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Librarians to the Rescue
Duke Machesne writes "Citing concerns over materials being distributed to American students by the BSA, MPAA, and RIAA's evil minions, the American Library Association will begin distributing its own, more balanced material this winter. The material will deal with insignificant and oft-overlooked details like fair use. More information on Wired News."
This wasn't because the information in the libraries was bad (actually, it had a lot of good stuff), but as high school students we were generally lazy.
Better than college though, where publishers will force people to buy whole new editions of math books just because they changed the order of the problems at the end of each chapter.
Let them buy time in the media like every other business.
Uhm, they *are* the media.
Ever noticed how "unfair and unbalanced" all the stories about copyright are? They kinda miss the whole "there's a large section of the population that think the laws go too far " kinda angle.
Look at the latest stories about DVD Jon finding the streaming key for the AirPort Express.. "HACKER CRACKS AIRTUNES ENCRYPTION" .. uh yeah. I guess it's a more interesting headline than "SMART GUY FINDS HIDDEN NUMBER".
I don't have a lot of hope for the world to fix itself in the short term when it comes to this, maybe 2-3 generations from now when people finally realize that just because it happens in a computer, doesn't mean it's magical and special and worthy of 50 extra obscene laws.
By then I'll be long gone.. but of course my copyrights will be in full effect.
Librarians are getting overruled these days, not just by national directives such as the USA PATRIOT Act, but by activist governors.
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i brary y.cdsettlement.ap/index.html
Last month the South Dakota governor removed a section of the state library Web site because it gave health advice to teens.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlif
This month the Kansas governor had rap CDs removed from all libraryies.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Music/08/06/l
A Librarian
They support porn access for kids and have a serious liberal slant and there are so many reasons I don't like them.
Um, what? Porn access for kids? Can you point me to a link where the ALA advocates giving out porn to the kids that walk in their libraries? Google seems to be letting me down here.
And the liberal bias thing - I just don't get it. Most librarians I know support smaller, less intrusive government, which seems pretty conservative to me.
The occasional forays into politics that librarians have made in the past few years seem to be the moderating voices of reason, like questioning the value of having a government mandated censor at the firewall or letting the FBI see what books you check out without so much as warrant. These seem like valid questions to be raised, and if the government were suddenly making your job more difficult, while cutting your funding, I'd expect you to be raising similar questions, as a matter of patriotism.
Or were you just being disengenuous?
My other computer is your Windows box
While the story topic is nice, IMHO, the ALA's work in publicizing Ashcroft's demand that libraries remove information about certain US laws from their libraries is far, far more important of a public service!
Everyone's favorite tyrant AG John Ashcroft wanted ordered the American Library Association to destroy all copies of the federal laws on asset forfeiture and to prevent disclosure of their content. Thanks to quick action and a lot of publicity by the ALA and others, the fascists backed off.