[Web4lib] Wikipedia vs Britannica

[Chuck0]

Drew, Bill wrote:
> Being for open sharing of information does not mean opposition to
> copyright.  Just because you disagree just not necessarily mean it is
> right and prudent to support posting of an entire article here.  Such
> posting is clearly not fair use.  

Fine, that's your opinion. I, and others, disagree.

It's kind of quaint that a librarian posted a complaint about posting a 
copyright article on an email list. That's something that was more 
common ten years ago, but I would have expected that by now the 
profession had shed its hidebound role as a rules enforcer for wealthy 
copyright holders.

We as librarians are not paid to be "copyright police," so we shouldn't 
be "enforcing" copyright on this list anymore than we should be 
enforcing IP laws in our libraries.

If this exchange had happened ten years ago, my comments would have been 
seen as extremist. Now the positions have been reversed. In the past ten 
years there has been a sea change in thinking about copyright and 
intellectual property. Ten years ago I was one of a few people putting 
"anti-copyright" notices on my articles. Now we have the Creative 
Commons and GPL licenses. Most of you are using computers and networks 
and software that runs on free/open source software. There is a growing 
number of open access journals and public archiving repositories. Many 
librarians have been vocal against the draconian DCMA laws and similar 
bad IP laws around the world. Most publications give away their articles 
for free (except we have to be distracted by thousands of Flash-based 
ads). We have file-sharing and similar technologies.

James, thank you for sharing that article. Web4lib will not be closed 
down because some of us read *one* article from Nature.

Chuck