From AALL’s Washington Blawg:
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO) announced on November 2 that it is looking for feedback on PACER through an online survey to assess user satisfaction with current services and generate suggestions for future improvements to the system.
Archive of entries posted on November 2009
Administrative Office of U.S. Courts Wants Your Feedback on PACER
From the UK – Legislation to access public’s texts and emails put on hold
From The Guardian:
Plans for a £2bn Home Office surveillance project to track details of everyone’s email, mobile phone, text and internet use have been put on hold after a consultation raised concerns over its technical feasibility, costs and privacy safeguards.
The Home Office has confirmed that legislation for the project, known in Whitehall as the “interception [...]
From the UK – Government opens data to public
From the BBC:
An ambitious website that will open up government data to the public will launch in beta, or pilot, form in December.
Reams of anonymous data about schools, crime and health could all be included.
Data.gov.uk has been developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the web, and Professor Nigel Shadbolt at the University of Southampton.
It [...]
International Activists Launch New Website to Gather and Share Copyright Knowledge
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net), and other international copyright experts joined together today to launch Copyright Watch — a public website created to centralize resources on national copyright laws at www.copyright-watch.org. . .
. . . Copyright Watch is the first comprehensive and up-to-date online repository of national [...]
From India – Centre protests ‘copyright violation’ by Google Books
From the Financial Express:
Web portal Google Books’ initiative to create a digital library by scanning printed publications has triggered alarm bells in India, forcing the Centre to take up the matter with the US government. In a meeting held in the last week of October here, senior Indian officials told their US counterparts that the [...]
Revised Google Settlement Offers Minor Changes on Antitrust Issue, No Response on Library Pricing
From Library Journal:
Shortly before midnight last night, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers released a revised version (PDF) of the Google Book Search Settlement, with some clear concessions to foreign rightsholders (as noted by Publishers Weekly), a vague—and, to critics, fatally inadequate—concession on orphan works. There was also no response to [...]
Google Book Search Settlement Revised: No Reader Privacy Added
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Late Friday night the parties to the Google Book Search class action submitted a revised settlement agreement to the federal court in New York that is hearing the case.
Unfortunately, the parties did not add any reader privacy protections. The only nominal change was that they formally confirmed a position they had [...]
Modifications to the Google Books Settlement
From the Google Public Policy blog:
The changes we’ve made in our amended agreement address many of the concerns we’ve heard (particularly in limiting its international scope), while at the same time preserving the core benefits of the original agreement: opening access to millions of books while providing rightsholders with ways to sell and control their [...]
Copyright overreach goes on world tour
From the Washington Post:
. . . We may be watching a sequel to the DMCA story today. An international copyright agreement, negotiated under unusual secrecy, could impose a further round of restrictions on our use of digital technology.
This Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, represents an attempt by the United States and other countries to set [...]
Child protection or censorship? – Library employees lose jobs over book
From Lexington Herald-Leader:
She is either due your thanks for doing everything in her power to protect children from obscenity or she is due your disdain for wantonly taking away the constitutional rights of the people of Jessamine County.
She never meant to do the latter. She absolutely meant to do the former.