LISNews: Librarian News

Rights v. Rights may be slightly dated, but it\'s still worth a read. From the 64th IFLA General Conference, in 1998, \"This paper highlights the copyright barriers that can arise for visually impaired readers in the context of the \"Information Society\". It starts by enunciating certain basic rights which set the backcloth for the ensuing discussion. The historical setting of the pre-electronic era is briefly described. Recent ground-breaking legislation is then summarised. The author then details some of the new copyright issues posed as a result of the opportunities opened up by information technology. Finally, the paper reviews some of the ways in which legislators have begun to address these new questions.

Wired has a good Wrap Up on some bad luck the good guys had in US courts last week.

Wednesday a pair of federal courts siding with the music and record industry, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lost two of its most important intellectual property cases so far.

Many had pinned their hopes on these lawsuits as a way to eviscerate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Wired has a Story by Karlin Lillington on American copyright laws, and how crazy they have gotten.

The laws are causing the death of culture and the loss of the world\'s intellectual history. Lawrence Lessig says copyright has grown from providing 14 years of protection a century ago to 70 years beyond the creator\'s death, and has become a tool of large corporations eager to indefinitely prolong their control of a market.

The web isn\'t going to kill libraries, the laws are.

Aaron Tunn sent along
This Transcript of an excellent interview with from Radio National down in Australia.

I\'m not even sure how to summarize this one. It\'s about copyright, control of information, the information services industry, the publishing industry, libraries, and who owns what.

It really is worth a read.

\"So in that process there are a whole series of players, and how this will all shake out ultimately electronically, is going to be one of the fascinating questions. Either it will increase to a few very small, dominant, very great profit-making multinationals, or there\'ll be a deconstruction of the vast majority of the literature back to the authors for self-archiving and distributing in the old electronic college way.\"