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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."
In September, the ALA will hold focus groups with teenagers to better understand...what language they use.
OMGLOLWTFBBQ?
"Citing concerns over materials being distributed to American students by the BSA" The Boyscouts of America?! What's wrong with the Boy Scouts?
And not just because to "balance things out", you'd have to push a line that would make all copyright questionable.
The proper way to "balance" this is to not allow the **AA access to the schools. This isn't education, it's propaganda. Let them buy time in the media like every other business.
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.
The MPAA announced today that they will begin filing lawsuits against two current fifth-grade students who were former winners of the MPAA's own student essay contest. Winners were provided with MPAA T-shirts as well as copys of last year's Best Picture winner "Return of the King". According to the MPAA, one of the winners showed the video to her entire class during a "pirate pizza party" while the other student allowed his cousin to borrow his winning t-shirt w/ out paying the proper licensing fees.
Librarians and free media have always been the standard-bearer for issues of personal liberty. A while back, a group of publishers sued libraries for distributing books. Libraries have carried books, even when they've been shunned by society. They were the first ones to rail against the PATRIOT Act. They are one of the most significant forces against promoters ignorance, misinformation, disinformation, and junk science in existance right now. Remeber who had the fewest misconceptions about the Iraq war?
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Apparently, publishers don't like libraries. It decreases sales of their book.
On the other hand, it massively decreases incentives to set up efficient second hand marketplaces for books. After all, first doctrine means the publisher never gets money for "used" books getting read by their new owners anyway.
And if a library doesn't offer the latest Stephen King, romance novel or in a nutshell, a lot of people end up buying a new copy..
Having said that, they're always working their evil little ways to get libraries to pay for lending out books or having copying machines.. When you have a dead poet's estate prohibiting a poetry festival from "performing" his poems, you know the system's gone mad.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
...by Kurt Vonnegut I Love You, Madame Librarian
License: By reading this you are agreeing that you agree with me.
Not to mention literacy, which presumably sustains sales of books in the long term. Imagine what it'd be like if anyone who wanted to read had to pay.
This borders on the obvious but librarians love books, which means that they are often well-informed liberals in the enlightenment sense of that word, i.e., someone who is broad-minded and tolerant of the views of others and expect others to behave in the same manner.
They also understand that our cultural heritage depends on free sharing for its preservation and nurturing -as does innovation. Librarians are therefore quite suspicious of those who try to place limits on the sharing of cultural outputs, particularly when they do so to benefit from the social conjectures and economic dislocations produced by a given technological moment in history.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
Actually, education begins at home, indoctrination begins at school.
nos laetus epulor qui would domito nos
It's even worse than you think. Most parents repeatedly attempt to instill in their impressionable childrens' minds the idea that nice people share their toys with their friends. This is a clear enticement to copyright violation.
;-)
And it's even worse than that. Many of those parents knowingly hand over their children to "schools", which are institutions that also attempt to teach the children that they should share.
After years of this sort of indoctrination, it's not surprising that the result should be teenagers (and even adults) who think that it's ok to violate copyright by sharing ideas, documents and music with each other.
These organizations are merely trying to interrupt this process and teach the children that ideas and songs are like toys and other kinds of property: Every child should have his or her own, every one should be paid for, and they should never be shared. Sharing is an economic perversion that undermines the private property that is at the heart of our corporate economic system.
(Lessee; will I get a "Troll" or "Funny" rating here? Maybe I need a
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
When you have a dead poet's estate prohibiting a poetry festival from "performing" his poems, you know the system's gone mad.
Indeed. Anyone who's ever been to an open mike night knows that in a sane world it would be the poet who would be prohibited from reading his own works.
KFG
It is possible to be both a strong supporter of the philosophy of copyright and yet oppose specific copyright law.
Not to mention private interests being allowed to making their case as fact in the public schools without so much as a representative of a counterpoint.
I certainly hope school librarians take up the gauntlet, but my experience suggests that to do so might well endanger their jobs.
KFG
"We're trying to educate children at a very young age about the importance of protecting copyrighted works," said Diane Smiroldo, vice president of public affairs for the BSA. "It's important to start talking to them at a very young age about creative works online and what you can and can't share with your friends."
Smiroldo compared the BSA's program to an antismoking or antilittering campaign. The curriculum doesn't talk about fair use but focuses on what are "right and wrong" behaviors online.
Hmm, lemme see, smoking harms the kid himself, littering defaces the entire community, and "pirating" copyrighted works hurts -- oh right, the Business Software Alliance.
And lemme see, these kids, having mastered all that readin', writin', and 'rithmeticin' -- ain't no child left behind no any more --, they've got plenty of time to spend learning a corporate lobbying group's version of "right and wrong".
I've never pirated music or software, and I do believe that the MPAA and the BSA should have the protection of copyright -- including the right to bring civil suit.
But when they try to co-opt the education of children and get the Department of Justice to bring their civil suits for them, and to pile criminal charges on top, well, it seems to me the corporations are getting much more than a fair shake.
Begins to remind me of the "War on Drugs" -- a "War" we'll never win but which benefits corporations building and running prisons (and the drug mafias and the prison guards' union) at the expense of cops and taxpayers and citizens.
It even makes me wonder if the "content providers" have gone so far as to forfeit their moral rights to copyright protection. There comes a time when you just have to say that the "cure" is worse than the "disease" (as for instance, the "War on Drugs") and tell those grabbing more than their fair share of money and legal power, "this far and no farther".
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Librarians are getting overruled these days, not just by national directives such as the USA PATRIOT Act, but by activist governors.
e /2004 4-07-13-sd-censor_x.htm
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
Imagine what it'd be like if anyone who wanted to read had to pay.
We'd have a culture where most people get their information from visual and audio media like television and radio and ignore in-depth analysis found in newspapers and magazines.
Oh.
You, MBCook, are a damned fool. The ALA supports a few things you might not have heard of on Fox News. We like to call them democracy, freedom, and liberty. You see, we, and I really mean me and the other library students with whom I am friends, believe that each American has the right to information and that access to information is the cornerstone of democracy.
Public librarians, of which my wife is one, do not want children to look at pornography. They also don't want children to wonder why they can't research papers on gay rights or learn about breast cancer. Filters do not work. They let some bad things through and they block some good things. Every day we see children unattended in the library. Their parents and apparently you would like to impose upon us the responsibility of parenting these children.
So, I find it lamentable that you hate the ALA who fights to protect your right to read without intervention by the Department of Homeland Security and defends Mark Twain from book burning "concerned parents". I am more disturbed, however, that you feel the ALA ideological slant (again, freedom;liberty;democracy) is evil.
I'm sorry, you can disagree but not label the other party evil. It sounds really childish and dilutes the meaning of a rather harsh term. It also distracts people from the message you are trying to get across.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Not quite familiar with the ALA, but up here in Canada, my library rents out books. It has a couple of small shelves of hardcover new stuff that you'd get for roughly 2-3$ a week. Pretty fair. I'm sure they're paying whatever legal duties or price for those books to rent them out and you can legally read the new Steve King book without shelling out an arm and a leg. That said, I happen to find it bloody interesting that the ALA is getting involved in the whole online/copyrighted scheme of things. This is a public organization, supported by public money (ie your tax dollars) that acquires a broad amount of copyrighted material (and at my local library it extends to music cd's, film, magazines etc) intended for free public consumption. I'm liking the idea of a public library using public money to now make that content available over the internet. The ends will justify the means. Imagine how culturally enriched we could be as a society if every young person (or at least those online - which in 15 years will be all of them) who would never set foot into a library, (come on, the place is flat out boring) could actually access the entire catalogue of available material from their computer when they got bored of ebaum's world. The business world, MPAA, RIAA, BSA etc can rape us of fair use and any use of our purchased items, but I love the idea of the ALA getting involved in this, because the more the average Joe can equate the concepts of copyright with that place where you can pay 3$ for a membership and take out whatever the hell you want and pay $0.05 a day late fees, the more the general public concensus will sway towards maintaining fair use and maintaining copyright for its originally intended purposes.
CONAN, the LIBRARIAN!!!!
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Don't blame him. He's blindly spouting rhetoric. The reason he's a neocon is because neoconservatism strongly appeals to insecure people...i.e., nerds. Neoconservatism is a "manly man" political philosophy. (I'm trying to remain as neutral as possible.) Neoconservative rhetoric appeals to the insecure because it makes people feel dominant, in control, alpha-male, and morally superior.
As far as I'm concerned, as a recovered ex-neoconservative, this rhetoric does not correlate with reality. However, I can't blame him. It's taken him over like a virus, just like it had done to me. Even the most logically rigorous are prone to this powerful fallacy.
It is possible to be both a strong supporter of the philosophy of copyright and yet oppose specific copyright law.
Given the current copyright law, it's pretty much impossible to be a strong supporter of the US founders' philosophy of copyright and *not* oppose specific copyright law.
The only way you can really support the current copyright system is if you buy into the content producers' notion that copyright is some sort of perpetual, natural and even inalienable right to collect cash for every use, rather than the carefully balanced social contract originally intended.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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
This isn't education, it's propaganda.
My kids are past elementary school, but we've had to deal with at least two other equally bogus programs that were nevertheless strongly supported by some of the administrators:
Much of this nonsense didn't stop, despite numerous complaints from parents, until Consumer Reports wrote up the practice.
The only role that these sorts of things have in the classroom is in a high school level civics style class that discusses why they should not be used in the classroom.
Wow, a strawman attack and you didn't even need to waste time setting up a strawman argument to attack! What a time saver!
balance in this case is 80% closer to the RIAA and MPAA side than what you think balanced is
Are you talking about balance as in giving a fair and honest explanation of existing copyright law, or balanced as in what balanced law should be? Not that it matters because the RIAA/MPAA/BSA fail on both accounts. Their "educational program" is pure propaganda to push an agenda. They have no interest in giving an accurate and balanced picture of copyright law. They ignore or misrepresent any aspect of copyright law which does not support their agenda, and they simplify and overgeneralize any portion of copyright law which does support their agenda.
Oh yes, those eeeevil librarians are dong this to spread disinformation and lies to undercut the MPAA/RIAA/BSA's fair and balanced message. It's all part of the eeeevil librarians' plot to brainwash our children and conquer the world! Muahahahaha!
As for what balance law should be, well things would be a lot closer to balanced if we simply repealed a couple of rotten laws the copyright lobby has bought in the last few years. The DMCA, NET, Sony Bono, AHRA, and one or two others. If we were to include state laws I think there were a few statyes stupid enough to pass Super-DMCA bills, and two that bought into the UCITA.
But of cource that makes me some some evil anti-copyright nutjob because I want good old traditional copyright. A-yup. I'm an evil anachist for wanting the perfectly good laws we used to have.
And actually there's a rather unlikely item I'd like to add to the list of bad copyright law, though I have to stretch waaaaay back to 1976. And what item would that be? TITLE 17 CHAPTER 1 Sec. 107 - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use.
Yes, that's right, I want the Fair Use clause stripped out of US law.
Why? Because it's redundant and it has led to widespread missunderstanding of fair use. You could strike that clause from the law and fair use would not change one wit! If you check the cogressional record when it was first passed they stated it was intended to reflect existing fair use, and that it was not intended to expand, restrict, or alter existing fair use in any way whatsoever!
Since Section 107 of the law describes fair use, many people have the mistaken impression that that law somehow grants, defines, and restricts fair use. They have the mistaken impression that fair use can be altered/restricted/eliminated simply by rewriting that law. That is incorrect. Fair use existed before that law existed, therefore it cannot be that law which created fair use.
You you actually read that clause carefully, it does not place any limitations on fair use at all! In fact what it says is that fair use is whatever the courts say it is. It merely lists examples of fair use, and gives a minimum list of factors to consider in determining fair use.
If you read the history of copyright law, fair use was established by the courts on constitutional grounds from the very beginning. It was repeatedly found that copyright law would be unconstitutional if it actually attempted to impose the sweeping restrictions it claims to impose. Rather than striking down copyright law as invalid, the court bent over backwards to assume that copyright law implicitly never even attempts to apply in cases of fair use. That copyright willingly flees in the face of fair use.
It is not copyright law which grants and defines and restricts fair use. It is fair use which rescues copyright law from being struck down as unconstitutional.
Where fair use treads copyright is entirely swept away.
The fact that fair use was written into law in 1976 in section 107 has led many people to false beliefes about fair use. Rather than acknowledging and protecting fair use rights as intended, section 1
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
You know the world has changed when librarians start getting miltant...