Ethics and Publishing

Twitter follows Google in issuing a report on governments requests for user account information.

I was reading about the small window that opened the other day in the "Great Firewall of China" and then read this article. It bothers me that so many people seem to be ready to send printing presses to a junkyard and rely entirely on electronic distribution of information. First, there is still a HUGE demographic who does not have regular access to the internet. Secondly, what would happen if all of our information could be controlled with a filtering program? And finally, printed material still gets into places that a computer cannot. I read an opinion piece in the NYT before Christmas that discussed how an Afghanistan woman learned to read with the help of her young daughter and the newspaper pieces that wrapped her fish. Are we turning information into something elitist? Is there a parallel between a push to make everything electronic - so only people with Kindles and laptops can get information, and a time not-so-long-ago when literacy was a class distinction? DO WE REALLY WANT TO CREATE A NEW CLASS DISTINCTION BY RESTRICTING INFORMATION TO ONLY THOSE WHO CAN AFFORD ACCESS TO IT?

Fascinating points!!! The printed word has been responsible for the American colonists ability to read the words of the great Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and perhaps be inspired to foment the continued revolt that brought us America. It brought the thoughts of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and Adolf Hitler to the world. For good, and less so, the printed word has been a catalyst for change that has moved the world and impacted people around the globe. While there are many who have access to the Internet and PC, there are far greater numbers around the world who have no such access, for them even a phone is a luxury. Many represent the populations of the third world, but high numbers are the disadvantaged right here at home or in other developed nations around the globe. When oppressive regimes and less then optimal economic or geographic conditions prevent technology from bringing information via wire or air wave, the printing press will continue to spread the message. Education, found in the pages of textbooks, passed down from generation to generation or moved around the world, bring knowledge and potential to those who have no access to the Internet. Until, in some distant future when the earth is truly the global nation envisioned by some futurists today, the printing press will hold its place as a global facilitator of knowledge and information.

Bentham revisited!!! Hoax article pulled prior to print. How can we better protect the validity of content with the rapid spread of Open Access Publishing?

Copyright battles looming.

Okay, sure, I understand feeling the need to self-publish, and yeah, I can see how even big publishers could have bad marketing, but to take the advance and run? That just seems wrong wrong wrong to me on all levels.

An interesting solution for dealing with DRM issues. 

Viacom sues YouTube for copyright infringement.  YouTube claims that Viacom has been surreptitiously posting its own content. 

It's difficult to defend snooping on users, especially when your motto is don't be evil.

Google says no to censored search results in China, and China responds.  "Don't be evil" has costs.

Although this NYT opinion piece deals with more than just judicial censhorship, it give a very apocolyptic view of the influence of courts on higher education in several categories that I find very frightening in the same way that the fact that one judge was able to censor a sequel to "Catcher in the Rye" without any academic review or input was bone-chilling to me.

Laws on Cyberbullying are increasing in US

Althought RIAA has mostly ceased its method of suing people who download music illegally, it has been at tremendous cost -- financially and in PR.

Interview with the magazine's editor

Disney uses freemium aimed at kids to get parents to pony up $57.95 a year.

OK, this is not about ethics, per se, but it is a very interesting article on the effects of being hyper-connected. Maybe we are losing contact with our domestic lives, family and our ability to think. Or, maybe the predictions that our always-connected society is heading for intellectual doom are just natural reactions to new technology. Consider this quote from the article, "Socrates believed that scrolls would erode thought by permitting people to forget what they had learned because they'd be able to look things up, that 'they wouldn't feel the need to remember it from the inside, completely on their own.' Worse, writing wouldn't 'allow ideas to flow freely and change in real time, the way they do in the mind during oral exchange.'"

Benchmarkreviews.com reviews office equipment, and posts a review about a chair that sounds ... off. It turns out that the review lifts phrases and content from press releases about the chair. Benchmarkreviews responds by permanently banning the person investigating the plagiarism -- and publishing his real name, address and phone number.