intellectual-property

Deja Vu - Kindle and the Right to Read

In February 1997 Richard Stallman published “The Right to Read” in the Communications of the ACM. The piece is a short science fiction story about two students in 2047 who run the risk of jail by surreptitiously trading e-books on their computer. This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first.

Discovering New Social Networks and the Threats of Intellectual Property

From Danny O’Brien I find a link to a new weblog by Jonathan Moore which contained this jem on the amount of work it takes to find new communities on the internet. The Fans and Fetishists problem is the desire to create partitions of the social network so that diversity can exist. Take for example two groups of Britney Spears devotees: fans and fetishists. The fans are mostly young people who actually enjoy the singer’s music.

Open Access to Science

I’m happy to see that Martin Sabo, a congressperson from Minnesota, has sparked a few articles and debates about copyright and access to federally funded scientific research. The free research movement by Farhad Manjoo at Salon and Open Access and the Case for Public Good: The Scientists’ Perspective by Michelle Romero at Information Today give two good summaries of the issues. More can be found at the Open Access News weblog.