Copyright for Librarians is a useful resource for anyone–not just librarians–to learn about the current state of copyright law.
Norman Oder updates us on the arguments at the Google Books settlement hearing. I found the several following points made by speakers at the hearing particulary interesting.
Cocky Law Blawg brings us this note: The Legal Information Services to the Public (LISP) Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) just completed its latest version of How to Research a Legal Problem: A Guide for Non-Lawyers. It’s available in PDF and Word formats from the LISP website.
Aug 272009
For anyone using any kind of electronic reader — including a regular computer — this addition to Google Books may well prove quite useful: EPUB as a download format.
Aug 212009
The cloud consists of data and services that live on someone else’s servers. Although the term itself is new(ish), the basic idea is embodied by traditional legal research services like LexisNexis and Westlaw — data lives on someone else’s servers, not your own. Thus, someone else controls the data, not you. And someone else can delete or modify the data, and you’d never know…
There have been several stories over the last week about issues related to digital rights management (DRM) on Amazon’s Kindle.
May 122009
Looking for alternatives to expensive legal research through Westlaw and LexisNexis? Here’s a non-exhaustive list of ten alternative sources for legal research (aimed primarily at lawyers and law students) that are useful – and much cheaper.
Apr 292009
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Marketplace: Publicly funded research for a price:
Publicly funded research doesn’t seem so public when the public has to pay to read the results in a journal. A proposed law would help publishing companies preserve their business models, but it would limit public access to the research.
Publishers continue to resist the open-access movement, it [...]
Apr 232009
Simon Chester at Slaw.ca has an excellent article up about World Book and Copyright Day. Of particular importance, I think, is the point the fair use (an exception to the regular restrictions on use provided for under copyright law):
For libraries, and the people who use libraries, it is the exceptions and limitations to the [...]
Apr 082009
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Open-access policy flourishes at NIH : Nature News:
One year on, advocates of free public access to scientific literature are calling a law that requires researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make their manuscripts publicly available at the PubMed Central repository a success. At the same time, the measure continues [...]
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Law Librarians, Schools Propose Bold Move to Digital, Open Access Alternative – Library Journal
In a broad call to action, a group of the nations’ law schools and law librarians have signed the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship. In essence, the statement urges law schools to adopt digital communication, forgo print, [...]
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