Confessions of a Mad Librarian

Lots of things going on ...

1) I'm going to IL next week. I'm making no promises to blog or even pay 100% attention, but it should be pretty cool. Plus, you know ... Monterey. Barking seals. Otters. All of the good.

2) Google has another lawsuit on its hands over the library portion of the Google Print project.

Mrs. Schroeder noted that while “Google Print Library could help many authors get more exposure and maybe even sell more books, authors and publishers should not be asked to waive their long-held rights so that Google can profit from this venture.”

3) A couple of European policy wonks muse on a world without copyright [caveat lector - I think it's an interesting article but I don't necessarily subscribe to any and everything in the article; I just thought it would be nice to share]:

What might an alternative idea of copyright look like? To arrive at that alternative, we first have to acknowledge that artists are entrepreneurs. They take the initiative to craft a given work and offer it to a market. Others can also take that initiative, for example a producer or patron who in turn employs artists. All of these artistic initiators have one thing in common: They take entrepreneurial risks.

What copyrights do is precisely to limit those risks. The cultural entrepreneur receives the right to erect a protective barrier around his or her work, notably a monopoly to exploit the work for a seemingly endless period of time. That protection also covers anything that resembles the work in one way or the other. That is bizarre.

We must keep in mind, of course, that every artistic work - whether it is a soap opera, a composition by Luciano Berio, or a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger - derives the better part of its substance from the work of others, from the public domain. Originality is a relative concept; in no other culture around the globe, except for the contemporary Western one, can a person call himself the owner of a melody, an image, a word. It is therefore an exaggeration to gratuitously allow such work the far-reaching protections, ownership title and risk-exclusion that copyright has to offer.

4) Things to make you go "awwwwww ...": online erotic magazine Nerve [perhaps not safe for work, depending on the intensity of the pr0n filter] has named cataloguer extraordinaire Sanford Berman as its Crush of the Week:

Just last month, the bearded, bespectacled seventy-two year old wrote the Library of Congress to "warmly suggest" the creation of a new subject heading close to our hearts: "anal fisting." And for that, he is our crush of the week.

That last entry won't do me any favours in fighting off the porn spam, but Sandy is worth it ...