...librarians must begin to de-emphasize the value of access in general and re-emphasize their role as research assistants. We need to provide our patrons with the reader advisory services that were once a core element of our work. In academic libraries, this can be done most readily by creating guides to the literature, but those guides need to go far beyond what we see in most guides.  They need to be more than simply lists of useful databases and video tutorials on using various search tools.  They need to do such things as introduce patrons to the nature of the field of study, provide a history of its devepment, and identify its most important figures, and its classic and important current works.  Library administrations will need  to hire subject specialists with significant expertise,  who are potentially capable of teaching courses in the departments they serve. 

Of course, this presents a challenge to our desire to remain “neutral” or “unbiased” with regard to the subject matter that we make available, but we need not shy away from the challenge. We must conscientiously identify the information that we judge to be most worthwhile, while remaining reasonably humble about our abilities to discriminate the wheat from the chaff.  We need to exercise our  right to the freedoms that our teaching colleagues have in expressing our views about our fields of expertise.  We owe it to our patrons to apply our professional judgment about the value of the resources available to them and not simply serve as human cogs in an access providing machine.

When passengers travel, they are required to provide the following Secure Flight Passenger Data (SFPD) to the airline:

Name (as it appears on government-issued ID the passenger plans to use when traveling)
Date of Birth
Gender
Redress Number (if applicable)
The airline submits this information to Secure Flight, which uses it to perform watch list matching. This serves to prevent individuals on the No Fly List from boarding an aircraft and to identify individuals on the Selectee List for enhanced screening.

A property right (ius in rem, real right) is an abstract legal concept which relates to an object, referred to as “thing” or “res,” or imprecisely, but commonly, “property.” This object of property is a product of legal categorisation; it may be represented by a physical thing or it can be an abstract legal creation itself, as is the case with an intellectual property right. In any event, for the law the “property-object” (whether tangible, intangible or purely intangible) is the product of a legal conceptualisation. The law (private law) creates any res or thing, whether corporeal or not, through the legal concept of real rights. That enables legal recognition of the res in question. The material object (if there is one) only becomes a res in law if real rights are attached to it. Therefore, real rights and res are both “property”, and particularly with (purely intangible) intellectual property, property rights and property objects merge into one. The abstract conceptual res typically has a reifier to make it recognisable in the material world and for the purpose of social interactions. This reifier can be a corporeal object, in which case it is a direct reifier (a table being a direct reifier and incident of a res, chattel), but, for example in case of copyright, a chattel may act not only as direct reifier of the notional personal (moveable) property right (e.g. a canvas of a painting, the score of a symphony, the paper of a manuscript), but also as an indirect reifier of the notional copyright (artistic work, musical work, literary work). The chattel in question represents directly the personal/moveable property (but does not constitute it, because the res remains a legal concept), and, in addition, the chattel represents indirectly the copyright in the work which is expressed and recorded in the chattel in question (a painting, sculpture etc.).

This Article initiates an account of things in the law, including both conceptual things and material things. Human relationships matter to the design of law. Yet things matter too. To an increasing extent, and particularly via the advent of digital technology, those relationships are not only considered ex post by the law but are designed into things, ex ante, by their producers. This development has a number of important dimensions. Some are familiar, such as the reification of conceptual things as material things, so that computer software is treated as a good. Others are new, such as the characterization of material things as conceptual things, so that digital goods become licensable. The regulatory consequences of the thing are increasingly built into the construction of the thing. These developments appear to be poised to envelop things beyond the digital sphere. It may no longer be apt to divide the world cleanly into conceptual and material objects. Things combine features of both. As a result, they can no longer be viewed solely as passive backgrounds against which relation-based legal analysis unfolds. To ensure that society maintains the ability to regulate as broadly as it deems legitimate, law must account for the creation and design of the things that increasingly dominate developments across a variety of legal domains, from intellectual property law to antitrust law to commercial law. The Article describes how things exercise the authority that characterizes classic legal regulation, and it reviews the different mechanisms that legal institutions have used to recognize and differentiate things. Understanding those mechanisms is a step toward appreciating the nature of the regulatory landscape in which both legal institutions and individuals exist.

In serving faculty and administrators at UNC-Chapel Hill, these policies assist in preparing and submitting proposals for sponsored project funding and managing sponsored funds awarded to the University.

Lawyers and law professors should be extremely cautious in attempting to derive the “ought” of legal conclusions from the “is” of how technical systems are specified. Just as with the words of a contract, one needs to know something what the parties meant by their use of a protocol, and the answer to that question need not lie in the protocol’s official specification. (Think, for example, about robots.txt.) Textualism, in other words, cannot be a complete theory of interpretation for computer code. (Neither can pure purposivism, but that is a topic for another day.)

"...no provider of information services is exempt from the power of the state."

Addresses the basics of copyright law and the exclusive rights of the copyright owner, the major exemptions used by cultural heritage institutions, and stresses the importance of “risk assessment” when conducting any digitization project.

Welcome to the Public Index, a site to study and discuss the proposed Google Book Search settlement. Here, you can browse and annotate the proposed settlement, section-by-section.

Google recently made a deal with book publishers over access to scanned books for Google Book Search. We have to be vigilant that they don't snub the reading public the way they are currently dissing the listening, writing and remixing public on Blogger.

I hope that these recommendations will prove equally appealing to those who think that Google can do no evil and those who think it does only evil. Perhaps they will prove equally frustrating. The settlement is good as it stands, but it could stand to be better.

The United States economy has grown faster, on average, under Democratic presidents than under Republicans. If history is a guide, an Obama victory in November would lead to faster economic growth with less inequality, while a McCain victory would lead to slower economic growth with more inequality.

Unless and until some deal can be worked out for digital rights to images, the focus of the digital library is limited to text—just as we enter the golden age of visual narration.

Many of us are seriously worried about Ohio's March 4 primary. I highly recommend Ned Foley's article, "Administering the March 4 Primary in Ohio", which lists five things we should all keep our eyes on. In the 8th paragraph of Prof. Foley's article, he mentions a bill that the Ohio House was poised to pass on Tuesday. That bill was SB 286, and it did pass on Tuesday with little opposition.

Prof. Foley talks about concerns he has with a particular feature of the bill: a new practice allowing mid-day pickups of ballot materials at the polls. Foley is primarily, and appropriately, concerned with chain of custody issues; that is, the procedures that ensure ballot materials make it from the controlled environment of the polling place to the controlled environment of election headquarters without any additions, subtractions, modifications or damage.

However, there are other aspects of this bill that are troubling. For example, on the issue of mid-day pickups of ballot materials, neither the legislature nor the Ohio Secretary of State seem to fully understand what this process would entail. In order to hand-off ballot materials at mid-day, pollworkers will essentially have to do all the things they normally do at the close of polls. Most importantly, they'll have to reconcile the number of ballots cast up to that point with the number of signatures in their pollbook. This means that the pollbook will be entirely unavailable to voters who arrive at the polling place during this process. Since the various steps of ballot accounting take on the order of an hour (maybe two), this means that the polling places in Ohio that do midday pickups will be closed to voters for this amount of time. SB 286 makes no provisions for the exact procedures involved with this; it appears that polling places in Ohio using central-count optical scan will be shut down for a period of time on 4 March.

One would think that the OH SoS would weigh in and issue a directive about the procedures involved with a midday pickup and chain of custody procedures. In order to keep the polling places open, the OH SoS could specify that two copies of pollbooks be kept so that one is operational during the midday ballot accounting. Or a shadow team of pollworkers could be employed to do the ballot accounting while the pollworkers continue to allow voters to vote. To date, the only thing from the OH SoS' office is a directive (Directive 2008-25) that emphasizes the seriousness of chain of custody, lists some example best practices and provides a chain of custody log (form). We're still waiting to see if a directive is issued with a title like, "Procedures for Midday Pickup of Ballot Materials".

As others have pointed out (See Paul Gronke at Election Updates: Foley's essay on Ohio), there are more problems with SB 286 than just this issue of midday pickups. Here's one example: section 3506.21(A)(3) says:

"If automatic tabulating equipment detects that more marks were made on an optical scan ballot for a particular office, question, or issue than the number of selections that a voter is allowed by law to make for that office, question, or issue, the voter's ballot shall be invalidated for that office, question, or issue. The ballot shall not be invalidated for any other office, question, or issue..."

This appears to ensure that if one contest on a ballot is overvoted (has more choices made by the voter than are allowed for that contest), the other contests on the ballots will still be counted. However, optical scan equipment is notorious for detecting stray marks as "valid" marks. In my own precinct in November 2006, our precinct-count optical scan machines (the Sequoia Optech Insight) detected a single dot, produced when a voter accidentally dropped the pen on her ballot, as a valid vote. This provision, unless it were amended to anticipate voter mistakes, smudges, stray marks, etc., will undoubtedly disenfranchise voters who's votes would otherwise be counted using Ohio's standards for determining voter intent, required by the Federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, outlined in Directive 2006-76.

Anyway, SB 286 is emergency legislation... but it's particularly bad emergency legislation!

[UPDATE 2008-02-21T14:48:09]: Added link to Paul Gronke's post at Election Updates... Sorry, Prof. Gronke, that link should have been in there when I posted this!

Democracy won’t fall just because our privacy is invaded; it will fall if we don’t ensure due process for those on whom data is collected and accountability of those who collect and control the data.

To the extent it or other search engines limit access to parts of their index, their public-spirited defenses of their archiving and indexing projects are suspect.

Many archives and web sites are being asked to remove images of violence that could be shocking or used to support the insurgents in Iraq. Are removals from public view censorship, or a responsible way to limit the effectiveness of propaganda?

A worldwide Coalition of leading companies, respected associations, and industry experts have joined this unprecedented non-profit mandate to clearly define and standardize the core aspects of image licensing and its management. Now we can all agree.

The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules.

Google's engine is a meticulously hand-crafted, continually optimized machine that does precisely what Google instructs it to do - even if that means filtering results to protect the company's reputation.

His work explores the growing contributions of IT forms and practices -- most notably computer modeling and simulation techniques -- to the practice of democratic administration and governance.

The NKDPS program is launching a series of funding opportunities to help increase the production, use and capacity for research to serve public-interest advocacy and organizing around media and communications.

Worked to develop an online entertainment cooperative, a nonprofit digital music distribution system modeled after proposals to reform the current entertainment industry and intellectual property system via collective licensing and revenue-pooling regimes

The Progress & Freedom Foundation is a market-oriented think tank that studies the digital revolution and its implications for public policy.

Bound By Law reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.

William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School.

Privacy is a complex and often abstract topic: this symposium will address "visual privacy," a subset of the much broader topic of data privacy, and bring together experts from a range of perspectives.

Because America has mortgaged it's social and cultural capital for less durable, less valuable financial capital, it is less and less able to innovate in a world, where the economic is deeply enmeshed in the social, the cultural, and the creative.

I get the message "This video is not playable in your country." What is the policy behind this? I'm assuming it is not a copyright issue.

CBC launched an ambitious project called Riding Talk with 308 *moderated* forums on its website — one for each riding in Canada. (A riding is the equivalent of an American voting precinct.)

The call for this new regulation is being led by the United States government and the European Commission, pushed by highly paid lobbyists for a trade association that includes Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Real Networks and a handful of other companies.

The treaty would give broadcasters 50 years of copyright-like control over the content of their broadcasts, even when they have no copyright in what they show. A TV channel broadcasting your Creative Commons-licensed movie could legally demand that no one

There's a new restriction on content waiting in the wings--a "webcaster's right" that allows websites to control the dissemination of content they put up.

DJs may "not mix, remix, Segue, edit, change or otherwise manipulate the sounds of any Sound Recording so that the sounds on the Dubbed copy of the Sound Recording are different from those on the original Sound Recording."

Wales plans to bar anonymous users from creating new articles; only registered members will be able to do so.

Papers should address the issues involved in building sustainable models for openness in science, software and content. They can examine technical, sociological, economic/business and legal issues, and can be conceptual or practical in nature.

Democracy and education, urban educational change and school policy, sociology of education, service learning and youth development.

The AMV community reacts to Larry Lessigs publicizing of the AMV phenomenon.

By focusing on major media, technology and communications issues and emphasizing local stories, HearUsNow.org will help explain increasingly complex issues and the connections between these issues, underscore what's at stake, and offer ways to make improv

The book sets out the forms of governance, design principles and everyday uses that can help boost people’s participation in public space and the wider public life of their town or city.

Cross-fertilization of ideas between economics and computer science is yielding fresh insights that can help inform policy decisions.

This seminar will consider economic and business rationales for adoption of open source modes of production and dissemination and will consider how open source projects might be made sustainable.

Fair Use--"a privilege in others than the owner of a copyright to use the copyrighted material in a reasonable manner without his consent, notwithstanding the monopoly granted to the owner...

Conducts research in the social, ethical, and political dimensions of information and communications technology.

A non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the basic rights of attention owners

Dysfunctional business and political leaders cause the social, political and economic malaise afflicting America. It produces an MBA mindset that embraces the robber baron culture and Social Darwinism of market and Christian fundamentalism.

Once a leader in Internet innovation, the United States has fallen far behind Japan and other Asian states in deploying broadband and the latest mobile-phone technology. This lag will cost it dearly.

Taxonomy of approaches to designing open systems.

Use case for augmented reality: make competent politicians look the part.

This past Spring semester, our class looked at the challenges posed by peer-to-peer technologies to the current state of copyright law and policy. Many students wrote quite insightful papers.

By bringing together the creative, technical and educational communities, NESTA Futurelab is pioneering ways of using new technologies to transform the learning experience.

"We could track levels of user autonomy, ownership, and innovation, and consider whether some amount of innovation and creative use is enough to override concerns about privacy or ownership."

How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle.

Demos knowledge is organised around five themes, which combine to create new perspectives. The themes are democracy, learning, enterprise, quality of life and global change.

"The action right now is in making the music and video owned by the major labels and film studios archaic and unpopular."

The idea that copying another person's ideas or expression (the form of words in which the idea is encapsulated), without the person's authorization and without explicit acknowledgment of the copying, is reprehensible is, in general, clearly false.

"Get the ownership system out of the way so that we can all add our voices to the choir, even if that means pasting our singing on top of the Mormon Tabernacle and sending the output to a friend?"

The Digital Art Auction is an online service providing a facility for en masse sales of digital content.

Networked products evolve and we are now going to frame what ongoing design obligations should exist with regard to these networked products.

There are 4 versions of Bill Number S.167 for the 109th Congress.

The case involves consumer use of software and hardware to skip scenes of sex and violence and to mute profanity on DVDs of films they have purchased.

The Family Movie Act immunizes from copyright and trademark liability any for-profit companies that develop movie-editing software to make content imperceptible without permission from the movies' creators.

The main purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright infringement but to change consumer expectations about what they are entitled to do with digital content.

Professor Bell posits that a system of fared use actually may offer freer access to expressive works. He argues that allowing copyright owners and consumers to freely contract under a fared use system may reveal a system more beneficial than one preempted

Licensing structures like the CC help copyright catch up with today's faster moving, smaller-scale and more intricate network of information exchange, not by 'freeing' it, but by describing it as intellectual property more efficiently.

Here is a very interesting piece by Hiroko Nagano on anonymity and responsibility in the Japanese blogosphere.

The concept is simple: the music industry forms a collecting society, which then offers file-sharing music fans the opportunity to "get legit" in exchange for a reasonable regular payment, say $5 per month.

When I visit your website, and you send me a page in response, I should be able to do whatever I like to manipulate it on my end.

Articles at LawMeme discussing the law and policy issues surrounding automated video editing and intermediation systems.

The same tools that allow you to easily copy and share music and video also allow you to make your own.

What would an object-oriented democracy look like?

It isn't necessarily tricky to imagine a technological product to enable playlists, and it isn't necessarily tricky to create fabulous mixes or playlists ... What's difficult is doing them in our current legal and commercial framework.

The rights and freedoms enjoyed by those who work expertly with words (fair use, the ability to comment, pull apart and reassemble the words of others) must be extended to those who work with images and sounds, because the second group is the larger.

This seminar will consider a range of policy alternatives available to respond to the challenges P2P technologies and file sharing pose for the entertainment industry and the implications of each alternative.

The problems that documentary filmmakers face in getting and controlling rights for their creative work--and the consequences for cultural creativity--are the focus of this research project.

The Center for Social Media showcases and analyzes strategies to use media as creative tools for public knowledge and action.

This article provides the results of a dynamic simulation of the publishing industry in the United States from 1800 to 2100, and tests the impact of different protection schemes on the development of authorship, the publishing industry, and reader access.

One of the UK’s leading research groups exploiting the synergies between distributed artificial intelligence and social simulation to analyse areas like marketing, organisational design and strategic decision-making.

New, different, and interesting ideas, data, and analysis relating to communications policy, from an economist at the FCC.