I admire Carl Malamud immensely and have had the good fortune to help his efforts over the years. Joe Mullin explains Carl’s latest efforts, to free access to Georgia’s legal code from a $1000+ price take, efforts that have netted him a lawsuit. The article is worth a read for the clear explanation of the basis of the state’s case, a claim that annotations on the code are copyright protected even if the text of the law is unencumbered. This is a difference without distinction since the only available text is the one with the annotations. I don’t see Carl backing down, this is a case worth following.
Tag: open access
2015-12-05 The Command Line Podcast
This is an episode of The Command Line Podcast.
This time, I chat about some recent news stories that caught my attention, including:
- The NSA’s Bulk Collection Of Phone Records Ended Saturday. Long Live The Bulk Collection Of Phone Records!
- Senate bill adds new fuel to NSA debate
- The National Security Letter spy tool has been uncloaked, and it’s bad
- Net neutrality goes on trial
- Towns want Verizon investigated for abandoning networks through neglect
- Open Insulin Project Could Help Save Thousands Of Lives And Billions Of Dollars
- Let’s Encrypt Enters Public Beta
- Find a Security Vulnerability, Get a Reward: Announcing EFF’s Security Vulnerability Disclosure Program
- Mozilla Is Flailing When the Internet Needs It the Most
- Thunderbird “a tax” on Firefox development, and Mozilla wants to drop it
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You can directly download the MP3 or Ogg Vorbis audio files. You can grab additional formats and audio source files from the Internet Archive.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
ACM Struggles with Open Access
Cory shares a story on Boing Boing of the Association of Computing Machinery’s opposition to open access. I am an ACM member and also on the US public policy committee. I cannot share the committee’s views on this but what I can say is that many general ACM members share the same frustration that Cory’s submitter mentions. The ACM is made of quite a few folks from academia that otherwise are supporters of open access and there have been issues not just with the organization commenting on the NIH proposal, but on adequate open access of its own assets.
From what I understand, the NIH proposal seems like a reasonable compromise between using exclusion in the interest of profits by journals and public interest by shifting the open access to after an initial for pay period. I struggle to understand why publishers in a field where open access is key to further innovation wouldn’t see the value in this proposal.