LISNews: Librarian News

CNET has a Story on a new idea from AT&T. PUBLIS is a new system that will allow anonymous publishing on the web. Since it allows free distribution of files online, without any checks by copyright owners or law enforcement, Publius has been talked about in the same breath as Napster, Gnutella and Freenet.

\"\"The ultimate kick for us as developers is if some organization such as Amnesty International starts to refer people to our systems,\" said Avi Rubin, the AT&T Labs researcher who is leading the project. \"We\'d like to see it used in the real world, by real world people who can\'t express their ideas.\" -- Read More

A Report from Wired on the final hearings at the COPA Commission. They seem to think the problem (Porn on the web) has gotten worse, and the technology to stop it (filters) has gotten better. This leads them to believe the injunction should be lifted and the law should be enforced.

\"If the government can establish that the problem has gotten worse and that the technology has gotten much better, it then becomes easier for the government to prevail,\" -- Read More

Slashdot has a nice round up, that talks about all the alternatives and ideas. After reading the the Preliminary Injunction Brief (pdf file) it looks like Napster is in big trouble. Technically Napster was not shutdown, they are just not allowed to do anything that is even close to illegal (no major label music, no links to the music, etc...). Which is basically like saying, no one who will ever speed or run a stop sign is allowed to drive. It doesn\'t outlaw cars, but no one is driving.

On a realated note, check out DOCSTER a form of instant document delivery, that builds in copyright and organization for libraries.Read on for more stories from around the web. -- Read More

CNET has a Story that covers all the latest in the never ending world of internet lawsuits. Some of these cases challenge the very Existence of the Web

\"It all depends on how broadly the opinion is written,\" said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. \"If an opinion is quite broad, it would interfere with a lot of things on the Web. But I don\'t think it\'s likely that a court would issue such an opinion.\" -- Read More