Au Courant

A few weeks ago Publishers Weekly published an adaptation of my June 9 blog post on the Georgia State trial on their “Soapbox” page.  This week’s issue of PW contains a reply by Tom Allen, President of the Association of American Publishers. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Allen and I do a good deal of talking […]

The following post, which provides a constitutional analysis of aspects of the Georgia State case, is written by Bobby Glushko, J.D., who is currently Associate Librarian in the Copyright Office of the University of Michigan Library. I find Glushko’s views to be illuminating and important. In this post, Mr. Glushko speaks for himself, and not […]

I once took one of those pricey b-school executive education workshops designed to teach leadership skills.  One of the things I learned there was the importance of distinguishing between adversaries and enemies.  In academic administration, in library management, and in the life of a faculty member, one often finds oneself in positions that are adverse […]

The current issue of The Economist has a leader supporting the Google settlement and an article in the business section that quotes me in the course of discussing the issue. I am described, with my enthusiastic consent, as running an orphanage. The more I think of it the better the orphan metaphor works. Orphan works […]

I spent Friday at a fascinating conference at the Columbia University Law School, on the subject of (what else?) the Google settlement. Lead counsel from all three parties, lots of other lawyers, several princpals, publishers, authors and librarians were there. I learned something important that at some level I already knew. The most important single […]

In my previous post I briefly discussed peer review, which has been raised by many in the publishing industry as a justification for opposing the NIH mandate for deposit of articles into PubMed Central, and, more broadly, as a justification for the vigorous protection of publisher-held copyright in scholarly publications. In this post I discuss […]

Last week there was a hearing on a new bill before the House Judiciary Committee, the “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.” Think of it as the Clear Skies Act for copyright; an odious piece of corporate welfare wrapped in a friendly layer of doublespeak. The bill, introduced by Michigan Congressman John Conyers, would prohibit […]

I recently changed the Creative Commons license on this blog from Attribution-Non Commercial to Attribution, for a number of reasons. My reasons are all related to a general point of view about commerce, one that is highly unoriginal (having, famously, been well articulated by Adam Smith in 1776) but powerful nonetheless. The profit motive often […]

It is with dismay that I read in today’s New York Times that three distinguished academic presses, Oxford, Cambridge, and Sage, are suing Georgia State for copyright infringement with regard to course websites. I cannot know the merits of the case, but two points are telling. One is that the transaction seems to be between […]

Since everyone else is talking about the new open access mandate from Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, I figure I might as well jump in, too. There are any number of details that will have to be worked out before we know how the mandate will be implemented, and we will probably never know […]