The stockmarket is a mess, senior citizens are threatened by high drug costs, terrorists may eventually nuke Washington, but our bought pols can still find time to do Hollywood's bidding. Rep. Howard Berman, a property of AOL Time Warner and other stellar corporate citizens, Thursday introduced his bill to let content-providers use hacker-style tactics against file-sharing sites. The AP notes that Berman "represents part of Hollywood and is the House's single largest recipient of political donations from the entertainment industry." Also see a Wired News story telling how the bill would give special breaks to AOL Time Warner and...

"The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit Tuesday challenging a controversial 1998 federal law that forbids the dissemination of information that could be used to bypass copy-protection schemes." - AP, July 25, via the Nando Times. The TeleRead take: The ACLU correctly argues that the law threatens freedom of speech among those researching protection technology....

"Using a search engine to locate stories on newspapers' sites violates European Union law, according to a recent ruling by judges in Munich's Upper Court." - Wired News, July 25. The TeleRead take: Let's hope this contagion is wiped out before it reaches and affects the U.S. in a serious way. Once again, of course, the press is emerging is a major enemy of freedom of the press....

"Singers and entertainment attorneys criticized California's $41 billion recording industry Tuesday, testifying that it routinely underreports royalties and cheats artists of millions of dollars." - July 23 AP story out of Sacramento. The TeleRead take: Well, so much for the recording industry as a defender of the creative. Old news, alas. The above item reinforces our comment made elsewhere that the best-lawyered tend to prevail over the most deserving. Meanwhile, in a related vein, let it be noted that the SEC is investigating bookkeeping at AOL Time Warner to see if the company has misrepresented itself to shareholders. Too...

Imagine "a world where everybody assumes they have the right to use intellectual property as they please, and the creator of the work has the burden of discovering that use of her property and billing for it....It can work because most of the infrastructure we need is already in place and paid for." - Disenchanted, July 23, 2002.The TeleRead take: Wonderful to see Disenchanted writing up the failings of the present copyright system, but the above proposal won't fly. Just ask musicians, writers and artists who've been in extended copyright wars with large conglomerates. The real benefits will go...

See a recent San Jose Mercury News article (via LibraryPlanet)....

E-books are hardly taking the world by storm, but the picture just isn't as gloomy as the doomsters claim. From a press release from the Open eBook Forum:--Random House, Inc.'s eBook revenues doubled year-over-year in 2001 and during the latest quarter ending in March, revenues were the highest since the company began selling eBooks in 1998.--HarperCollins' eBook imprint, PerfectBound, has sold more eBooks in the first five months of 2002 than in all of 2001.--Average monthly downloads of Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader have increased by approximately 70% from 2001 to 2002.--Simon & Schuster has seen double-digit growth in eBook...

"It is not so important that principals master the latest toys and gadgets--rather that they show an appreciation for the challenges facing teachers and that they become knowledgeable about the best ways to use these tools to improve reading, reasoning, writing and communication." - Leading by Example: The High Touch High Tech Principal, by Jamie McKenzie in the Summer 2002 issue of From Now on--published originally in the Classroom Connect Newsletter.The TeleRead take: Exactly! Not so coincidentally, a principal was solidly behind a successful e-book project described in TeleRead Update 19....

Good article in the Washington Post today on the decline of rural America and the need for more sensible polices to encourage rural development. How to keep 'em down on the farm? With better telecommunications, in part--to help create more jobs. But that still does not address the content question. Imagine how a well-stocked national digitial library system could help narrow the gap between rural and urban libraries and their users. Attention, Senator Dorgan. The TeleRead approach certainly should be in your territory in more than one sense of the word....

I'd never have confused Robert Pittman, AOL's departing COO, with John Perry Barlow. Pittman was and is a bottom-line guy just like Steve Case. Still, his departure from AOL is one more sign that the old Time Warner people are in control, and that has implications in the copyright war. It puts AOL more solidly than ever on the side of the big copyright holders at the expense of the online side (and in many cases the public). Of course Pittmann himself was a good example of the confusion at AOL. He actually came up with the malarkey that...

TeleRead is an all-volunteer effort. That's good for the integrity of the cause, but can mean that postings will not be as frequent when life and business get in the way. I myself am fighting a mean deadline and coping with my wife's health problems. If you want to know when a daily schedule resumes, drop us an email and we'll put you on the light-volume TeleRead mailing list. Meanwhile, thanks to Amos Bokros, Raymundo Pedraza and other contributors. Guest essays are welcome, especially those that use news events to show the need for well-stocked national digital library systems...

"Computer graphics pose a serious threat to the primacy of writing. The relationship of word and image is changing in our culture, and this change is now related to the rise of computer graphics, as it was related to film and television in the past century." - Jay David Bolter, Paper given at Beloit College Symposium on the future of print culture; reprinted as "Virtual Silence" in Liberal Education v84 n3 1998, found via Newscan and my friend Rick Barry.The TeleRead take: This is exactly why a national digital library isn't enough. It needs to be a true...