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 Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Latest Pointless Patent: Redirect Page For WiFi Logins. Wouldn't it be nice if we could go just one week without hearing about yet another ridiculous patent? These days, that seems to be wishful thinking. The latest, dug up by the always excellent WiFi Networking News is the fact that someone has actually gone and patented the concept of using a redirect to force you to a login page when you connect to a WiFi network. How is this possibly patentable? It seems like an insanely obvious idea - and one that plenty of companies use because it's obvious - and not because they ripped off someone's "intellectual property". The point of the patent system is to encourage innovation. The point of this patent (like so many others we've been hearing about recently) is to hold companies hostage for doing something obvious.
[Techdirt]
Patents are being abused and the PTO just lets it go. It is so much harder to fix these after the fact. But it apparantly is cheaper for the PTO to just push them out. 1:28:44 PM 
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More on the database bill. Declan McCullagh, Tech firms fail to squelch database bill, News.com, January 21, 2004. Excerpt: "By a 16-7 vote, the House Judiciary committee approved an intellectual property bill that had been opposed by Amazon.com, AT&T, Comcast, Google, Yahoo and some Internet service provider associations. The proposal, backed by big database companies such as Reed Elsevier and Thomson, would extend to databases the same kind of protection that copyrighted works such as music, literature and movies currently enjoy....The bill...is controversial because, critics say, it would sidestep a U.S. Supreme Court decision that said facts could not be copyrighted. Wednesday's vote follows a 10-3 vote last October in a subcommittee. Now the measure likely will go to the House floor in preparation for a possible vote." More coverage. [Open Access News]
More on this bill which will surely require the Supreme Court to look at it if passed. Facts can not be copyrighted, unless you are an oldtime publisher trying to keep your business alive when its business model is dying. 1:17:00 PM
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More on the database bill. Roy Mark, House Panel Sparks Database Controversy, InternetNews.com, January 23, 2004. Quoting Mark Erickson, director of federal policy for NetCoalition: "The Supreme Court ruled in 1991 that facts can't be copyrighted. All intellectual property has a finite life. Any sort of legislation that creates a new property right in facts can have a profound impact. It can drive up the cost of data and potentially give the owners of the new protection the ability to charge for using the facts in a downstream distribution." Quoting Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA): "[This bill] is mischievous in that it will lock away facts from public access....This bill is testament to the power that one company can muster," referring to Reed Elsevier, one of the largest and most energetic backers of the bill. [Open Access News]
This bill is a horrible piece of legislation brought by a publisher trying to maintain its stranglehold as it is dying. The attempt to retain power, even as you screw your customers, must be a disease of current capitalists. 1:14:21 PM
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"Copyright horror stories". Robert S. Boynton, The Tyranny of Copyright, New York Times Magazine, January 25, 2004: The article discusses consequences of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, efforts by Lawrence Lessig and others through Creative Commons and other venues to retain rights for content users, concerns of authors and content creators, and the question of micropayments for content usage. (Source: beSpacific) [Open Access News]
Makes you think. The use of copyright to prevent whistleblowers from dispersing embarrassing information is chilling. We shall more of this I expect. 1:10:57 PM
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Pharmaceutical industry and high-priced journals. Users Tell the Rest of the Story, Outsell, January 23, 2004 (only summary available online) reports the frustrations of several pharmaceutical companies with respect to expensive journal subscriptions. Evidently, the American Medical Association generated a furor when raising one institution's license "900%." A group of these companies, then, surveyed their users and found that they didn't regard such journals as "must-haves" and were to consider alternatives, including cancelling expensive subscriptions. The report notes that many of the pharmaceutical companies pay for advertising in journals and then face high subscription prices. (Source: The Virtual Chase) [Open Access News]
WHat will the publsihers do when both universities and companies refuse to pay huge subscription prices. I was on the Library Committee at Immunex and we dealt with this every year. More and more of the expensive journals are becoming less and less relevant. Models whre authors pat for page charges scale much better than models based purely on subscription payments. The former can publish whatever it gets paid to do. The latter must publish first then hope to get paid by subscription. 1:08:54 PM
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OA will improve legislation. Janneke Mostert, Diffusing information for democracy: an insight of the South African Parliament, Library Management, 25, 1 (January 2004) pp. 28-38. (Only the abstract is free online.) A nice argument that open access is needed for effective legislation, not just for effective research. From the abstract: "The paper concludes that democracy can only be sustained if information is freely available, and utilised to its fullest potential by the legislators so as to be enabled to actively participate in all the parliamentary functions." [Open Access News]
While this looks like a very interesting and even important article, the irony is that I have to pay to see it. So I guess some information is not freely available. But we are getting there. 12:59:18 PM
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Backlash against OA models?. Stephen Downes, 2004: The Turning Point, Ubiquity v.4,no.46 (January 20-26, 2004). Downes offers an assessment of "issues that will change the way we use the internet." One section, headlined "Attacking Open Content," says that media industries will attempt a backlash against freely-available alternatives to their products. Alongside open courseware and open source, Downes mentions "Open access journals are forcing publishers to retrench." He sees the attack happening on both "legislative" - through intellectual property and legal channels - and "promotional" - or negative advertising on the stability of open content. Finally, Downes calls such attacks "a last desperate gasp before the bottom falls out of the content industry completely... Content is well on its way to being a value-add, something that you might attach to a product, but not something that is the product. Apple uses music to sell iPods, not iPods to sell music." (Source: The ((sci-tech) library question) [Open Access News]
This is exactly right. The price of content drops to zero. You will attach it to something else or you will make a living filtering after publication. But you will have a hard time making money on the publication itself.I would not have money in Elsevier right now. 12:54:53 PM
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More on scientific paper embargoes. Rudy M. Baum, Counterproductive Restrictions, Chemical & Engineering News, January 26, 2004, p.5 (access restricted to subscribers). An editorial in C&EN decries U.S. Treasury Department rulings that make it illegal for American scientific publishers to publish results from researchers in countries subject to U.S. trade embargoes, such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Cuba. Baum notes that the American Chemical Society received 195 submissions from such countries, most from Iran. While ACS is involved in efforts with other societies to urge that the rulings be overturned, Baum points out that "under no circumstances can ACS be a partner to violating U.S. law." Finally, the editor bids ACS members to address the subject with their legislators and concludes by saying while embargoes may be useful diplomatic and political weapons, "they shuold not be extended to blocking the free flow of scientific information." (Note: see earlier postings by Peter Suber from 10/03/03, 10/17/03 and 12/01/03 in this weblog and in the SPARC Open Access Newsletter for background and further discussion of this issue. [Open Access News]
I sure am glad that we even embargo scientific information from these countries. That will show them. 12:50:04 PM
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Apple Knowledge Base RSS feeds. Want to get news about the latest updates to the Apple Knowledge Base in your favorite RSS newsreader? MacOSXHints posted yesterday with a link to the feeds. Excellent! [Mac Net Journal]
Very useful. More and more sites will be doing this. 12:17:25 PM
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Daily Outrage: The Myth of a Master List. Is it smart police work to fingerprint millions at random? [The Nation Weblogs]
As this article mentions, virtually all of the 9/11 terrorists were in the databases without a need to create a whole new one. Collecting info without analysis is a sure path to failure. 11:37:34 AM
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