Confessions of a Mad Librarian

I didn't do a caveat lector for the previous post, but I should have. It's by no means a complete transcript, but I needed to sleep on it before I felt comfortable commenting on Berry's speech. My apologies if the notes resembled a not-so-small core dump.

It was an interesting lecture. Turns out we were in one of the smaller conference rooms in the Library and it was a capacity crowd ... latecomers sat on the floor in the back. The crowd laughed at the appropriate spots and clapped loudly at the end (some people stood).

But what really struck me about the presentation was something Berry kept referring to over and over:

Current trends in intellectual property controls/legislation are posing just as much of a threat to information access and intellectual freedom as threats to privacy and confidentiality. And librarians need to take a pro-active stance against this, just as they have done in regards to censorship and government intervention in libraries.

I'm paraphrasing, of course. And in a way that dovetails nicely with my own position on issues of copyright, licensing, etc. -- my notes, I hope, are not quite as biased.

Assuming my take is correct, Berry is certainly not the only person to feel this way. The Free Expression Policy Project has a report titled "The Progress of Science and Useful Arts": Why Copyright Today Threatens Intellectual Freedom.

I strongly disagree with Berry in one regard, however: his notion that frivolous/ pop culture material, like Mickey Mouse, can be locked up in copyright in perpetuity as long as publicly relevant, 'socially redeeming' information is made available and put in the public domain after a reasonable time. He did say that it was just his opinion ... nonetheless, no.

1) Just taking the Mickey Mouse example: MM is a figure of enormous (and to some extent global) cultural cachet. Don't believe me, just ask Andy Warhol.

2) Let's leave The Miller Test and its judgments of serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value at the courthouse steps and not take them to the Copyright Office. That road is just a vale of tears.