Extending mandatory open access beyond the NIH

The NIH requires free, public access to research they fund. Now the Office of Science and Technology Policy is considering extending the policy to other federal agencies that fund academic research.

Why should we keep others from selling our work?

Techdirt discusses why you shouldn’t be concerned if someone “steals” your work and sells it, noting that “it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

517386_scanning_test

It could mark one of the biggest changes for lawyers joining the profession since the first U.S. bar exam was given in Delaware in 1763 — a single bar exam aimed at standardizing attorney credentials nationwide.

Modern media centers: the hard 20% is socio-legal

Cory Doctorow points out that the first 80% of creating a media center is easy: a decent computer (I used an old Pentium III and an old PowerBook, but you can use newer tech if you’re not a poor student), video out (S-Video to an old-school TV, VGA or HDMI to a new HDTV), big hard drives, maybe network sharing (I used an Airport Extreme I inherited) so you can access media from multiple rooms. But what about content — “the other 20 percent”?

Google Books adds open-standard downloads

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.

What modern copyright law means to our culture

What does it mean to our culture that we have imposed the most draconian restrictions on the reuse of intellectual creations than at any other time?

Evolution vs. Revolution: Overcoming Resistance to Change

Image via CrunchBase

Speaking in the context of technology, Michael Crandell at GigaOM writes:
Take yourself back for a moment to 1990, to the era of dueling operating systems: OS/2 and Windows. At the time, many people still used MS-DOS, and Windows was new (and klunky). Microsoft had cooperated with IBM to create OS/2 to overcome the [...]

"Everything is free" is not a business model

Image via CrunchBase

Mike Masnick responds to the complaint of some people that providing “free” information, tools, and so on (open source, for example) is not a sustainable business model going forward because “everything is free” cannot work:
No one is suggesting any business model where “everything is free.” Everyone’s been focusing on ways to take some [...]

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