[Web4lib] Wikipedia vs Britannica

[Walt.Crawford at rlg.org]

Sorry, ChuckO, but as far as I'm concerned, you're still extremist--and
directly damaging efforts to achieve a reasonable balance in copyright,
unlike Creative Commons and other efforts to achieve such a balance.

Open access journals and open source software have nothing to do with
opposing copyright as a whole.

GPL ***depends*** on copyright for its force. So do all but one flavor of
Creative Commons license.

You say it right in your signature: You're against copyright. Period.
That's your privilege--but saying it's not an extreme stance is ludicrous.

And, frankly, once you've said you're entirely opposed to copyright, you no
longer have any standing to assert what is and isn't fair use. You've
abandoned the field of discussion about nuances of intellectual property,
since you oppose the concept entirely.

Will Nature put Web4Lib out of business because an article was improperly
posted? Probably not.

Does that make it acceptable or proper? Absolutely not, at least not in my
opinion.

[Not particularly incidentally, most copyright holders are not wealthy,
although that's sure a convenient battle-cry.]

[Yes, all of this is directly relevant to the web and libraries...]


Walt Crawford
wcc at rlg.org, 650-691-2227

--------------------------------------

web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org wrote on 12/15/2005 09:59:07 AM:

> 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
>
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