Monday, Geist wrote an article touching on some of the major (and disappointing) aspects of bill C-60, An Act to amend the Copyright Act. I guess I was out in space when I read the portion of the Act that talks about interlibrary loan… A couple of posts ago I showed some optimism at the fact that the bill proposes to allow digital delivery of interlibrary loan material. Geist points out that this provision, whose intent is laudable, has been bogged down with technicalities that make it difficult to apply:
The library provisions are even more onerous, turning librarians in digital locksmiths, who are ironically compelled to restrict access to knowledge in order to provide it. The bill allows libraries and archives to provide digital copies of materials, however, in order to do so they must limit further communication or copying of the digital files and ensure that the files cannot be used for more than seven days.
June 30th, 2005 at 2:57 pm
Boston Public Library denies access to the public documents on the BPL intranet, emphasis on the intra…, an interesting set of public informative material that library aficionados might read and learn more about how things work behind the scenes, back stage so to speak. Remarkably, library intellectual freedom advocates ignore the censoring of internal public documents even to the disadvanage of library unions labor relations advocates!