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Gizmodo: “There are currently 342 potential borrowers waiting for 197 digital copies of Ronan Farrow’s investigative thriller Catch and Kill at the Los Angeles Public Library. “It’ll take months for that ebook to become available,” I mutter to myself as I do my usual dance: searching the LAPL’s ebook shelves for titles on my reading …
Smithsonian Magazine – “Culture connoisseurs, rejoice: The Smithsonian Institution is inviting the world to engage with its vast repository of resources like never before. For the first time in its 174-year history, the Smithsonian has released 2.8 million high-resolution two- and three-dimensional images from across its collections onto an open access online platform for patrons …
The World University Rankings – Return to table reflects ongoing string of advances for open science movement – “After watching the University of California head toward a series of open access agreements with other big publishers, industry titan Elsevier has agreed to resume exploratory discussions with the unbending state system. The 10-campus California system – now …
The Open Book Feather: “The Open Book is an open-hardware device for reading books in all the languages of the world. It includes a large screen and buttons for navigation, as well as audio options for accessibility and ports to extend its functionality. Its detailed silkscreen, with the all the manic energy and quixotic ambition …
EFF: “Washington D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that functional aspects of Oracle’s Java programming language are not copyrightable, and even if they were, employing them to create new computer code falls under fair use protections. The court is reviewing a long-running lawsuit Oracle filed against Google, which …
Hyperallergic: “Paris Musées announced yesterday that it is now offering 100,000 digital reproductions of artworks in the city’s museums as Open Access — free of charge and without restrictions — via its Collections portal. Paris Musées is a public entity that oversees the 14 municipal museums of Paris, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la …
Creative Commons: “Creative Commons (CC) is working towards providing easy access to CC-licensed and public domain works. One significant step towards achieving that goal was the release of CC Search in 2019. Through this search and indexing tool, we’re making a plethora of CC-licensed images accessible in one place. As CC Search expands to include …
Unpaywall: “How do you find all these fulltext articles? We harvest content directly from over 50,000 journals and open-access repositories from all over the world. We also use great open data from PubMed Central, the DOAJ, Crossref (particulary their license info), and DataCite. Is Unpaywall legal? Yes! We harvest content from legal sources including repositories …
Gizmodo: “[January 1, 2020] isn’t just a day to nurse your hangover from New Year’s Eve—it’s also a day to celebrate the public domain. Movies, books, music, and more from 1924 are all entering the public domain today, meaning that you’re free to download, upload, and share these titles however you see fit. And it’s …
Berkman Klein Center – Julia Reda – “Last spring, 200,000 Europeans took to the streets to protest against a new EU copyright law that risks to restrict online culture and block vast numbers of legal online communications such as memes, reaction gifs, video game reviews or remixes. It is the latest clash between a generation …
“The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and a coalition of 23 news organizations are urging a Delaware court to reject a defamation claim that could threaten the use of hyperlinks in news stories. In a friend-of-the-court brief, filed on Dec. 19 by Reporters Committee attorneys and David L. Finger of Finger & Slanina …
Vox – In memoriam: The brands we lost in the 2010s – RIP Blockbuster, Borders, and so many more. “The 2010s were a decade of extreme retail innovation. Instagrammy direct-to-consumer companies like Warby Parker and Everlane sprang up seemingly overnight; hulking businesses like Amazon permeated what felt like every aspect of our shopping lives. There’s …
