interesting article on information rights and intellectual freedom

Julie E. Cohen, Information Rights and Intellectual Freedom, in Ethics and the Internet 11-32 (Anton Vedder ed., Intersentia 2001).

A combination of technology and strengthened legal protection enables vendors of digital content to exert tighter control over access to and use of that content, and enables trademark owners to exert tighter control over critical and even discursive references to their names, marks, and products. This increased control over inputs to creation and communication — and thus over social "meaning-making processes" in turn seems likely to concentrate ownership of culture in the hands of large producers of standardized, mass-market content. ...

... These conditions do not square with traditional assumptions about intellectual freedom, which presume a rich substrate of publicly accessible information and a substantial degree of autonomy, and of anonymity, for both authors and speakers, on the one hand, and readers and listeners, on the other. Preserving intellectual freedom in a networked information environment therefore requires reconsideration of arguments that equate intellectual freedom with strong intellectual property rights and weak informational privacy protections.

Intellectual property laws do not exist in a vacuum. As our society becomes more of an "information age", information rights - of accessing and using information - will become an important human right.

12:46:36 PM    Comments []  

GATS and public libraries

Public libraries are in the public domain, supported by public taxes. Imagine an information services company entering a market and demanding the same subsidies and tax support that public libraries get. It would be entitled to do so under national treatment rules, providing it can prove itself to be the same kind of operation. The government's most likely response would be to cut back on or eliminate public funding to libraries so as to avoid similar claims in the future.

Wow, this is something I definitely plan to investigate further.

9:53:44 AM    Comments []