Open Access Independence Day: Information feudalism in the US and Australia

"Ronald Sackville, Cultivating the Creative Commons, On Line Opinion, June 15, 2005. Reflections of an "old-fashioned, even Luddite" Australian judge on his country's retroactive extension of the term of copyright under pressure from the United States. Excerpt: 'Even from [my] limited perspective, it is impossible to avoid being struck by how rapidly (to use the words of Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite in their book Information Feudalism) there has been a transfer of knowledge assets from the intellectual commons into private interests... Despite the [U.S.] Supreme Court's ruling [in Eldred v. Ashcroft] and the willingness of Australian negotiators to accept the position of the US, it is extremely difficult to understand the policy justification for a further extension of the term of copyright, let alone the application of the extension to subsisting copyright... In his dissenting opinion in Eldred v Ashcroft, Justice Stevens, in words that echo the famous speech given by Lord Macaulay in 1841, pointed out that: Ex post facto extensions of copyright result in a gratuitous transfer of wealth from the public to authors, publishers and their successors and interests. The real sting in the tail of this comment is that for the most part, beneficiaries of the extension will not be authors or even the original publishers, but commercial entities which acquired the rights long before the extension... There are many commentators who have appreciated - in the words of James Boyle - that we are in the middle of the ?second enclosure movement?, which he sees as exemplified by the recognition of patent rights in human genes. Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite draw a parallel between medieval feudalism and what they describe as "information feudalism". Under the earlier variety, a lord of the manor exercised not only private power by virtue of his ownership of land, but public power, though a system of manorial taxes, courts and prisons. In the modern form of feudalism, the transfer of intellectual commons has been to media conglomerates and integrated life sciences corporations, rather than to individual scientists and authors. The effect of this, they argue, is to raise levels of private monopolistic power to dangerous global heights, at a time when States, which have been weakened by the forces of globalisation, have less capacity to protect their citizens from consequences of the exercise of this power.'"

Source: Suber P. Information feudalism in the US and Australia. Open Access News Blog (15 June 2005) [FullText]

Making Legacy Databases OAI-Compliant

"Francis Jayakanth has been working on making legacy databases OAI-compliant. In February 2005 he finished a six-month Fulbright fellowship at Old Dominion University (supervised by Mohammad Zubair and Kurt Maly) focused on an OAI-compliant version of UNESCO's CDS/ISIS database for managing textual data. Quoting Jayakanth (personal correspondence): 'We have devised two approaches - Static and Dynamic, to make CDS/ISIS databases OAI-compliant. In the static approach, the database records are exported on to a file. This file is then converted to static repository xml file. This xml file can be ingested in to the Kepler system, a light-weight, self contained OAI-compliant tool for the individuals. Or, the xml file could be made OAI-compliant through the intermediation of static repository gateway. The static approach has found a mention in the above mentioned UNESCO's site. Since the static repository has certain limitations, we came out with the dynamic approach. This approach required developing a gateway program. This gateway program will accept OAI requests and translate the requests to corresponding search expression for the CDS/ISIS database, carry out the search, and translate the resulting set to xml format. The advantage of the dynamic approach over the static is that there is a real time interaction with the CDS/ISIS databases. We have set up a sample harvesting service for a few sample CDS/ISIS/isis databases using the Arc software... The metadata from sample CDS/ISIS databases were were harvested in...real-time, using the gateway software developed for the purpose.'"

Source: P.Suber. Making legacy databases OAI-compliant OANews Blog (15 June 2005) [FullText]

India Permits Larger Foreign Investment in Indian Science Journals

"T. V. Padma, India opens door to foreign science magazines, SciDev.Net, June 14, 2005. Excerpt: 'The Indian government has announced measures that should make it easier for foreign science publications to publish local editions. On 1 June, it announced that certain publications produced by Indian media groups could be funded entirely by foreign investment....Previously, foreign investment in non-news publications was capped at 74 per cent, a limit set in June 2002 when the then National Democratic Alliance government opened Indian print media to foreign investment. "The change from 74 to 100 per cent investment does not reflect a mere incremental change in numbers: rather it signifies that a new set of rules are in place which will help foreign science magazines set up Indian editions," says Rajesh Kochhar, director of the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies. The change will not affect Indian research journals much because the government publishes them, points out an official from the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Research... Meanwhile, most Indian science enthusiasts ? scientists, students or policymakers ? often have to share a sole institutional copy of a foreign science journal or magazine, or use websites offering free access to research papers from the West to catch up on research news.'"

Source: Suber P. India permits larger foreign investment in Indian science journals. OANews Blog (15 June 2005) [FullText]

Canadian copyright reform: Patents, Copyright and Signals from the Sky

"Jack Kapica, Patents, copyright and signals from the sky, Globe and Mail, June 14, 2005. More on Canadian copyright reform, focusing on the consequences for academics. Excerpt: 'Word has it that the revised copyright bill has been formulated with an awful lot of input from Canadian subsidiaries of U.S. corporate interests, pushed further along by an insistent U.S. ambassador. It might make music-sharing illegal, but it's more likely to enrage the academic community, which will find itself incapable of photocopying documents or quoting from them for a much longer period of time than before, unless they are willing to pay their owners a lot of money first. Even with the current law, it's next to impossible to make money in academic publishing. The big worry is that our most important intellectual property might get crushed in the rush to satiate the corporate desire for ever-greater profits from their intellectual property. The principle of protecting one's intellectual property is a good one, but the tough U.S. law has actually thrown the relationship between fair use of intellectual property and rewarding its owners seriously out of balance.'"

Source: Suber P. More on Canadian copyright reform. OANews Blog (15 June 2005) [FullText]