Ethics and Publishing

The debate about open access continues with a hearing that was held in Washington on Thursday.

Wired.com sits down with Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred von Lohann to discuss the EFF's proposal for a DMCA exemption for iPhone owners who want to jailbreak their iPhones.

The Wylie agency signed a deal to exclusively distribute e-books of its authors through Amazon. Want to read Philip Roth, Dave Eggers, Saul Bellow in digital form?  Better get a Kindle. 

Debate on the costs of college textbooks.  I think we did a better job at last year's SPI.

This is not likely to have any real effect. Textbooks are sold to a captive market. Those who are paying their tuition without benefit of student loans will buy the books without thinking too much about the cost. Those who are going to school on student loans will go into debt.

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.

GREAT news for the First Amendment!

Here is some information about open access and the Public Knowledge Project. This piece generated a lot of comments, which are also worth reading.

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.'"

ScienceBlogs, a site aggregating dozens of science blogs, on Thursday killed Food Frontiers, a new blog developed and written by Pepsi following a fierce backlash by the site's bloggers and others in the scientific community.

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.