Scott Carlson, In the Copyright Wars, This Scholar Sides With the Anarchists, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 19, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: '"I resent a legal system that makes it too difficult and too expensive for creators to play around with the culture," says Mr. [Siva] Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University. "I resent the fact that copyrights last so long that things that should be free and convenient to use are locked down and lost forever."...Mr. Vaidhyanathan's new book, The Anarchist in the Library, released in May, picks up similar themes, describing the digital revolution as a battle between those who would free culture and those who would use technology to lock it down. "To participate in culture is to share," he says, "and now, all of a sudden, our laws are telling us that we may not be cultural."...In The Anarchist in the Library, a sharply written digital-age manifesto, Mr. Vaidhyanathan focuses on what he sees as a technological battle between anarchy and oligarchy, pitting the forces of freedom and liberty against those of ownership and control in realms as diverse as file sharing, digital television, terrorism, libraries, and academe. Those who want a free culture stand against those who want to profit from culture....The model of database companies like Reed Elsevier and Thomson is oligarchic, he says: They maintain control of and access to information. If a library gives up a subscription to an electronic database of journals, it loses access even to issues published when the subscription was in effect. But libraries -- "leaks in the information economy," Mr. Vaidhyanathan calls them -- tend to follow the anarchist's model by making information cheap or free. They are, in a sense, hacking the established system as they talk about setting up their own publishing models, like online, open-access journals.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/15/2004 08:34:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
