[WEB4LIB] Re: Computers in Libraries and the death of copyright

[Daniel Messer]

Good morning!

HTheyer <htheyer at pacbell.net> said:

> I tell the staff in my branch this all the time.  For every problem they
> want a rule.  "Let's have a rule against skateboards.  Let's have a rule
> against gum.  Let's have a rule against playing cards.  Let's have a rule
> against teasing.  Let's have a rule against ..."  My reply is always, "Will
> you enforce it? Will you REALLY enforce it?  ALL the time?  For EVERYONE???"
> 
> I think Napster taught us a lesson.  The record label said the technology
> was the problem but that cat is long out of the bag and there are dozens of
> Napsterclones all over the web now.  Napster was sued because they were big.
> The clones are not big, so they are still in operation.  When they become
> big, they will get sued, but not until then.

Wow it's nice to hear someone agree with me for a change! :) The real problem 
is that, for the longest time, the ability to record to a CD was available 
only to people with lots of cash, such as big corporations in the recording -
industry. Now many computers ship with CD-R/CD-RW drives. Since the encoding 
scheme for audio on a CD is so simplistic, it was easy for people to write 
programmes to rip the audio from a CD and do different things to it, such as 
compressing it into MP3 format. But you're 100% correct that the cat's out of 
the bag. Napster may go down, but there are other things available. GNUtella 
has NO CENTRAL SERVER. To effectively shut down GNUtella you would have to 
sue EVERYONE using it. Then there's AIMster which uses the private AOL 
network to send files peer to peer. Since the DMCA says it's illegal to 
backwards engineer something to see how it works, the RIAA cannot do anything 
under the law they helped create and force on the people. In other words, if 
lawyers from the RIAA ever walked into AOL with a list of people who were 
sending MP3s through AIMster, AOL's lawyers will be extremely interested in 
knowing how the RIAA ever got that information off of a private commercial 
network. 

 
> Absolutely correct.  Might makes right, and Law = might.  Ethics simply does
> not enter into the equation.  As a consumer, we are limited a lot more by
> money than by ethics.  Using CDs and music again as our analogy, why aren't
> CDs as cheap as cassettes?  They were supposed to be someday, and I read
> somewhere that they are actually cheaper to produce.  It is what the market
> will bear, and the market is getting sick of it.  Hence Napster.  Hence Open
> Source.  Hence ... fill in the blank with your choice.

As I recall, it costs less than fifty cents to produce a single CD. Think 
about it, I can do gown to Office Depot and get a spindle of 50 blank CDs for 
US$35.00 or so. That's less than a buck a disk! So I really question why I 
should be paying US$14 - US$15 for something that costs much less to produce? 
I don't blame pirates at all, if for no other reason than they don't like 
being taken for a ride.

> I was helping a parent and high school student use EBSCO in the library, and
> I pointed out the email feature for full-text articles.  The mom could not
> believe it.  Once she got that the FULL text of the entire article would be
> sent to her daughter and could be inserted directly into the word processor
> she asked what was there to prevent the students from plagarism.  I replied
> the student, the parent, and the teacher, that's who.  She said that wasn't
> enough.  If that is true, then we have a much bigger problem on our hands,
> don't we?

Too bloody right we got a big problem. If parents, teachers, and students 
can't stop their children, students, and themselves (respectively) from 
plagarizing, then the academic world is heading for a downfall of 
catastrophic proportions. I remember when I was in school )all of 2 years 
ago) I had a professor, one Dr. Heckart who quite simply stated that in her 
class plagarism would be rewarded with an F on the paper, an F for the class, 
and everything she could do with her influence (which was considerable) to 
get that student expelled from the university. Needless to say, we took it 
just as seriously as she meant it.

Dan

-- 
The subject in question...
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Daniel Messer
Technologies Instructor
Yakima Valley Regional Library
dmesser at yvrls.lib.wa.us
509-452-8541 ext 712
102 N 3rd St  Yakima, WA  98901
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When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
                                         -Hunter S. Thompson