LibrarianActivist.org

Date: 2006-11-28 16:28:38
Subject: [Iraqcrisis] Iraq National Library and Archive

******************************
Jeffrey B. Spurr
Islamic and Middle East Specialist
Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture
Fine Arts Library, Harvard University
Fogg Art Museum
32 Quincy St.
Cambridge, MA 02138-3802
Phone: (617) 495-3372
Fax: (617) 496-4889

(via SRRTAC)

- JH

Is 92-year-old Donald Crowdis (former host of the Candadian TV program The Nature of Things) the world’s oldest blogger? Even if he isn’t his blog is terrific. He’s funny and astute. Here’s an excerpt from a recent entry he wrote on cannibalism:

[T]he best food, or at least the best protein, is that which is most like our own. Of course, eating others of our kind gives rise to social problems, and is rare as a result, but it happens. In times past, among some of the Pacific Islands peoples, since a butchered human very much resembled a butchered pig, it was referred to as “long pig”. I presume these cannibals ate only their enemies, not their family members, no matter how tasty they may have looked. Most of us have accepted that humans are precious in the sight of God, while ordinary pig, or “short pig”, is OK nutrition.

(via Boing Boing)

An article in Le Devoir today has prompted quick reflex in the wild world of copyright. The article was written by prominent Quebec publishers and challenges federal government’s proposed educational exceptions for a copyright bill they plan to introduce this fall. The article’s authors believe the educational exception is too broad, and that people in educational institutions should have to pay for access to online content. But they also do something good — they call for consultations on the education exceptions. Howard Knopf wrote an article calling for the same thing earlier this week. As part of his analysis, he describes the two major problems with the intended bill:

The most obviously contentious problem would be excessive anti-user digital rights management and technical protection measures (DRM + TPM). These could serve to strangle much new technology and threaten basic access, the public domain, fair dealing and other users’ rights. This will particularly please the multinational recording industry, which also wants to have American-style mass litigation with high statutory minimum damages against ordinary Canadians for ordinary Internet activity involving music. All of this would be to preserve a dying music industry business model. Contrary to repeated and wrong assertions by lobbyists and even the Department of Canadian Heritage, Canada has no current international obligation whatsoever to enact such proposals or to implement, much less ratify, the controversial 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization treaties. Among the G-8, only the U.S.A. and Japan have so far ratified these treaties.

The other major misstep will likely consist of a superficially user-friendly special educational exception for use of publicly available material (”PAM”) on the internet. This unnecessary and misguided initiative would be a dangerous solution to a non-existent problem and could end up costing Canadians outside of academic institutions millions of dollars a year in short order–because the amended law would imply [...] that everyone outside the educational tent is indeed liable for everyday use of the Internet that was previously free. The payments would likely go to the collective that calls itself Access Copyright and fall on internet service providers (Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Telus, etc.), who would naturally pass them along to their customers. Only in Canada–pity.

Michael Geist discusses the political implications of the Le Devoir op-ed on his blog, and concludes:

Rather, the Le Devoir op-ed points in the right direction by noting that the government has not consulted on the education issue. Instead of hurriedly introducing a bill that will leave everyone unhappy, the Conservatives would do far better to launch a consultation or commission (as Howard Knopf suggested this week) on copyright. There may be value in looking decisive, but facing criticism from all three opposition parties in committee, in the House of Commons, and in the media will do little to help the Conservatives chances at a majority government.

Howard Knopf also responded to the article which called for a judicial copyright commission.

Olivier Charbonneau has submitted to Le Devoir (with the support of ASTED) an article in response to this morning’s piece; we’ll let you know when and where it’s available.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out both politically, and for copyright. Maybe some people (like Heritage Minister Bev Oda) should start receiving letters that request consultation prior to the passing of any new copyright legislation. We’ll keep you posted.

-SIO

“The International Children’s Digital Library was initially created by an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Maryland in cooperation with the Internet Archive. Members of the team include computer scientists, librarians, educational technologists, classroom teachers, graphic designers, and graduate students from the University of Maryland’s (UMD) College of Information Studies (CLIS) and the UMD Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), a leader in children’s interface design.”

Their search interface is particularly cool - it’s very kid-friendly with big, obvious buttons that allow users to search for books by age range, length, subject and most importantly, cover colour! You can also search using combinations of the above. (Thanks to Linda B. for the tip!)

- JH

Just a wee bit ironic that YouTube would send a cease & desist letter to the tech news site, TechCrunch (that was an early promoter of their service) because there were concerns that TechCrunch was infringing YouTube’s copyright by promoting a tool that allowed people to download YouTube videos directly. (This is something TechCrunch feels is allowable under YouTube’s Terms of Service by the way.) The comments in the link above are worth reading as well as the main story. Some speculate that allowing people to download videos directly is how YouTube plans to monetize now that they’re part of Google which is why they’re so active in pursuing this “infringement.”

- JH