Reminder: Jerry Justianto submitted this from Indonesia. Heres in the States, serious legal questions exist about the ability of use of software to circumvent encryption, the reason I've deleted a link even though the DRM/DMCA is an outright attack on fair use. - DR As you may have read on [deleted], a small 32K program has been floating around. It's to Microsoft Reader what Russia's Elcomsoft is to Adobe. It removes high-level Digital Rights Management from purchased e-books. So honest buyers can back up files easily and otherwise take advantage of fair use. Based on informal research, I firmly believe...

The Mathematics Survey Proposal calls for a new means of organizing, communicating and archiving mathematical knowledge, by a faithful representation of that knowledge in cyberspace. The purpose is first of all to provide a peer-reviewed survey of all of mathematics, professionally organized, fully searchable, navigable and retrievable, continuously archived and updated, and available free online to anyone with Internet access, in perpetutity.This is to be achieved by creation of an electronic journal, The Mathematics Survey (or MathSurvey for short), which would be a multi-layered network of richly interlinked electronic survey journals, one in each...

The TeleRead proposal for a well-stocked national digital library system could aid publishers by, among other things, driving down the cost of distributing even nonlibrary books. Publishers could use the same distribution system that libraries did with e-books, and in all cases within the system, readers could share the book files legally. The difference is that the publishers would charge readers, for access to entire encrypted books beyond sample chapters, rather than collecting fees from a national digital library fund. Library catalogues could be all-inclusive and point interested readers--who toggled in this option--to library and nonlibrary books alike. Yes,...

With articles as far back 1949, the NUMDAM site will offer mathematical literature published in France. NUMDAM is short for "NUM...

Sen. Trent Lott of the no-longer-so-sovereign state of Mississippi is still bleeding from his suggestion that the U.S. might have been better off if Strom Thurmond, the former Dixiecrat, had become President. Both in Blogdom and the Real World, which increasingly intersect, many are calling for Lott to step down as leader of the of the Senate Republicans. We won't comment here on the controversy itself even though we found his comments to be just as offensive as billed. But if Lott is indeed eager to demonstrate contrition, he might well show a little imagination and make a policy...

J.D. Lasica is right. The RIAA should go after stores that sell pirated CDs and the like. That's an entirely different issue from fair use. We're talking outright theft here. Same idea would apply to sellers of pirated e-books. Lending copyrighted books, especially with distribution controls in place, is different from ripping off writers and publishers.Under TeleRead, libraries could legally spread thousands of copyrighted e-books around while paying content-creators from a national digital library fund. Books could even remain on users' machines. Fees could be based on accesses to some of all of the library books, with provision in...

One of the reasons why TeleRead favors national digital libraries, plural, is that different countries have different values. Certain Americans, for example, would consider many Moslem countries to be backwards and blame the religious environment for the poverty of the typical Arab. But who says that the West is in all respects the paragon of intellectual freedom? In the January Wired, Charles C. Mann writes of "The First Cloning Superpower," China, which is pouring millions into stem-cell research and other potential lifesavers without the accompanying debate that has bogged down scientists in the States. The idea isn't to clone...

"Jurors have acquitted Elcomsoft because they believed the company didn't mean to violate the law. The case is a key test of the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act." - Ziff Davis, Dec. 18. The TeleRead take: Even though Elcomsoft wasn't intending to violate the DMCA, the case is still a useful reminder to publishers and others of the perils of building their business models around rickety and controversial laws that might someday be weakened not just by the courts but by the U.S. Congress. Horror of horrors, someday Washington may be a little less bought than it is now....

"Internet media company Yahoo Inc. (NasdaqNM:YHOO - news), in its latest move to expand its business through fee-based services, on Tuesday said it has opened a pay-for-use archive of Associated Press news stories." - Reuters, Dec. 17.The TeleRead take: The Reuters account goes on to say that after two weeks, stories will vanish from the free part of Yahoo and will then carry a charge of $1.50 per access via archives. Not sure what the online survival time for free AP stories has been. Still, the item illustrates a trend accelerated by the recent advertising drought.This affects you, fellow...

Some posts on the eBook Community List discussed "Copyright Economics"--a big reason for the scarcity of e-titles from the '60s, '70s and '80s.The TeleRead take: TeleRead would help address this issue by providing for compensation for authors and publishers of many recent books, not just those in the public domain. If nothing else, the plan would offer a good infrastruture for distributing even books not covered by a national digital library fund....

"Software and hardware suppliers hope a $2,000 tablet can replace a stack of documents and a laptop, making it seem like a money saver rather than a money waster. Positioning tablets as successors to notebook PCs (which some now resemble) also may overcome objections to the notion of a two-computer desk, which Gates showed at the November launch of Tablet PCs running his firm's Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system." - Dec. 17 Editor and Publisher.The TeleRead take: The companies pinning their hopes on $2,000 Tablet PCs for reading newspapers and other documents would do well to...

Stocked up on vacation reading the old-fashioned way--a local library sale. Got The Rise of David Levinsky for 50 cents in paperback. This, of course, is the stuff that copyright zealots hate. Why, as the just-given link shows, Abraham Cahan's 1917 masterpiece is even on the Net for free. If Levinsky had been published just few years later, alas, it would have been covered by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. And that would have been society's loss, for Levinsky has much to say about the immigrant experience, regardless of the ethnic groups involved--including the role of books...