It seems to me that a quasi-public service, such as the folks running train service in and out of New York City (MTA), would applaud wider distribution and availability of their schedules.  Especially considering how un-mobile-friendly their current web site is, they were practically begging for someone to make it better.  And someone did with a popular iPhone app.    How did they respond?  With a claim that their schedules are copyrighted and the app developer infringed on that copyright — what!???  Even if they are correct from a legal/technical standpoint what does this say about their management, and their concern for providing quality service?

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I have often advocated for an easing of copyright restrictions, and wider adoption of Creative Commons licensing for content.   And for those who create content to share, or for content with little-to-no current commercial value, this makes sense.  But I will concede that there is a limited class of content that continues to have commercial value which generates benefits for the artists and/or their families.  Take the recent case of J.D. Salingers’s Catcher in the Rye, and the lawsuit over an updating of Holden Caufield in a new book.  In a nutshell a new author has written a story with Holden as an old man, and the Salinger estate has cried copyright infringement.

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Wasn’t is all Boston’s fault that we started our little argument with the colonial homeland a couple of hundred+ years ago?  By one count MIT and Boston University are in the top 3 for domestic college copyright violators.  But a recent Harvard study finds that these sharing activities actually increases the amount of artistic and other creative content.  Turns out those folks up in beantown were right about the whole revolutionary thing way back when.  For my money I’m willing to bet they are right about this latest cultural revolution as well.

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If you missed it last fall GMU’s Zotero project was sued for possible copyright infringement.  Kudos to GMU for standing up for their rights, and nice to see that reason prevailed.  Strike up one for open source and the power of the commons.

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Why is the Creative Commons idea important?  What is Creative Commons?  I’m not sure I can give it to you in a twitter-like 140 characters, but I’ll try for the elevator speech.  Did you know that under current US copyright law and content you post on the internet is automatically copyrighted?  In fact anything you publish in some fixed format is automatically copyrighted, whether you actually intend to copyright it or not.  But what if you want to encourage people to use your ideas, expand on them, and use them to build new ideas/artwork/music or whatever type of creative expression?  Enter Creative Commons.

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What is the future of community libraries?  Is the book dying, and with it our local public libraries?  I believe that new technologies can strengthen the benefits of libraries.  The trick it in figuring out how to make this happen, while keeping local funding authorities convinced that libraries still have a place.

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