Showing posts with label freedom of access to information. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freedom of access to information. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

The Fight for Free Information: Liberate Our Cultural Assets from Economic Prisons; Library Journal, 11/12/12

John N. Berry III, Library Journal; The Fight for Free Information: Liberate Our Cultural Assets from Economic Prisons: "A huge, much more important question lurks over the entire struggle. We have to participate in the ongoing effort to decide whether the digital brave new world into which we are moving will offer people more freedom of access to information and entertainment, or confine our intellectual resources in a maze of impenetrable legal walls that could ultimately end much of the intellectual freedom we have enjoyed through the print era. Is technology liberating information, or will it allow special interests to use the law to deny access to it? Currently there are many attempts to create models for a digital information future. In most of them, the concept of a book collection is replaced by a universal online catalog of digitized works that everyone can simply tap for downloading onto their own devices. The problem is that many will not be able to afford the fees for such access. Proposed models that require us to pay for each use of our intellectual resources are far more plentiful than those that let us pay once for all of our uses of them."