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
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?
Should search engines license content for crawling? A potential German law thinks so.
Patron-driven acquisitions programs may supplant inter-library loans for ebooks, which in turn could get more publishers to support both PDA and ILL.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The very real trade-offs inherent in Internet security have to faced directly, but politicians are avoiding these trade-offs as they talk about SOPA and PIPA.
As the deadline for responses to the OSTP RFI approaches, perhaps we should reflect on how the government can make its own research reports available in a more complete, direct, and affordable manner.
A dialogue on patron-driven acquisitions by a librarian (Rick Anderson) and a publishing consultant (Joe Esposito). Patron-driven acquisitons may evolve into patron-driven access. But publishers ultimately will have to bless the plans.
UNESCO, along with the U.S. State Department and others, launch a portal that has plenty of information, lower than usual amounts of rhetoric, but remains controversial because of how it’s positioned.
More tired OA rhetoric, this time wielding an argument that copyright approaches of some OA publishers aren’t pure enough to qualify as “real” open access. Get ready to feel the burn.
Publishers’ practice of clinging to DRM may be strengthening Amazon’s already overwhelming market position. Publishers should consider dropping DRM and even assisting in the creation of new digital venues.
Is plagiarism of fiction less of a problem for publishers? Another tale of pilfered prose seems to indicate that checking for plagiarism isn’t something book publishers care about . . . yet.