derivative work

I’ll be watching Harvard’s A&S faculty vote today to see if they approve setting up a library-run faculty publications open access repository. (A proposal, I noted to my partner, that I first saw some 15 years ago in the library community.) The NYT covered the proposal. For-profit scholarly publishers have of course been complaining vociferously [...]

The Weekly World News is shutting down. The WWN was the source of many a headline or graphic I pasted at various workplaces over the years. This NYT article profiles the story, mostly from the perspective of right-wing (faux) commentator, Ed Anger. In the South, in the 80s, it wasn’t apparent to me that Ed [...]

“I wish with all my heart that you will be able to publish a new translation.” — Simone de Beauvoir, 1982. Another example of copyright being used by the copyright owner to control or restrict dissemination of a copyrighted work — regardless of the likely desires of the creator. Ampersand at Alas, a Blog writes [...]

I’m pleased to see the Google Print issue spurring discussion of the role of corporations in controlling access to information. See, e.g., today’s post @ Gnuosphere [link from sivacracy] Gnuosphere, Siva, and others point out that Google isn’t doing Google Print out of the goodness of its heart; the company is scanning, indexing, and providing [...]

cory doctorow writes about SFWA’s ongoing campaign against copyright infringement (Why writers should stop worrying about “ebook piracy”– boingboing 5/14) cory also cited from & linked to john scalzi writing about the same thing (The Stupidity of Worrying About Piracy 5/13). personally, i much appreciated john’s description of how he feels about readers who can’t [...]

pet peeve: men reading men. More precisely, based on highly scientific studies of (a) watching what people on public transit read; and (b) reading & listening to interviews with people about their reading habits, I conclude that men (in a general, statistical sense) love to read other male authors and rarely read women authors. Women, [...]