I fear that I tend to focus on the challenges to IF because I find them the most interesting and disturbing. This week I came accross an incidence of the Merriam-Webster dictionary being banned in the fourth and fifth grades of a Southern California school district. This disturbs me on many levels, particularly that the reason for the censorship was hat the dictionary contain a definition for "oral sex". So now the school is not only censoring a very basic and ubiquitous resources, it is also doing so solely on the basis of a term that students might come across due to curiosity or accident. In addition the comments of the parents and officials were disturbing in their willingness to censor a resource as useful as the dictionary.
The other reason that this story bothers me is that I didn't hear about it through the American media, it was picked up by the Guardian in the UK and then by Cory Doctorow. I really think that our society would be less eager to censor ourselves if there was more coverage about the effects on education and access that censorship has.
Please read the original stories, I hope you laugh as much as I did to keep from crying.
Here is a link to the Cory Doctorow piece on BoingBoing.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Public Records and Copyright
Can Oregon copyright the Oregon Revised Statutes?
This is an older issue that came up in 2008, however, this course has put into perspective for me. The essential function of a library is to provide access to information, open and unfettered access whenever possible. For this reason I find the issue of open access to state statutes to be both interesting and vital to understanding how we can balance accuracy with open access.
The basics of this particular disagreement are this: Oregon Legislative Counsel sent out cease and desist letters to Justia and public.resource.org telling them to take down their republished versions of the ORS or to pay a licensing fee (Justia reported this to be $30,000 for 2 years). The letter asserted copyright to the "...arrangement and subject-matter compilation of Oregon statutory law, the prefatory and explanatory notes, the leadlines and numbering for each statutory section, the tables the index and annotations and such other incidents as are work product of the Committee in the compilation and publication of Oregon law." The organizations who were sent this letter objected and eventually the state decided to not enforce their copyright assertion.
My understanding of copyright and public records lead me to think the copyright claim was entirely bogus, but this was from a sense that if "ignorance is no excuse" then there has to be free access to the laws. I understand that there may be more to the ORS than just the legal text, but it is all part of the interpretations of the law and how they will be enforced. I did not, however, have much to back me up other than one course covering some copyright law as it pertains to libraries.
I then stumbled on the Harvard Law blog Info/Law, which addressed the legal presidents for copyright not applying to government laws and regulations. I was pleased to find several of the cases that I had studied in my own coursework such as Feist, but was shocked by how recent some of these cases were (e.g. Veeck). I recommend that anyone who is not familiar with the ideas behind limiting copyright of governmental documents take a look at the post because it is very simple and concise.
So, in all this, have I answered my question? I have for myself and I think the OLC answered it for Oregon and it is a resound "No". Laws are public record and not subject to copyright lest the people be subject to rules of which they have no knowledge or ability to gain knowledge.
I looked at several bogs for information on this subject:
Justia's initial report of the C&D letter
Info/Law blog on the whole issue of law copyright
Oregon legal librarian's take
This is an older issue that came up in 2008, however, this course has put into perspective for me. The essential function of a library is to provide access to information, open and unfettered access whenever possible. For this reason I find the issue of open access to state statutes to be both interesting and vital to understanding how we can balance accuracy with open access.
The basics of this particular disagreement are this: Oregon Legislative Counsel sent out cease and desist letters to Justia and public.resource.org telling them to take down their republished versions of the ORS or to pay a licensing fee (Justia reported this to be $30,000 for 2 years). The letter asserted copyright to the "...arrangement and subject-matter compilation of Oregon statutory law, the prefatory and explanatory notes, the leadlines and numbering for each statutory section, the tables the index and annotations and such other incidents as are work product of the Committee in the compilation and publication of Oregon law." The organizations who were sent this letter objected and eventually the state decided to not enforce their copyright assertion.
My understanding of copyright and public records lead me to think the copyright claim was entirely bogus, but this was from a sense that if "ignorance is no excuse" then there has to be free access to the laws. I understand that there may be more to the ORS than just the legal text, but it is all part of the interpretations of the law and how they will be enforced. I did not, however, have much to back me up other than one course covering some copyright law as it pertains to libraries.
I then stumbled on the Harvard Law blog Info/Law, which addressed the legal presidents for copyright not applying to government laws and regulations. I was pleased to find several of the cases that I had studied in my own coursework such as Feist, but was shocked by how recent some of these cases were (e.g. Veeck). I recommend that anyone who is not familiar with the ideas behind limiting copyright of governmental documents take a look at the post because it is very simple and concise.
So, in all this, have I answered my question? I have for myself and I think the OLC answered it for Oregon and it is a resound "No". Laws are public record and not subject to copyright lest the people be subject to rules of which they have no knowledge or ability to gain knowledge.
I looked at several bogs for information on this subject:
Justia's initial report of the C&D letter
Info/Law blog on the whole issue of law copyright
Oregon legal librarian's take
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Authoritarianism and IF: China's interactions with US internet search companies
With Google's announcement that it may leave China, there has been a spotlight on China's interactions with Internet search services such as Yahoo and Google over the last few years. In my investigation of the issues I discovered a timeline of privacy invasion incidents, censorship and other events in China's history with the Internet put together by the BBC. The thing that I found most disturbing was that Yahoo! had been involved in investigations and arrests of several bloggers for the opinions that they shared through Yahoo! services.
I'm not surprised by the censorship of political views by the Chinese government because historically that is how authoritarian governments maintain their power. Control of political information and opposition viewpoints is a key component to controlling a population and appears anytime a government feels threatened by outside or inside forces. The thing about China is that it is not the Communist paradigm that is challenged by dissenting opinions it is mostly the current implementation of that paradigm that has significant opposition. One piece of the current system in China is control over expression which may have once served to control anti-communist rhetoric, but which now controls mostly anti-government and populist opinions.
For example, a skilled tech worker in China will be paid more than most other Chinese workers and encouraged to live in a larger house separated from the rest of the city. This means that the educated population is not in regular contact with poorer people and has no populist legitimacy. Many of these same tech workers would prefer to be on a level pay scale with all other Chinese people and are the kind of people who might challenge the current government. Should one of these people take it upon himself to redistribute the wealth that they earn from working with a western company and live like their neighbors, the government will encourage and threaten until he removes himself from society again. This means that the most educated and free thinking citizens lack leadership legitimacy and no matter how much they believe in the principles of Communism they cannot challenge the current implementation of it.
This is all to say that China's attempts to control the information access of its population have nothing to do with the particular economic system that they use and more to do with the authoritarianism of the current political structure. Given this structure, the Chinese government will continue to use any resources they can muster to control the intellectual freedom of its population. This is not unlike the censorship during McCarthyism or warrantless wiretaps that Bush performed but does raise red flags for the general state of human rights and freedoms in China.
As long as companies such as Google and Yahoo! continue to do business with China according to the invasive and restrictive policies that the government has put into place China will be able to control their population with some international legitimacy. While it is true that the government run search engine already holds most of the market, the simple protest that Google is finally making may help to encourage better behavior on the part of the Chinese government in the interest of broader commercial power.
I'm not surprised by the censorship of political views by the Chinese government because historically that is how authoritarian governments maintain their power. Control of political information and opposition viewpoints is a key component to controlling a population and appears anytime a government feels threatened by outside or inside forces. The thing about China is that it is not the Communist paradigm that is challenged by dissenting opinions it is mostly the current implementation of that paradigm that has significant opposition. One piece of the current system in China is control over expression which may have once served to control anti-communist rhetoric, but which now controls mostly anti-government and populist opinions.
For example, a skilled tech worker in China will be paid more than most other Chinese workers and encouraged to live in a larger house separated from the rest of the city. This means that the educated population is not in regular contact with poorer people and has no populist legitimacy. Many of these same tech workers would prefer to be on a level pay scale with all other Chinese people and are the kind of people who might challenge the current government. Should one of these people take it upon himself to redistribute the wealth that they earn from working with a western company and live like their neighbors, the government will encourage and threaten until he removes himself from society again. This means that the most educated and free thinking citizens lack leadership legitimacy and no matter how much they believe in the principles of Communism they cannot challenge the current implementation of it.
This is all to say that China's attempts to control the information access of its population have nothing to do with the particular economic system that they use and more to do with the authoritarianism of the current political structure. Given this structure, the Chinese government will continue to use any resources they can muster to control the intellectual freedom of its population. This is not unlike the censorship during McCarthyism or warrantless wiretaps that Bush performed but does raise red flags for the general state of human rights and freedoms in China.
As long as companies such as Google and Yahoo! continue to do business with China according to the invasive and restrictive policies that the government has put into place China will be able to control their population with some international legitimacy. While it is true that the government run search engine already holds most of the market, the simple protest that Google is finally making may help to encourage better behavior on the part of the Chinese government in the interest of broader commercial power.
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