RE: Another Angle Regarding Vendors Holding Libraries Responsible for UserViolations of Intellectual Property Law

["Peter Picerno" <ppicerno@nova.edu>]

Davids,

Be careful what you wish for!!

Time has shown over and over again that life has a tendency to imitate
art, especially in the case of emerging technologies!!

The cable repair-persons who monitor this list are probably forwarding the
previous suggestions on to legislators and corporate lawyers at this very
moment, and soon there will be an announcement from high up in the
administration that copyright or potential copyright violations are a
terrorist activity endangering national security, coporate publishing
profits (and the stability of the stock market as well as the economy)
thus subjecting the perpetrators (or potential perpetrators) of such
violations to being held incommunicato in undisclosed locations throughout
the country.

It is also possible that all published material, in order to preserve
national security -- and we all know how dangerous research results, even
in the humanities, are to the formation of public opinion and the accrual
of erroneous knowledge -- will be referreed by one national security agent
before being allowed to be published. Librarians, who are noted for being
reckless libertarians and maintaining the opinion that information of any
and every sort should circulate freely throughout society, will be placed
under special surveilance (watch out for those FBI library patrons!!) and
library policies which challenge the rights of publishers, whose lobbyists
are already active on Capitol Hill, will be struck down in the name of
un-American (i.e., impeding the flow of commerce and business) activities.
These policies will obviate the necessity of expenditures for extra
security guards and security-monitoring devices since they will strike at
the root of the problem, i.e., those who would circumvent industry and
givernment dictated laws about intellectual content, much like the police
force in Los Angeles is now copyrighted so that television cannot portray
any LAPD anything without being subjected to royalty payments (and this
last statement is not life imitating art ... cf a report on NPR about a
week ago!).

Peter Picerno


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu]On Behalf Of David Goodman
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2002 8:07 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Another Angle Regarding Vendors Holding Libraries
Responsible for UserViolations of Intellectual Property Law


Closed stacks, non-circulating collections, and supervised reading rooms
will take care of the problems for printed material. Auditing all
library's computer user logs and scanning their hard disks on a regular
basis will take care of it for electronic. Libraries have long had the
right to do the first--and have long done so for rare book and manuscript
collections. Apparently universities have the right to do the second for
the computers they own, and students need merely be required to grant
permission for the use of the security software on their private machines
as a condition of enrollment (it could be a click-on button in the
electronic application for admission). The only remaining problem is
bookstores. I think they'd have to be confined to selling pre-approved
material, printed so as to disintegrate after one reading.

For additional security, private ownership of copy machines could be made
illegal, and a chip placed in every computer printer preventing the
printing of more than one copy of an item. It might even be possible to
check ownership before printing, analogously to the way certain software
checks that two copies of the same license number are not simultaneously
connected to the network.
--