"Patenterprise" — Jean Luc Picard, Apple, and Androids
In space, nobody can hear you litigate.
Georgia State Redux: And Now the Trouncing Is Complete
What once appeared to be a lopsided ruling has, in its final form, turned into something much more definitive.
Driving Innovation: Finding the Balance Between Fair Reward and Profiteering
Vitriol may have obscured important points in a post last week. The growing business strategy of our era is to drive the cost of everyone else’s product to zero in order to make more money from your own product. This imbalance stifles innovation and creation.
Working and Living Inside the Game — Source Filmmaker and E-books Make Us Part of the Action
Creative people are using our inputs — and letting us do the same — to drive more creativity.
The Beatles Yesterday and Today: An Allegory of the Role of Paid Content
An essay on the Beatles and their business model, which emphasized paid content, now called “toll-access” content. The question is how the Beatles would have been different if they had worked in an era where content was expected to be free.
Final Score in the Georgia State Game: Library 94, Publishers 5
The GSU case serves as a strong rebuke for publishers over fair use and copyright claims, while recognizing that some boundaries remain.
An Interview with Cameron Neylon, PLoS' New Director of Advocacy
An interview about open access, funding of science, publishable works, profit motives, and other topics of interest, with one of the more thoughtful advocates of OA publishing, Cameron Neylon.
Thinking Through a Strategy for Digital Rights Management
DRM (digital rights management) is a problematic response to a complex situation where copyright infringement becomes common. A management team needs a clear, progressive strategy to offset unauthorized use and may choose to drop DRM
Tea Party-led Super PAC Coalition Seeks to Limit US Research to US Taxpayers
A surprising new coalition of Tea Party and US-first activists begin an effort to limit US taxpayer-funded research to US taxpayers. Will it succeed?
Do Search Engines Owe Publishers? A German Proposal Raises the Question
Should search engines license content for crawling? A potential German law thinks so.
PDA and Inter-library Loan
Patron-driven acquisitions programs may supplant inter-library loans for ebooks, which in turn could get more publishers to support both PDA and ILL.
The Preemptive Publisher
In a business environment characterized by risks, upstart innovations, and even contempt for the law, publishers have to ward off threats the old-fashioned way, by out-innovating their rivals and preempting new services.
Fleshing Out the World Dreamed Of — What If the Idealistic Recommendations Passed?
A new report for the Center of Economic Development suffers from a strong bias in its authorship. But beyond that, its implicit complaints, if addressed completely, would lead to a trainwreck in the world of scholarly communication. Is nobody thinking these things through?
Ask the Chefs: "What Is the Future of Copyright?"
The future of copyright will apparently involve catching up with technological change, cultural expectations of fairness, creative pressures for re-use, and many other factors. The Chefs cook up an interesting set of scenarios and ideas on this month’s question.
Why E-books Are Turning the Library and Publishing Worlds Upside Down
Old intersections of libraries and book publishers don’t work in the e-book era, and the rapid adoption of e-readers has shown that new bargains are inevitable. Whether libraries and publishers belong together in that future isn’t clear.