could prevail against distributors of CPHack whether or not the program itself was a violation of Mattel\'s copyright.\" -- Read More

The deadline for filing reply comments in this rulemaking
has been extended to Friday, March 31. Reply comments must
be received in the Office of the General Counsel of the
Copyright Office no later than 5:00 p.m. on March 31,
2000.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Public Law
105-304 (1998), added a new Chapter 12 to title 17 United
States Code, which among other things prohibits
circumvention of access control technologies employed by
copyright owners to protect their works.

1. If by
electronic mail: Send to 1201@loc.gov a message
containing the name of the person making the submission, his
or her title and organization (if the submission is on
behalf of an organization), mailing address, telephone
number, telefax number (if any) and e-mail address. The
message should also identify the document clearly as either
a comment or reply comment. The document itself must be sent
as a MIME attachment, and must be in a single file in
either: (1) Adobe Portable Document File (PDF) format
(preferred); (2) Microsoft Word Version 7.0 or earlier; (3)
WordPerfect 7 or earlier; (4) ASCII text file format; or (5)
Rich Text Format. -- Read More