It was a big week for copyright. Events were reported all over the blogosphere. My friend and fellow grad student, Carlos Ovalle, has a nice roundup on his blog, Copy This Blog, where he reports several unsurprising legal opinions based in the sad music industry war against college students, and in a post a few days earlier, the related decision of Ohio University to ban p2p software on its system.
MPAA's former head, Jack Valenti, died this week. Lawrence Lessig offers an interesting memoir.
And the Stanford Center for Internet and Society posted a note about a decision that determined that downloads were not performances for ASCAP/BMI/SESAC royalty purposes.
Tobe Liebert, one of my favorite law librarians (I have lots of favorite law libraians -- our UT Law School Library is one of the best!), posted a note about Siva Vaidhyanathan's explication of his position regarding the three serious dangers of the Google Book Search Project, well articulated and succinct. His argument raises important questions about a future that includes wildcard projects like Google Book Search. If you have a chance to see Siva in person, don't miss it.
On another note, I am winding down my first full year of grad school. Classes end next week. Papers are due, presentations will be made, files of printed articles will be dumped (recycled, of course). It has been a really amazing experience for me, one that still astonishes me, nearly 9 months into it. I'm registered for the summer session and for the fall. I shift focus next year to research, having been accepted into the Ph.D. program. In the meantime, I head off to France to do a little bit of research, sort of getting my feet wet in the Seine (and the Cote d'Azure). Whatever I conclude based on my little sojourn will be reported through the CIP, perhaps even here on the blog. I'm going to write a paper, though I have to admit, I call it that only reluctantly, because I am planning to put my money where my mouth is -- I'm focusing on the future of the book, and I'm going to place all my research data, analysis, results and predictions in forms that explore that future. So, it will be fun, as well as instructive for me to figure out novel ways to report research in progress. I hope you'll enjoy that exploration too. The future of libraries is affected directly by the future of books so it is in our interests to pay attention to the expansion of the expressiveness we experience in books today.
