LibrarianActivist.org

Every January 1st is Public Domain day, where copyright expires for thousands of works across the world — except in the United States, where decades of copyright extensions have eliminated public domain day for many years to come. Notable authors whose works will be in the public domain in Canada (where copyright is life + 50 years) and other countries (where copyright is life + 70 years) include author, singer, and songwriter Boris Vian, Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, Canadian inventor of basketball, James Naismith, and former Québec Premier Maurice Duplessis, one of Canada’s most repressive politicians, especially when it came to freedom of expression.

Connected to Public Domain day is a new celebration created, by Public Knowledge, called World’s Fair Use Day (WFUD). It will be a day of free talks in Washington, D.C. on such things as ACTA, emerging media, and participatory culture.

Google will soon be releasing their own take on a Wikipedia-style of information resource - Google Knols (screenshot).

Some of the significant differences will be: named authors (who can choose to receive a portion of ad revenue for the “knol” pages they write) instead of Wikipedia’s anonymous author model. The site will allow multiple “knols” on a single topic (each will be written by a single author) with the community voting for the best one and suggesting changes in a separate area instead of the collaborative style of composing articles used on Wikipedia.

(via MetaFilter)

On a completely unrelated note, this will be the last Friday Fun Link I post on LibrarianActivist. After some recent discussions with the other two librarians I took on this project with about the future of the site, it was felt that we need to re-focus on the serious side of activism. We also discussed some other potential changes and improvements to the site. Hopefully more details about these items will be forthcoming in the weeks and months to come.

I am happy to remain involved with LA as a contributor but for anyone who’s enjoyed this recurring feature, I will continue to post the Friday Fun Links on my personal blog.

- JH

Here’s an immediate action opportunity, and no you don’t have to be a Calgary resident to take part:

Cory Doctorow points to an event being organized on Facebook to meet with Industry Minister Jim Prentice at his open house in Calgary on Saturday. If you are in Calgary, the open house runs from 1:00 to 3:00 pm on Saturday, December 8th at 1318 Centre Street NE, Suite 105. If you can’t attend, Cory has a great idea:

Not in Calgary? NO PROBLEM! Plan on calling the Minister tomorrow or on dropping him an email, expressing your regrets that you can’t attend the open house, but letting him know how you feel. Here are the numbers:

Ottawa office - (613) 992-4275
Calgary office - (403) 216-7777
Minister office - (613) 995-9001

His email address is: Prentice.J@parl.gc.ca. Once you send an email, print it out and mail it (no stamp needed!) to:

Jim Prentice
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

After you send Jim a note, there’s also these sources from Geist’s blog:

Geist’s 30 things you can do blog post.

Geist’s 30 things you can do wiki.

and what would a social activism push be without a corresponding Facebook group?
Facebookers can look for the Fair Copyright for Canada group.

-PC-


“The Canadian police announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use. Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers instead of the cash flow of large corporations.“

My French isn’t good enough to know if a Le Devoir article linked from this TorrentFreak post is saying that this is a national policy of the GRC (er, RCMP) or one that only applies in Quebec.  But either way, this is a pretty rational stance from the police and it makes me happy to hear that I can download to my heart’s content exercise greater freedom in my choice of online activities. 

On a semi-related note, the Writers Guild of America is on strike with appropriate compensation for sales from electronic media being one of the major issues.  (Writers in Canada dealt with a similar situation a few years back - as new technology that no one foresaw when initial contracts were written came into being, corporations tried to put up works (reviews, essays, articles, etc.) without additional compensation.  Needless to say, writers wanted to be compensated for the reproduction of their work, no matter the form it appeared in.  I can’t remember how this resolved itself - anybody?  Bueller?  Bueller?)

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has put up over 13 000 segments going back to 1999. That’s pretty cool…or at least it would be if I could get any of the videos in the archives to load.

Maybe the site’s just being hammered with traffic because it’s so new. But it almost makes you wish some of these media giant properties would skip the proprietary site designs and media players and just put it all up on YouTube instead.

[Edit: Just saw that there’s also a proposal to make all of the books shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize available for free online as well. Following up the Radiohead announcement, that now makes the announcement of a major music, TV and book release for free online within a very short period of time. So, the big question is - which will be the first big Hollywood movie to follow this model? We should all avoid buzzwords where ever possible but this really does feel like a paradigm shift. Oh, and the commentator I linked to about Radiohead says they won’t make any money but the goodwill they recieve from fans for the move will pay off in the long term. But another commentator speculates that Radiohead have made $10 million already, more than they made from their last three albums combined. The truth is probably somewhere between these two extremes but I’d lean towards this being a very profitable move for the band.)

(via MetaFilter)

- JH