intellectual freedom

Who your writing represents

Sunday, January 14th, 2007

I remember when I got my job at Norwich, but before I started, I wondered what the new job would mean for my blog. How would my writing reflect on my organization? Would people ask me to censor myself? Fortunately, it has not changed what I write in the least. My blog is separate from […]

Why my (and probably your) congressman voted for DOPA

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

This is why. You’ve got to check out the actual ad; it had me half laughing half furious.
I don’t write much about politics on this blog, but I have to admit that this has gotten me kind of riled up. Vermont just isn’t the sort of place where people have really vile, manipulative, negative campaigns […]

DOPA: Contact your senators!

Tuesday, August 1st, 2006

I Want you … to Drop DOPA!
Originally uploaded by davidking.
I haven’t written much about DOPA (Deleting Online Predators Act), though I certainly made my opinions about social networking software clear in my megapost on the subject. I was appalled, but not surprised, by the overwhelming support and passage of the bill […]

Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries?

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005

I found this link via Nexgenlib-L and I found it so amusing/horrifying that I had to share it with everyone. Human Events Online, which is a conservative journal, came out with this list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Apparently, they polled a group of conservative scholars […]

What is happening to our country?

Friday, February 18th, 2005

I was more than a little frightened when I saw the survey, sponsored by the James L. Knight Foundation, which found that 35% of the high school students surveyed thought the “First Amendment goes to far in the rights it guarantees.” The study also found that three-quarters of the students think that flag burning […]

The Max Power way

Tuesday, January 18th, 2005

According to Techdirt, a California state senator has introduced a bill that threatens developers of file sharing applications with jail time. John Borland at CNET, writes, “if passed and signed into law, it could expose file-swapping software developers to fines of up to $2,500 per charge, or a year in jail, if they don’t […]

Exhuming McCarthy

Thursday, January 6th, 2005

Bill Gates recently sat down with CNET for an interview (which begins with the frightening teaser “Bill Gates is coming to your living room, whether you like it or not”). In it, Gates talks about the current state of intellectual property law and the recent challenges to it from certain “communist elements” in the […]

Open Access

Thursday, December 30th, 2004

I guess this is the day to post intros! Peter Suber, at Open Access News, has published a very concise introduction to the concept of open access. A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access is a shorter version of his Open Acecss Overview. Both are great documents, though the former is certainly […]

A Net Nanny with an MLS

Friday, December 24th, 2004

Wow! In an age of shrinking budgets and shrinking staffs, the Phoenix Public Libraries has secured $175,000 to hire one full time professional librarian and three paraprofessionals to police their no-porn policies. The professional, this “Internet Resource Specialist”, would monitor people’s use of the Internet and deal with people’s requests to turn off the […]

Eyes on the prize (money?)

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2004

Here is a disappointing story about the licensing and intellectual property rights . The award-winning documentary, Eyes on the Prize, about the civil rights movement, can no longer be aired on TV or sold on DVD (or new VHS’s) because the filmmakers could only afford to pay for a few years of rights […]

Satellite radio safe… for now

Monday, December 20th, 2004

According to the Curmudgeony Librarian, the FCC has declined a request by a Saul Levine — a California radio station owner — to apply the same standards to satellite radio as they do to AM/FM radio. Essentially, he wanted satellite radio to be censored just like AM/FM radio:
Levine argued among other things that this […]

Where Google leads…

Saturday, December 18th, 2004

Here is an interesting article I found via Resource Shelf. The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) and Google Scholar by Nick Luft looks at one positive effect Google (and specifically Google Scholar) may have on digital publishing.
One of the greatest barriers to retrieving and exchanging scholarly information online is the fact that database vendors (and […]

Kahle vs. Ashcroft

Saturday, December 4th, 2004

I don’t have anything to say about the case that hasn’t been said before, but I am really saddened by the fact that this case, challenging the Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, has been dismissed. To me, this is a clear sign (among many) that our government has moved completely away from any […]

If it didn’t work for the RIAA…

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004

The MPAA has filed their first bunch of lawsuits against people who offer movies for download. Apparently they were inspired by the rousing success of the RIAA’s campaign to sue music sharers into oblivion (hmmm… how’s that going?).
Slightly more scary is the Intellectual Property Protection Act which contains a slew of measures […]

Glad they didn’t have these when I was in school!

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004

Cutting class — almost a right of passage in high school — is no longer an option for Houston area students. According to the NY Times, children in Houston area schools are being equipped with RFID tags that monitor their movements. While this particular project was designed for benign purposes (to prevent […]