There have been a couple of high-profile cases this summer involving US law enforcement seeking library computers as evidence, and showing up without a warrant in hand:

1. In Maryland, FBI agents took two computers from a Frederick County Library. The library director granted them permission, although they came without a warrant.
2. In Vermont, state police detectives were told by a librarian that they had to go back and get a warrant before seizing Kimball Public Library’s public access computers to investigate a child’s disappearance.

I want to discuss these cases, because I’ve been mulling over the similarities and differences between them, and trying to figure out what we can learn from the two situations.

First of all, what are the differences between these two cases? I’m sure there are several, and here are some of the major ones I’ve identified thus far:

• Vermont vs Maryland cultural variances - VT is known for liberalism, independence, cows, white people and lots of libraries.  The state also has a new law that went into effect a couple weeks after the Kimball incident, which requires libraries to demand court orders before turning over records to law enforcement. Frederick MD is very close to Washington DC, very military and politics influenced, and semi-Southern.  The biggest employer in the country, by a large margin, is US Army base Fort Detrick.
• Type of law enforcement officers – A FBI request seems to me to be more intimidating, commanding, carry more weight than one from the state police.
• Type of case – This could work both ways.  A federal case (MD) might be more compelling than a local case (VT), but on the other hand the VT case was about a missing 12-year old girl, which seems to be both very time sensitive and heartstring-tugging.  The case of the MD case has not officially been stated, but is generally assumed to have to do with the 2001 anthrax mailings in the US, the major suspect of which recently died of an apparent suicide, which seems less time sensitive or pressing, but does hark back to the post- 9/11 patriotism that may be a bigger cultural factor in Frederick MD than in some other regions.
• Responding librarian – in VT it was a librarian doing storytime who responded to the police request.  In MD it was the library director, whom I assume was called by other staff to come out and deal with the FBI agents in the library.  Did the library director feel he had more discretion to make a judgment call in this type of matter, rather than blindly following policy?  Had he not developed a policy for his libraries?  I don’t know, but he is likely the person responsible for the “bottom line” in privacy policy, as opposed to a non-directorial librarian who may be more likely to feel bound to follow written policy.

Listing these out, and pondering their influence on the responding librarians’ decisions, I was reminded of when I used to work in domestic violence response services.  I know that if we had someone, particularly a child, go missing, and someone was withholding a computer that might contain evidence that might lead to locating that child I would have been livid. My mission in such a circumstance would be to do anything and everything possible to find that child and bring her home as safely as possible.

On the other hand, one of the things I learned from working in domestic violence and sexual assault agencies is the value of multiple advocates representing different interests. The shelters I staffed worked best for a family when mom had one advocate looking out for her interests and her child had a different advocate looking out for his best interests.  When advocates were free to fully focus on the needs of one facet of the family, their various perspectives could then be heard, weighed and combined for the best possible outcomes.

Similarly, I think it’s important for libraries to demand warrants from law enforcement, because it’s too easy for someone whose main focus is law enforcement to lose perspective on general civil rights outside of the current case.

So while (in the above hypothetical situation) I might have been livid at a librarian for withholding a computer for a couple of hours – hours in which a child might be being assaulted! – on balance I am glad the librarians would be there to demand the proper paw enforcement procedures be followed.  Because their holding that line would free me to fully advocate for the child’s welfare without worrying about stopping and trying to weigh the general public’s privacy rights against my current mission.

Let’s go back to the Kimball and Frederick library computer seizures now.  I think it’s clear that I favour the Kimball type response.  I don’t want librarians to be weighing the merits of privacy rights vs an individual legal investigation in the heat of the moment. I don’t want the culture of the local environment to sway decisions librarians are pressured into making on the spot, with cops staring them down. I see libraries as advocates for the privacy rights of the public, and I’m obviously not alone in this perspective. The ALA, among other library associations, has long been a staunch advocate of privacy rights, stating that:

“Confidentiality of library records is a core value of librarianship”

I want the well-pondered leadership of professional standards and guidelines to outweigh any sudden freaked-out librarian split-second judgment calls. I believe this frees law enforcement to do their job - trying to properly solve a crime - the best they can as well.

I do want to say that, while I don’t necessarily agree with both librarian responses above, I think it’s important to support both the librarians involved in these two cases as people who were doing their best on the job. Having the cops, let alone the feds, show up and demand something from you is pretty shocking, if not downright scary. It’s not a typical event in the day-to-day life of a public librarian. (My own experience in public libraries was far more focused on pointing people to those damned Rainbow Fairy books, the latest Maeve Binchy novel in large print, or the bathroom, than overtly defending citizens’ rights on a daily basis. On a really exciting day I’d have a high school student doing a report on astronomy, you know?)

If a librarian is really lucky, they had a class on intellectual freedom way back in library school.  More likely they had a discussion somewhere along the line, perhaps in a collection development course, about book challenges.  And very possibly they had no academic background on the topic at all – just whatever they had gleaned from on the job trainings or conference sessions.  I consider myself lucky to have had a full class on IF in my library school (it’s one of the reasons I selected that particular school, in fact), but thinking back to my job orientation at the public library I don’t think any protocol regarding police requests was included.

Had I been the only librarian holding down a branch when the cops walked in and demanded it, it’s entirely possible that I would have freaked out and had no idea what to do.  Of course this is Canada where the PATRIOT Act is more of an arm’s length threat, but I digress…My point is that we don’t know what type of background, training or support from their library administration these two librarians had, but that the variance in librarian response to similar seizure requests – despite clear guidelines from the ALA – indicates a need for more discussion of and training on privacy issues.

I’ve been thinking about digitization and history; specifically the trusim that history is written by the victors (aka the privileged), and what that means for our current era.

With literacy and war-conquests-slash-oppression on the part of literate groups, orality became devalued as “official” history in most of the mainstream, dominant, Western societies.  Non-literate or illiterate people and groups have largely either been written out or written *about* in what we now deem to be literature and history. (Please forgive my rushed-through and simplistic history of the conquests of literacy-based-culture here…this is just the context part of the post!) With mass printing, the privilege bar to produce, distribute and preserve was reinforced, perhaps nudged a bit, right?  Certainly by the 20th century just writing something down was rarely enough to incorporate it into official narratives of “history”; the writing had to be adjudicated and then reproduced by a professional publisher, preserved by an archivist, or otherwise selected by someone with societal power.

I went to undergrad in 1994.  It was a heady, exciting time, especially if you worked in a library, as I was fortunate enough to do.  The Internet had just gone public!  Netscape and Mozilla were battling it out!  Web 2.0 was already being foreshadowed by innovators like Crayon (remember CraYoN - Create your own newspaper?  Early mashup, back in ‘95!). All the street-level activists in my circles were xeroxing radical zines on their temp job office photocopiers, and the Internet was going to democratize the world! Anyone could publish their work and reach the whole world! Well, anyone in the portions of the world that had electricity at least.  Or at least the literate portions of the world that had electricity…

< - -time warp here- - >

Now, we have these amazing Open Access repositories forming, and we have increasing numbers of people creating and sharing content online. I’m particularly excited about and interested in the community-based archiving projects that are popping up. (**Note to self: write a post about some of these cool projects soon**)

BUT, I have a big concern. I think we’ve all outgrown the “the Internet is going to democratize the world!” phase by now (yes? no?), but I don’t think we’re paying adequate attention to the fact that this migration of “scholarship” and preservation – basically the bulk of what will be tomorrow’s “history”  - is reinforcing the exclusive nature of historical preservation.

We are beginning to see documentation of the same type of hierarchical dynamics in online content generation as we do in printed matter.  I’ve seen recent scholarship focused on the male-female gender gap both in scholarly self-archiving and in creative digital media sharing.

I know most of us aren’t purposefully torching the libraries of our enemies and competitors.  And I don’t want to question the very sensible move of scholarly communication into online, open access format.  But I would like to talk with more folk about how we can hark back to our idealistic 1994 mentality and regain those ideals, if not the naïveté, relating to the potential that digitization holds for the whole of society.

Academic libraries are working fast and furious toward digitally archiving their institutions’ scholarly output.  I think there’s a place for public libraries to serve an organizing function in the community in terms of creating public history. A public history project, perhaps.

Public History Project…I kind of like the sound of that.  Too bad the acronym’s already pretty much “taken.”  Maybe if we slap a “Canadian” on the front end or some such…

Of course, it’s easy to spout off about, and much harder to actually figure out the nuts & bolts: How to you ensure broad community representation?  What do you do with communities that don’t want to participate? How do you select what is of long-term value – or do you at all?  Is that up to the communities themselves, perhaps?  Do you allocate more space to groups under-represented in formal histories and scholarly communities?  Is there content that is unacceptable? What about illegal stuff?  Who’s responsible for the maintenance?  And where does all of this…stuff…reside, anyway?  What formats can reasonably be accepted and preserved? Should the government be involved in this?  What about private funding?  How do you keep things impartial?  Should you strive to keep things impartial?

Despite all of this chaos in my mind about the details, I do think that public libraries are uniquely suited to facilitate a public history project: something technically based on open source software, and developed in coalition with community groups.  And, frankly, perhaps in collaboration with academic libraries, who are doing TONS of work already getting Institutional Repositories up and running.

What are your thoughts?

-Greyson

Can you stand to hear me kvetch again about irresponsible health reporting?

Today it’s the CBC (among others), whose health headline screams: Bone density level may act as predictor of breast cancer

It’s one of those articles without a byline, and the nameless reporter who penned this brief article clearly has no idea what they are talking about. But I guess fearmongering is always a good story-seller, so they wrote an article anyway.  They must have been in quite a rush, however, as not only is this yet another article written based only on a press release about a forthcoming article, the press release isn’t even quoted correctly.

The article begins:

In addition to mammograms, ultrasounds and blood tests, doctors may have a new tool in their breast-cancer-screening arsenal.

Off to a bad start. Bone density testing is not used like a mammogram or ultrasound, both of which are used to detect masses that may indicate cancer. I mean they’re all imaging tests, but there is nothing in bone densiometry that can indicate a suspicious lump in your breast for investigation. It seems that the article in question here is about screening for risk factors, which one could liken to blood tests if you’re talking about the small minority of breast cancers that are linked to the BRCA 1 & 2 gene variations found in 0.1-0.6% of the US population…but even that is a stretch.

The article about the unseen-article states that:

In the study, 10,000 post-menopausal women with an average age of 63 were studied in 40 health centres in the U.S.

without mentioning the critical context that this study was done on Women’s Health Initiative participants and is part of the WHI study backlash/follow up wave we are currently riding.

The CBC delivers the article punchline that:

Higher bone mineral density, which is governed by hormonal levels in a woman’s body throughout her lifetime, may lead to a higher a risk of breast cancer.

Without mentioning the CRITICAL fact that the study was funded by the Eli Lilly Company.  Lilly, incidentally, makes Raloxifene (aka Evista, Keoxifene), a newish bone density drug that – unlike the older bisphosphonate class of bone density drugs – may reduce the risk of breast cancer.

Wait, you mean to say that a study that says that high bone density could be linked with higher risk of breast cancer, funded by a company making a drug that builds bone density while allegedly decreasing risk of breast cancer might be victim of conflict of interest? Crazy.  </sarcasm>  Of course, we can’t evaluate for ourselves because the full article isn’t available…but we’ll get to that later.

Raloxifine, of course, has been struggling to gain market share against the older bisphosphonates in the face of a black box warning (for Increased Risk of Venous Thromboembolism and Death from Stroke) and multiple FDA warning letters for direct-to-consumer advertising practices in violation of federal guidelines (and if you know how rare it is for the FDA to actually send these letters, you know these must be rather egregious violations!). Not hard to imagine that the maker of such a drug might wish to have some studies encourage new prescriptions.

It would have been nice - ethical even - to have some context for this article’s findings: not only the study’s funding source, but also an idea of how prevalent the problems of osteoporosis, breast cancer, and cardiovascular disease are for postmenopausal women.  Want it?  It’s not hard to find (pdf here). Almost 39% of deaths among women 65+ in the US are due to heart disease or stroke.  19.3% are due to all cancers combined.  1.8% are due to unintentional injuries, and even if you attributed every single pneumonia death to a fracture and hospitalization (common but certainly not the only way to die of pneumonia) that only adds an additional 1.6% of all total deaths.  While personal and family medical specifics make a lot of difference in terms of the weight given to risk factors, it’s a no-brainer that cardiovascular events should be a bigger concern than bone fractures as far as preventable deaths in postmenopausal women.  It’s not rocket science here; I’m a librarian not a doctor.  Finding this info took only a mere Google search, not even a single subscription database.  A health journalist should be able to provide this context too.

Finally, in case you were a CBC reader who happened to be health literate enough to question the, er, thoroughness, of the news clip and wanted to go to the full article to read it, the CBC includes a final sentence:

The study is published in the July 28 issue of Cancer.

This would be quite helpful, were there a July 28 issue of the journal Cancer. However, Cancer is published on the 1 and 15 of each month.  As of today there are not any “early view” articles released on the 28 either, nor does this article appear in either the July 15 or August 1 issue. Way to fact check, CBC.

(For those who are interested in the actual study, please note that this article should be found in the September 1 issue of Cancer.)

A better example of quick but accurate health reporting from a pre-publication press release can be found here. CBC, please take note. You’re supposedly the national public broadcaster.  I expect better.

Is it too impolitic for me to say that I hope the good folk over at Media Doctor let the CBC have it over stuff like this?  Hmm…perhaps what I ought to be doing is talking with fellow health librarians about how we can better reach our health beat journalists in order to make it easier for them to write accurate articles. Okay, okay, I’ll do that.  But I’m still gonna kvetch about irresponsible reporting in the meantime.

-Greyson

I know, I know, everything is “such and such 2.0” now, and it’s getting really old.  I agree!  However, this really is “2.0,” as direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of pharmaceuticals has officially moved from being all “push” media into its own special social networking universe. Check it out:

The Toronto Star called my attention to the social networking website www.RareShare.org last week. The uncritical article by the “Faith and Ethics Reporter” acclaimed RareShare for creating online support for the “forgotten people” who have diseases so rare that there are no local face-to-face support groups.  Call me cynical, but I wish the article went a little heavier on the ethics and a little lighter on the faith in altruistic corporate goodwill.

The RareShare site is tight-lipped about its corporate sponsors. From publicly accessible information, we know that the 2 founders of the site are U.S. business guys with specialisations in high-growth tech and biotech and communications. We know one of the corporate partners behind the RareShare site is Nutra Pharma, currently testing a drug for the rare disease adrenomyeloneuropathy.  And we know that, in addition to “moderated” (by whom?) discussions in communities organized by disease, the site plans to have doctors (presumably those who are friendly with the corporate sponsors of the site?) holding online Q&A sessions with community members.

The Privacy Policy is a bit odd, in that it appears to have been written for another website. ?? They collect your email address and track your travels in order to improve their page, customize their content to you, etc. They’ll remove your name and phone # when they share your info with other companies. They use cookies, and record session info, “such as items that consumers add to their shopping cart”?  Shopping cart?  Huh?  If you give your telephone #, they’ll only use it to contact you regarding orders you have placed online? What kind of a website is this anyway?

It is perhaps worth noting that the RareShare defintion of “rare” is considerably broader than some other lists of rare diseases, including such conditions as gestational diabetes, which occurs in about 4% of pregnancies, according to the American Diabetes Association. According to the Canadian Organization for Rare Disorders, “A rare or “orphan” disease affects fewer than 1 in 2,000 people.”  While expectant mothers with gestational diabetes may legitimately feel the need for more support, they are hardly living with a rare disease.  The inclusion of such common ailments – particularly ones such as diabetes that are hotbeds of new pharmaceutical interest, and sometimes lead to ongoing monitoring and medication for the rest of one’s life – do raise a question of drug company profit motive.

It’s all not necessarily fishy, but it is a perfect setup for embedded DTCA with a social environment created to reach vulnerable and isolated populations. Sort of makes me want to lurk around and see what goes on once things get kicking in their forums…

…So I admit it: I did just that. Here’s my report. The site is so new that there’s not much there yet, so it’s a bit hard to assess where it’s going.  There were about 160 members as of when I peeked in, most of whom appear to be patients or family members of patients. These individuals post seeking help, advice, and connection with others.  Many of them are disclosing their personal stories: their ages, location, when they were diagnoses, what drugs they’ve already tried, etc. They join ”communities” of diseases based on their actual or suspected diagnoses.

Then, there are 2 members who appear to be doing far more posting then everyone else: one of the 2 site founders, and the CEO of a drug company.  The site founder has joined several communities and posted welcome messages in the forums.  The CEO has similarly joined many communities and in some he has posted messages such as:

“We’ve found that an already existing class of drugs is effective about half the time in XYZ syndrome. Please contact me for details of our Next Generation Disease Management service.”

“We think an already existing class of drugs may help in XYZ disease. Please contact me for details of our Phase IV trial.”

”We think already existing drugs may supplement standard chemotherapy and radiation treatment for XYZ cancer. Please contact me for details of our Phase IV trial.”

In addition to clinical trial recruitment, there is already some advertising for lab tests, for example Designer Diagnostics test kits of Nontuberculosis Mycobacteria (NTM).  Each disease community “home” has a link to more information about the disease.  Many of these pages are still pretty empty, but in the case of a few, this link leads to a full page that does not document the source of most of its information.  On the NTM disease information page, for example, under “diagnostic tests” there is only one brand of test mentioned.  If you follow the link to more information about the test, you can read about why this test is allegedly better than other tests, and you can follow another link right to the website of the manufacturer of the test.

Annnnnd, if you follow enough links on the Designer Diagnostics website, you can eventually get to the fact that they have a parent company.  This parent company, unsurprisingly, is the very same Nutra Pharma that you may recall is one of the corporate partners behind RareShare.

What a coincidence.

There is a clear and present need for more support and networking among patients and doctors dealing with rare diseases. If the public sector is not going to provide this type of health care, information and support, it is natural that the private sector will naturally seize the opportunity. We should not for a moment, however, forget that firms, unlike public health infrastructures, work from a place of their own bottom line and fiscal responsibility to their shareholders. For them to actually act out of total altruism and concern for the patients would be a conflict of interest.

If you’ve heard about this week’s court order (ArsTechnica plain-English breakdown here) in the Viacom-YouTube lawsuit, you probably already know it makes a parody of privacy. It clearly states for the world that corporate IP such as search algorithms should be held in the utmost confidence. However, concerns over the revealing of personal information such as location, login names, and video viewing history are really just “speculative.” (This despite personal video usage history being explicitly protected by U.S. law.)

Now I may be a cockeyed optimist, but I don`t think Judge Louis Stanton had any nefarious intentions in making this ruling. I think Stanton is just the latest high-profile example of a government representative exercising government power over information technology without understanding how IT works. (Katie blogged about this same problem back here.)

The EFF`s Kurt Opsahl picks apart the court order in a nice blog post that really calls into question whether Judge Stanton understands IP addresses, user IDs, video technologies of the 21st century, and data protection legislation. The Washington Post`s Michael Arrington points out that Stanton graduated from law school over 50 years ago, so his ignorance in matters tech should not be shocking.

We have a similar problem with legislators. Even our very well-intentioned Bill C-552, aka the Canadian Net Neutrality Bill, has shortcomings that I can only assume are the result of MP Angus not being quite well informed enough. Yes, C-552 is on the right track, but…it could be better with a little more information and consultation with IT-literate stakeholders.

Of course, our largest Canadian example, hanging directly over our heads at the moment is Copyright Bill C-61, aka the Canadian DMCA. Anyone who listens to the CBC’s Search Engine knows that Industry Minister Jim Prentice (who has already been embarrassed by a wikipedia bio editing blooper) doesn’t have a clue (podcast here) about what the copyright bill really means. (Oddly, that show ended up being the last ever for Search Engine.) Talk about an IT-illiterate making telecom policy; sheesh. It would be funny if the stakes weren`t so high.

C-61 is actually a prime example of the dangers of tech-illiterate government, because it is the type of legislation that, if passed, will likely spawn lawsuits similar to the Viacom-YouTube in Canadian courts. Which can then be presided over by judges who, in turn, do not understand the way technology works.

IT-ignorant lawmakers make technology laws, and IT-ignorant judges interpret those laws when large corporations battle against scary new paradigms or information dissemination…it`s almost enough to make one become a luddite, merely in order to protect oneself.

Then, of course, one might be qualified for a technology-related government appointment.

-Greyson

I`ve had several people ask me to expand on my third point from my Why I`m not a children`s librarian post. Here`s a little bit more on the topic of our frequent shortfalls in achieving social justice orientation in youth services, and my personal experiences with librarians shaming me without realising it.

“If their kid is at daycare all day, the daycare provider is really the parent anyway.”

My blood ran cold when she said that.

I thought of my son, in daycare at that very moment so I could be there in that library meeting, and held my breath as well as my tongue.

Not that I hadn’t heard statements like that before. Not that I considered myself especially vulnerable to such judgments.

I just wasn’t expecting it there – from a “friend” and colleague of mine, at a meeting of a team of children’s librarians specifically dedicated to providing culturally appropriate and accessible outreach programming for socially excluded children and families. The topic of discussion was how to extend outreach library services to go past the child to influence the whole family, so that parents might, say, bring their kids to the library.

And what I really didn’t expect, from that group in particular, was the fact that when one member said something outrageous like the above statement, no one else in the room spoke up. To the day I don’t really know if it was the dreaded librarian “niceness” striking again (inhibiting our ability to hold ourselves/each other accountable), or whether no one else thought she was being offensive.

I was a student intern. They were allowing me to sit in on their meeting, so I could learn. I didn’t feel like I could interrupt and intervene at that time. But I certainly did learn.

***

The dominant library paradigm holds very particular cultural conceptions of the ownership/belonging/responsibility of children. These notions are largely based in euro-colonial and neo-liberal values of the family as isolated, self-sufficient unit.

Even in our progressive and outreach programs, are we really listening to our communities, parents, families, and empowering them to make our services their own?

***

“The best library users, the ones we love to work with, are the parents who already bring their children to storytime. They are the ideal. I love to work with them.”

A library school instructor, one whom I sincerely like and respect, said this in front of a class I took.

Again, I was floored.

My child has never been to a library storytime. I have been a working parent since he was 2 weeks old, first lugging him on my back to my office, and then, too soon for my liking, sending him to daycare. My local library branch does not hold weekend storytimes for working parents. Even the summer reading club events are during weekday workdays, much to my child’s dismay.

I always garnered compliments from my library supervisors, but they don’t know my dirty secret – that I am The Non-Ideal Parent as a patron.

Shh…don`t tell!

***

We are beginning to acknowledge that “the ideal patron” is a problem - that this notion is culturally biased and exclusive; that we should be questioning it. I say this because we as a discipline have published papers to this effect, bestowed honours upon some individuals who have championed this message, and sometimes even committed funding to novel projects that work toward a more just community ownership of libraries.

But trickle down takes a long time, when it works. Will the status quo for plain old regular librarians – ones not leading special programs or “moving and shaking” their institutions - ever change?

***

Oh, but I didn’t mean you. Your son is wonderful, so smart.

Yes, and I don’t “look Jewish,” right? Let me guess, some of your best friends are black and gay?

Putting down who I am, my history and identity, and then telling me I am better than everyone else like me is not a complement.

I am not an exception.

Or rather, we are all exceptions.

I am a bit uncommon, in that I was a low-income single parent who went back to school and became a librarian. But I was certainly not the only one who met that profile in my library school intake of 40 people.

Really, it is highly likely that I am only unusual in following this path because of my privilege. Coming from a family with higher education and economic privilege, It was relatively easy to make the decision to go to grad school and change my situation. I was able to see that option and take the necessary path to get there, yes. However, the important part of this story is not so much how I got where I am now, but what I know of where I was a few years ago.

I know, I know, I’m different from all the other Black/Jewish/queer/Asian/poor/Latina/whatever people. The other daycare parents. You didn’t mean that slur to apply to me.

Isn’t that line getting old by now? Isn’t it one libraries shouldn’t be using anyway?

-Greyson

If anyone was wondering, you can apparently get a bunch of new blog traffic if you write about both Harry Potter and naked human vaginas.

Is that disturbing?

Rachel Walden’s follow-up post on POPLINE has given me a kick in the pants to get moving on my own follow-up post. (Yes, the one that I alluded to months ago…)

I’ve been thinking about the POPLINE debacle. While Rachel rightly points out that all is not perfectly resolved, and we await more answers, in general I’ve been wondering about what went so darned right.

Yes,I know I’ve been one of many ranting about what went wrong - i.e. USAID anti-abortion policies interfering with access to information - but what went right is a different question all together. Considering the positive is something I don’t get to ponder a lot on this blog, so indulge me here.

To recap, for anyone not following along in April: A librarian noticed that abortion was no longer a searchable term in the database and sent out an email about it. The email was passed along on various health librarian and feminist listservs and public outcry was raised. Who-knows-how-many of us emailed the POPLINE admins and blogged it with outrage, and within two days the dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health issued a public statement assuring the world that this would be rectified and investigated.

Wow.

So…as I asked before, what went right here? Why were we successful in calling attention to this issue, and getting it addressed so swiftly? Why did this work fairly well, when in comparison the Canadian Health Network was shut down after months of protest by health librarians, a petition, multiple high-profile newspaper articles, and various other media attention? I’ve been pondering this, trying to figure out what we can do in the future to make our information resources more like POPLINE and less like the CHN, and these are the elements that I’ve come up with thus far:

• US vs. Canada: The US is generally more political & inflammatory, and Canadian librarians will jump on a US database issue, while 99% of the US generally forget that Canada exists or is within the scope of the ALA
• POPLINE is housed at/maintained by a single institution with important people who could be embarrassed at the top of the chain of command vs. the CHN, which was, as I understand it, purposively built on a distributed model
• Specific interest vs. general resource: It’s hard to argue than another resource could easily replace POPLINE, as there aren’t really other reproductive health focused databases like it (are there?), and - however their scope or quality (attirbutes understood by librarians but not everyone) may vary - there are other websites that aim to be broad consumer health resources. It may also be significant that POPLINE is not really for everyday use of the general public, but more for scholars and health professionals.
• The scope of POPLINE, while specifically focused, had broad interdisciplinary appeal (while reproductive rights info access was damaged by CHN removal, as shown in my previous “ABC” post, POPLINE is obviously related to reproductive rights, and thus feminists signed on the campaign en masse: POPLINE was discussed on WMST-L, while the CHN never was)

I know there are more differences that may have been important in determining how things went down. Feel free to tell me what I am missing. My mind is now spinning on how future projects can be built in a way that helps a threat play out in a POPLINE manner, not a CHN one.

-Greyson

Even though I feel pulled in a million directions at the moment, I could not let the weekend pass without some sort of post on the new Canadian Copyright bill, C-61 (aka Canadian DMCA). Just in case anyone reading this hasn’t been amply informed about the supreme badness of C-61, here’s a link to Industry Canada’s explanation of and fact sheets on the proposed changes, and another one to Michael Geist’s special article on the “fine print” of the act.

What has been neat to see, in the shadow of this terrible proposed legislation, has been the public protest against the bill. Bill C-61, looking pretty much like we all feared it would, was introduced Thursday morning. With no public consultation, yet several meetings with members of the entertainment industry and the US Government, a near copy of the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act was no surprise.

Within an hour I was getting questions about C-61 at work. The CLA was on it in a flash with their press release. The Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group (link requires facebook login, unfortunately) gained 10,000 new members (adding to the existing ~40,000) overnight. You couldn’t turn on CBC Radio 1 without hearing someone being interviewed about the bill, and the show Search Engine began a cool webpage asking listeners to write in with their questions and conundrums about the proposed legislation. Neat and evenm fun responses have popped up, including that collaborative video of people proclaiming to be “Copyright Criminals.”

Call me unduly optimistic after a sunny neighborhood block party this evening, but frankly, to my jaded and weary eyes, this outpouring of protest is heartening. It’s not just librarians who care about copyright. On the contrary, suddenly copyright is this hot topic that anyone ‘in the know’ seems to have an opinion on.

And, of course, Michael Geist has been tirelessly working on the issue. Watch his blog for the latest news, links to coverage, creative responses, opportunities to make your voice heard, and his own legal analysis of the legislation and its consequences.

-Greyson

About 6 months ago I started a post about copyright legislation in Canada after reading an article in CBC news ”Copyright reform bill critics eye victory .” I got sidetracked and never got it finished, just got to vent but didn’t add enough content, then things sort of got quiet for a bit. This is what I had written:

It looks like one more attempt to have a tougher copyright law in Canada has been quashed, but when are we going to get a decent proposal for copyright law reform that looks at the interest of the public instead of corporations? When are we getting a law that allows fair use for educational and non-commercial purposes? I personally want a copyright law that allows me to make copies of what I’ve paid for, a law that allows my public library to provide movies for our multicultural communities even if it means disabling DRMS. I want to stop paying a levy on cds that does not go to the artists.

Well, things are not looking better now, things are pretty grim. Now we know that Prentice, Ministry of Industry, was not consulting with Canadians, or at list not with the general public, after realizing that we were starting to make noise and organizing things such as Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group. Little did we know that Mr. Prentice was just retreating to gather strength and plan an unexpected atack  (as in there was no consultation with the public) in the form of bill C-61.

I am looking at the official page for the “Copyright Reform Process” and my blood is about to boil. The lovely introduction is entitled “Government of Canada Proposes Update to Copyright Law: Balanced Approach to Truly Benefit Canadians.” Then, the short text explains to us how the bill ” introduces long-overdue and much-needed amendments to the Copyright Act that will bring it in line with advances in technology and current international standards.” The part this leaves out is how the reforms benefits anyone but Canadian individuals and seriously restricts our rights.

If you don’t feel like reading all or even part of this 57 page bill, check out their Fact Sheets. For example, in Education and Research Amendments it all sounds good until you get to the limitations. You would think this copyright amendment will finally take us out of the dark ages and allow ILL (interlibrary loan) delivery and reserve readings online, and use material for education as per fair dealing. Well, think again. You might do all these good things that will allow you do your work more effectively and serve students and researchers better… unless the material provider doesn’t want you to. If the material has digital locks, well, you are out of luck, because it is illegal for you to circumvent this technologies. Never mind these are actually infringing on your rights under fair dealing.

As far as I am concerned, those digital locks are the ones that are illegal and digital content producers, distributors and clearing houses should be the ones to be penalized. They want their stuff to be protected? Then they need to provide mechanisms for legal use such as for personal, educational and research purposes. How would the do that? I don’t know, but that should be their problem, not ours.

The media has been covering well what this bill will (or I hope, would) mean for Canadian consumers if it became law, as in the Globe and Mail’s “Ottawa gets tough with illegal downloaders,” and organizations such as Canadian Library Association, Canadian Music Creators Coalition have express their disapproval. Michael Geist has written so far 7 posts on this bill since last Thursday and many other bloggers are covering this issue too. Particularly good is his The Canadian DMCA: A Betrayal. So go to any of these or all of them, read, get informed, get outraged and lets do something about it.

mar