[2670] Last reading & muddy point

So, this “keeping my [assigned] notes in my real blog (instead of starting a new blog just for that purpose)” thing has been an experiment, and it’s not going to happen again. Should I have another instructor who makes the same kind of assignment–keep reading notes and questions about the course in a blog–I’ll probably make a new blog just for that. Probably. I mean, it’s been good to have my notes up and to be able to see and comment on others’ notes; it’s a good idea, a useful thing, and something more professors should do. I just kind of think I’ve bored the few regular readers I have with these commentaries. Separating it out would have been the right way to go.

That said, here are some thoughts on the readings for week 13. I’m glad to have a term for something that’s come up so much in discussions this semester: “patent thickets–the fear that some advance will tread on pre-existing patents, of which the innovator may not even be aware.” (Joseph E. Stiglitz, Intellectual Property Rights and Wrongs)

Stiglitz made several good points, including that open source shows IP protection is not necessarily a prerequisite for the creation of valuable products. And his point about giving someone a monopoly, even temporarily, leading to a lack of innovation is clearly worth examining. I didn’t know about the Wright brothers and Curtis brothers and their forced patent pool, but I’m probably going to bring that up whenever I want to fight about copyright, in the future.

Moving on to Clifford Lynch’s “Where Do We Go From Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries,” I don’t know about this idea of the future of libraries being “too important to be left to librarians.” That’s nonsense. Librarians are precisely the right people to handle this–if you can get ones who are in it for the public good over their own job security, anyway.

I’m interested that he thinks we’re out of interesting research topics, with respect to digital libraries. Really?

Muddiest Point: I don’t have one this week.