Now that Bill C-11, Canada’s Act to Amend the Copyright Act, has undergone its second reading in the House of Commons, it will be subject to two more votes before it likely heads to the Senate and finally to royal assent. Given our current majority Conservative government, this long-impending introduction of a “Canadian DMCA” will […]
It seems that the pot is starting (or have already started) to boil over. The role of academic publishing houses in the dissemination of knowledge has attracted the attention of people outside academia. And, certainly, it has attracted the attention of our blog. Mary Gray, Chris Boulton, and Zachary McDowell have chimed in with some important ideas about the philosophical […]
The president, secretary, and immediate past president of the International Mathematical Union released a statement, February 8, 2012, challenging academic publishing giant, Elsevier, to rethink their approach to (some might say monopoly stranglehold on) access to academic scholarship. You can find their statement here: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/a-more-formal-statement-about-mathematical-publishing/ Even though the signatories represent themselves as individuals, rather than […]
So, I know I’m using emancipation very loosely here. Saying emancipation begs the question: Emancipation from what? I’m trying to cheekily hark back to early ideas of the Internet as a space that can emancipate us from mass culture by making us all producers and consumers of cultural products. Nowadays, most of us accept that the cultural production […]
As reported by the Wall Street Journal last Thursday, Google faces a potential civil antitrust investigation from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for practices that include privileging certain search results based on how much a company is willing to pay for such ‘advertising.’ This lack of transparency in Google’s advertising business practices, along with the […]