Re: Copyright in China

[jcg <jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>]

There is an extremely simple answer to the meat-and-potato question - what
awful gastronomy, by the way! -: each institution that holds an OA
repository - university or association - is responsible for the integrity
of its own documents. This is not terribly costly as it is part of the
security system of the whole institution. Anyone citing any document
should refer back to the original document in the source depository, which
is easy and costless since these are OA documents.

The worst case scenario is having a system compromised without people
noticing it. Keeping a copy offline and automatically comparing both sets
of files thorugh some cron job or equivalent must not be beyond the reach
of an average sysadmin, especially if the recipe is diffused across
institutions.  And running a cron job is essentially costless. Such a
verification can be done once a week or even more frequently with little
effort.

Another good way to do all this is using Lockss systematically for OA
repositories. There again, the dynamic distribution and comparison of
elements of archives would wquickly spot integrity problems. in such a
scenario, integrity is part and parcel of an intelligent preservation
strategy.

Best,

Jean-Claude Gu�don

PS Actually, networked digitization makes the alteration of text much
harder than print because it is spotted much more easily than an
alteration in print. The same argument applies to plagiarism and was
initially developed for that question.

On Sun October 24 2004 09:06 pm, Joseph Esposito wrote:

> The following appears as an editorial in today's NY Times
> (http://nytimes.com, registration required).  The topic is copyright.  We
> should expect to see more abuses of this kind in the future, exponentially
> more, as the Internet makes piracy and the alteration of text much easier
> than they are in hardcopy.  Open Access documents will be particularly
> susceptible to this kind of abuse--which, I hasten to add, is not an
> argument against OA but a plea for careful (and costly?) management of all
> digital materials.  The editorial is written with winning humor ("'The
> town of Hope, where I was born, has very good feng shui'"), but it takes
> little to imagine papers on controversial scientific subjects (say, stem
> cell research) getting distorted in awful ways.
>
> My meat-and-potatoes question of the morning is, Who will pay for the
> management of textual integrity when economic incentives are removed from
> the equation?
>
> Joe Esposito
> ___________________________
>
> Bill Clinton's Fake Chinese Life
>
> Published: October 24, 2004
>
> Who knew that back in Bill Clinton's early days in Arkansas, the future
> president and his Uncle Buddy sat around and chewed the fat, ham fat to be
> precise, and talked about how China was one of the world's most ancient
> cultures and had produced Four Great Inventions, one of which was
> gunpowder?

[SNIP]