I’m still cleaning up my feeds and I’ve found all sorts of really good stuff to blog on. Some of it’s a little old, but still very relevant. This post is going to focus on DRM and Fair Use.
First off, I ran across a feed from boingboing.net that in turn points to this document on ALA’s site. It is a quite in depth primer on DRM for librarians written by Michael Godwin. When I say “in depth” I mean it. It’s a 44 page document that goes into definitions, history and policy of DRM. Honestly, I’ve only read about a quarter of it (and skimmed the rest), but my intentions are honorable and I will read it in its entirety… soon. This paper is a must read for anyone who is unfamiliar with DRM and would like to learn about the issue. It paints a quite thorough picture.
The second resource I ran across (I hadn’t forgot about it, I had just misplaced it) is a link to a presentation given by Lawrence Lessig, the copyright (or should I say copyleft) lawyer. His presentation can be found here. It’s about 15 to 20 minutes long (I think) and takes a few minutes to load. It’s well worth the wait and really gives a great perspective on what is going on today with copyright and how we (the average citizen) are loosing our rights even though technology is essentially enabling us with content creation and alteration.
All of this is pretty heavy reading and listening (I mean emotionally heavy). This is not happy stuff. In our day and age there is a constant struggle for control by the “powers that be.” We need to educate our users and ourselves in order to fight it.
Copyleft symbol taken from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Copyleft.svg .
Post a Comment