The Perils of Strong Copyright: The American Library Association and Free Culture

Abstract

The current state of intellectual property law is labyrinthine in every sense: it is difficult to follow, full of blind alleys, and the only people who know the way through it are the ones who designed it in the first place. Pamela Samuelson notes in Towards a New Politics of Intellectual Property, “copyright industry groups have cultivated relationships with policy makers in the executive and legislative branches over a long period of time” (98) and these relationships have been used to maintain control over copyrighted materials far beyond the length of time of commercial success of said materials. James Boyle noted that “the ground rules of the information society are being laid down by lawyers (strike one) employed by the biggest players in the field (strike two) all with little public debate or press scrutiny.” (Boyle, “Sold Out”) My goal in this paper will be to examine the history of copyright, attempt to unite some of the disparate aspects of the open information meme, and finally to consider how this meme is being distributed (or not distributed) by academic librarians. I will also attempt to make prescriptive suggestions that might assist librarians in seeing the strengths of the Open Information memepool.