LISNews: Librarian News

Lawrence Lessig, law professor and champion of the public domain, has created a Wiki to respond to the op-ed by Mark Helprin arguing for perpetual copyright.

madcow writes "Webtailer woot.com is having some fun with the MPAA and RIAA (on the heels of offering a DVD recorder no less) with a contest to imagine what a future anti "piracy" police force might look like.
Get out your GIMP and join in the fun."

I am giving a short presentation, to a group of law students that are taking a copyright class. The topic of the talk is about copyright and libraries. I try to focus on how intellectual property law can be used to promote the diffusion of knowledge instead of merely restricting it. I was hoping to share some viewpoints on copyright and libraries that were not my own. If you have any feedback to the questions below or want to mention something you think is a major issue in regards to libraries and intellectual property law I would love to hear your comments.
1) Do you have any personal examples of how copyright law is preventing you from helping your patrons?
2) Do you feel that copyright law needs to be changed in regards to libraries? If so, how?
3) As a librarian what do you think the major issues are in regards to copyright and libraries?
Please do not be limited to these questions if you have any comments in regards to copyright and libraries please share them.
Thanks in advance for considering these questions.

madcow writes ""The secret to the quality of Wikipedia entries is lots of edits by lots of people" says Nature.
"Three groups of researchers claim to have untangled the process by which many Wikipedia entries achieve their impressive accuracy.... They say that the best articles are those that are highly edited by many different contributors."

"In effect, the Wiki community has mutated since 2001 from an oligarchy to a democracy. The percentage of edits made by the Wikipedia 'elite' of administrators increased steadily up to 2004, when it reached around 50%. But since then it has steadily declined, and is now just 10% (and falling)."

Let the wiki wars (re)begin!"