Yesterday there was an interesting article in the Toronto Star summarizing issues of international technology law for 2003. Highlights include the Mickey Mouse Extention Act (otherwise know as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in the U.S. and a possible tariff on blank CD-Rs in Canada.
Read the full article
Well folks, you can rest easy. Your holiday shopping just got much easier. Get little Jimmy what he just always wanted:
Funny thing, China and the Internet. Seems that they want to have their cake (diminish the democratizing effects of the Internet) and eat it too (exploit the Internet\’s power for business).
It was just reported today, for instance, that the CCP detained a student for publishing dissident thoguhts on the Web.
Semi-related link: China Labor Watch
The Guardian has a small story about France moving the medal clad and mustachioed bones of Alaxandre Dumas to the Pantheon in Paris.
The remains will be taken to Paris this weekend, his coffin flanked by musketeers and actors in period dress.
True, this information *might* be useful to answer a reference query some day, but let\’s get some practical value from this story. I suggest dressing up as a musketeer and making a book display of Dumas\’ works.
This may have gone around already, but the New York Times has an interesting story detailing a novel use of the DMCA. According to the NY Times, information about post-Thanksgiving sales was detailed on various online coupon Web sites prior to the date of intended release. This made the retailers (Wal-Mart, Target and others)angry, so they threatened the websites using the DMCA as the muscle behind their argument. However,
Legal experts said invoking a copyright law in this context was unusual, because the information appeared to be a set of facts rather than the kind of original or expressive work that is typically covered by copyright law. The Supreme Court has ruled that telephone white pages directories, for instance, do not fall within copyright law.
Please see these related Web sites:
Anti-DMCA.org
DMCA U.S. Copyright Office Summary [.pdf]
This article certainly makes me feel better about loosing a few copies of Consumer Reports and Go Ask Alice a year. It could be worse!
From Reuters. Thieves have stolen the celebrated book in which the 17th century English physicist Issac Newton formulated his famous law of gravity
Posing as readers, the thieves stole a rare first edition of Isaac Newton\’s \”Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica\” from the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, a library official told Reuters Sunday
I\’m interested what the theives plan to do with the book. It\’s not like they can post this one on eBay. Any purchaser of said book would need to keep it on the down low too. Could it be that the thieves stole it for their own enjoyment?
Read the full story.
ZDNet Austrialia reports that Google has removed controversial political and religious websites from search result listings. The article focuses on google.de and google.fr. They have removed white power sites from these versions of google because of legal action posed by German and French groups. Certain speech (such as pro-Nazi material) doesn\’t enjoy the same protection in those countries as it does in the US. Read the full story.
Related link: Chillingeffects.org – a website that monitors \”the legal climate for Internet activity.\” Many copyright, IP, free speech, and filtering issues are discussed.
Original link via MeFi.
Okay, you got me. He may have not directly burned books, but in the below quotes he mentions throwing books out. If he\’s not going to use them, shouldn\’t he at least be donating them or recycling them?
Everyone reading this will be able to recite the litany of atrocities found in Powell\’s methods of researching.
But I have a search engine on my screen all day long so that if I need to know anything about anything or anybody, or whatever, I just throw it in the search engine and it\’s faster than me reaching for a dictionary or reaching for an encyclopedia, or reaching for a reference book. So I just threw them all out.
I told my staff: \”I no longer have any encyclopedias, any dictionaries, or any reference materials anywhere in my office, whatsoever, I don\’t need them. I\’ve stopped using all reference materials because you don\’t need it. All you need is a search engine.
Certainly we all need the weekend. I think, though, that I really need a holiday. The strange thing which leads me to believe that I need a few days off was a severe aural hallucination I had a few hours ago. While walking among the business reference titles (*gag*) I heard, not faintly, an angry man\’s voice followed by a child\’s scream. In all honesty I think it was a strange sneeze of some sort. The only thing that creeped me out is the fact that neither of the librarians in the area heard it.
How badly do you all need the weekend?
How naive must one be to fall for the Nigerian email scam?
Probably as naive as the scammers who got tricks played on them, like this hilarious case and this hysterical case.
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