The New Partisan Couldn’t Be More Proud:

New York Press editors (and New Partisan founders) Harry Siegel, Tim Marchman, Jonathan Leaf and columnist Azi Paybarah resigned yesterday, rather than compromise their journalistic ideals, when the paper’s ownership censored content, including the infamous Danish Muhammed cartoons.

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View an archived video of “Are the Archives Doomed?” Rick Prelinger presented this lecture in January at the University of Pittsburgh, and it’s a little over an hour long. The lecture is on

the marginalization of archives in light of copyright issues, advances in technology and resistance to providing access to collections. Mr. Prelinger will address the potential new public roles of the archivist and their collections.

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SSRN-Google Book Search: Fair Use, Fair Dealing and the Case for Intermediary Copying by Paul Ganley

This article examines the legality of Google’s Library Project under U.S. and U.K. copyright law. The Library Project provides a useful example of the divergence in approach to copyright exceptions in these two jurisdictions. In particular, whilst Google’s plans have generated a great deal of controversy, it at least has an arguable case under U.S. law that its use is fair use. No analogous argument can be made under U.K law. The main purpose of this article is to highlight this distinction and to suggest that U.K copyright law is failing to adequately account for transformations in the mode and manner in which individuals interact with information.

(via Open Access News)
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The president of the University of Michigan is outspoken in her support of Google’s digitization efforts:

So what will Google Book Search, snippets and all, do for book sales? It will whet the appetites of users and drive them to libraries, bookstores, and online retailers to buy more books. I believe we are seeing an exciting new business model unfolding, and I can’t understand why any bookseller or publisher, especially scholarly presses with such narrow audiences, would oppose an approach that all but guarantees increased exposure.

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Appreciative Inquiry (AI). A cousin of Open Access (OA)?

Appreciative Inquiry focuses us on the positive aspects of our lives and leverages them to correct the negative. It’s the opposite of ‘problem-solving.

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Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig. Quite naturally, the book is available for free download.
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Finally, if you’re not yet familiar with Creative Commons, it is time:

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works.