LAST spring, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas acquired the papers of Bruce Sterling, a renowned science fiction writer and futurist. But not a single floppy disk or CD-ROM was included among his notes and manuscripts. When pressed to explain why, the prophet of high-tech said digital preservation was doomed to fail.
I can't believe these books haven't been available for years! Also interesting to me because I used to live on the same street and just two blocks down from Beacon Press.
aking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.
the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it.
Search engines and news aggregators contend that their brief article citations fall under the legal principle of fair use.
Each article — and, in the future, each picture and video — would go out with what The A.P. called a digital “wrapper,” data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.
The issues of privacy, free speech and a feral press divided the panel at the Index on Censorship debate at the London School of Economics on Tuesday evening. Chaired by Index on Censorship editor Jo Glanville (right), the event celebrated the launch of the new issue of Index on Censorship magazine, Privacy is dead!