COPYCENSE

"Libraries conduct business with numerous companies to acquire scholarly resources for their user communities. Over the last 10 to 15 years, however, many of these companies have been bought and sold, resulting in fewer and fewer publishers in the commercial marketplace.

"Within scholarly publishing, librarians have watched the number of companies shrink while prices rise and service declines. Individually, library associations in the United States have conveyed their concerns about major mergers to the Department of Justice. These included the 1991 purchase of Pergamon Press by Elsevier Science, the Thomson-West merger of 1996, the proposed merger of Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer in 1997, and the purchase by Reed Elsevier of Harcourt General in 2001.

"The Association of College & Research Libraries, recognizing that it was time for a new strategy in confronting mergers, invited colleagues from several other library organizations to discuss how to pool efforts on a more public-policy focused effort to bring attention to this issue. Out of these discussions in spring 2002, the Information Access Alliance was born.

Mary M. Case. Information Access Alliance: Challenging Anticompetitive Behavior in Academic Publishing. C&RL News. June 2004.

"At first, the RIAA‘s strategy to sue individual users of peer-to-peer networks generated a stir, but, since last fall, most cases have quietly disappeared in private settlement agreements for sums averaging $3000.

"A recent court hearing offered a view into what might happen if these cases did not end in settlement negotiations and instead proceeded to trial. Inside the courtroom, the attorneys for the recording industry outnumbered defendants by a two-to-one margin, and the disparity of resources and expertise between the sides only continued to widen."

Berkman Briefings. Inside the Courtroom: The Music Industry Takes on the Uploaders. May 27, 2004.

(Editor’s Note: Valenti’s successor is a critical appointment in the social software landscape because the Motion Picture Association, along with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), has consistently sought to curtail peer-to-peer networking and file sharing through the courts and Congress.) 

"For two years Jack Valenti, the venerable, 82-year-old chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, has been trying to retire.

"After nearly four decades as Hollywood’s leading lobbyist, the silver-haired former adman and White House adviser announced in March that he would be gone within a few months. But those months have passed, summer approaches and the association is nowhere close to finding Mr. Valenti’s successor.

Doesn’t anyone want to run the M.P.A.A.?"

Sharon Waxman. Hollywood’s Casting Problem: Who Will Run the M.P.A.A.?. The New York Times. May 30, 2004.

(Editor�s Note 2: The Times allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper�s fee-based Archive.)

I found this intriguing editorial published in the Christian Science Monitor, and written by one of its former writers. What struck me particularly about the piece was that libraries remain true to the ideas — and ideals — of a commons, yet many communities fail to recognize them as such.

"Every invention, business technique, story, and song draws on what has come before. I couldn’t write this, nor you read it, without the English language – a gift to both of us. We all stand on many shoulders; and earlier concepts of property acknowledged this.

"Nowhere was this thinking more evident than in the realm of invention and ideas. America itself is an idea, the first nation so conceived; so the views of the Founders on this point are especially telling. Jefferson and Madison considered the mind to be the mother lode of freedom, and they wanted no restrictions – private or public – on its fruits. The copyright and patent clause of the Constitution generally restricts these private monopolies to limited times; and this provision is of a piece with the First Amendment protections of freedom of speech."

Jonathan Rowe. Our Dangerous Distance Between the Private and the Commons. Christian Science Monitor. May 27, 2004.

"A proposal that the Senate may vote on as early as next week would let federal prosecutors file civil lawsuits against suspected copyright infringers, with fines reaching tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The so-called Pirate Act (S. 2237) is raising alarms among copyright lawyers and lobbyists for peer-to-peer firms, who have been eyeing the recording industry’s lawsuits against thousands of peer-to-peer users with trepidation. The Justice Department, they say, could be far more ambitious."

Declan McCullagh.   Pirate Act Raises Civil Rights Concerns. News.com. May 26, 2004.