Copyright: intellectual property in the information age

Copyright: intellectual property in the information age

Book reviews such 227 methods as categorization or reader-interest arrangement. The ALA shows clearly how the technique of management by objective...

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Book reviews

such

227

methods

as categorization or reader-interest arrangement. The ALA shows clearly how the technique of management by objectives can be used to provide a more effective library service. Mr Smith rightly suggests that ‘the much-publicised benefits of computer use’ should be directed towards the availability of managment information for policy making (pp. 102-103). The ALA Planning process goes much further and demonstrates how this can be done. Systems thinking in library and information management might have some value as a source of inspiration and ideas but I shall make much greater use of the ALA Planningprocess. And an inadequate index is almost as bad as no index at all.

Planning

process

REFERENCE MORRIS,

w.E.M.(

information Librarianship,

1979). Benefit Assessment for System Change services: a research project in the public IO, 15-24.

K. G. B. Bakewell School of Librarianship Information Studies Liuerpool Polytechnic

and

Edward W. Ploman and L. Clark Hamilton. Copyright:

Routledge

(BASYC) in libraries and libraries field. Journal of

property in the information age. London, Boston and Kegan Paul, 1980. ISBN 0 7 100 0539 3. f12.50

intellectual

and Henley:

The first recorded breach of a ‘right of copy’ seems to have been the clandestine copying by the monk Columba (for this, they made him a saint?) of Abbot Finian’s Psalter, Finding for the Abbot by King Dermot. The ability to make such ‘hurried’ copies clearly was rare in the days of manuscripts, especially if illustrated, and the problem rested quietly until the invention of moveable type in the western hemisphere supplied facilities for making speedier copies and putting them on the market. In China, where they had had print for centuries already, the intelligensia scorned the concept of protecting individual rights in creative work, since they were rewarded for possessing artistic talent with social dominance and exclusive access to sources of knowledge. People were not too concerned with copyright in Bali, either, as everyone there was creative and had no word for ‘artist’. Copyright, as developed from the civil and common law systems in Europe, is a flawed concept, and presents us with profound problems. ‘The inherent dilemma of the law relating to such things as copyright and patents is that they encourage individuals to create information by offering some protection against misuse, but limit accessibility once it has been created’ (Aslib, 1980: 142). The past few years have seen committees in various western countries desperately poking at the ashes of the copyright concept, apparently in the hope that a phoenix will rise up out of them and spread its wings over all the new gadgets and techniques for making and reproducing intellectual thought. Their disappointment has been predictable: the wonder is that so few have attempted a basic re-think of the problem. Benjamin Kaplan, in the happy, far-off days of 1966, made a try:

228

3oo.k reviews You must imagine, at the eventual heart of things to come, linked or integrated systems or networks of computers capable of storing faithfu! simulacra of the entire treasure of the accumulated knowledge and artistic production of past ages, and of taking into the store new intelligence of all sorts as produced. The systems will have prodigious capacity for manipulating the store in useful ways, for selecting portions of it upon call and transmitting them to any distance, where they will be converted as desired to forms directly or indirectly cognizable, whether as printed pages, phonorecords, tapes, transient displays of sights or sounds, or hieroglyphs for fttrther machine uses. Lasers, microwave channels, satellites improving on Cornsat’s Early Bird, and, no doubt, many devices now unnamable, will operate as ganglions to extend the reach of the systems to the ultimate users as well as to provide a copious array of additional services (Kaplan, 1966: 119).

HOWvery

quaint;

how positively

H. G. Wellsian!

How dead

on the nail.

Copyright is likely to recede, to lose relevance.. copyright or the larger part of its controls will appear unneeded, merely obstructive, as applied to certain sectors of- production and . . . will lapse into disuse and may disappear (Kaplan, 1966: 120-121). Mr. Ploman and Mr. Clark have made another try, and a very good one it is. This reviewer has not enjoyed reading about copyright so much since laying hands on Kaplan’s book, and is puzzled by the omission of the older work from the bibliography of the newer. The intervening fifteen years have been filled with more dull stuff, more new editions of textbooks with large increases in price and small changes in appendices of international conventions, more do-or-die statements of entrenchment, more spurious special pleading, and more ignorant hysteria than bears contemplating. Poor, dead trees, cut down not for the creation of literature but in the interest of the artist as entrepreneur, the educationalist as exploiter, the disseminator as monopolist. The authors have not contributed another tedious legal textbook on copyright, nor have they added further cross-shots to the vitriolic contest now waging between creators and disseminators. Instead they have produced a book which is a delight to read (the information about Ireland, China and Bali mentioned above is but a sample), presents in a clear manner the tortuous history of copyright, of allied concepts, and of their unique international control mechanisms, and attempts to look into the future of this concept, ‘Why’, they ask in their Intr~~duction~ ‘is copyright important and why should anybody but the experts be concerned at all?’ Their immediate reply covers several points, Copyright is used as a legal mechanism for the ordering of social and cultural lifti, or, put another way, copyright is one method for linking the world of ideas to the world of commerce. Just as many of’ the traditional assumptions for organizing and controlling the flow of infi)rmation in society arc called into question so too are the economic assumptions or1 which the law of copyright is founded. And these assumptions condition ttir patterns of our cultural and scientific lit+. . Copyright is. expected to provide answers to another set of fun~~~~r~ierit~~l questions: how can intellectual creativity best be promoted? How is the livelihood of the author and artist best ensured and how is he integrated into sotial and economic lifti (p. 1I. Copyright

‘information an)sphere,

is clearly

a policy issue, and part of the political world of the age’. This book is essential reading for inf&mation workers, in who look to a future in that world. In the UK, particularly, aftel

Book reviews

229

twenty-five years of administering (or ignoring) the 1956 Copyright Act and its subsidiary regulations, we have learned to regard copyright issues with distaste. If any book can overcome this, and re-focus our attention on a fascinating area of human behaviour, this is it. G. E. Bull of Shejjield

University

REFERENCES Supplementary Memorandum submitted by Aslib to the House of Commons Education, Science .and Arts Committee. In Information storage and retrieval in the British Library Service. London: HMSO. KAPLAN, B. (1966). An unhurried view of copyright. New York and London: Columbia University Press.

ASLIB (1980).

Hedvah L. Shuchman. Information transfer in engineering. Glastonbury, 1981. 265 + 94 pp. ISBN 0 9605196 0 2. This is a report of a study the principal

Coun.:

The

Futures

Group,

aims of which were stated to be:

-to

produce a profile of the information actually used by engineers; -to identify the methods of communication and patterns of use according to technical engineering field, job activity, industry, education, degree -to

data and age; identify the attitudes toward and technologies in an effort to forecast information technology (p. 6).

use patterns of information the potential value of new

In deciding on the methodology to be used, the random sample survey was rejected because of the difficulty of selecting a random sample from such a large and varied population of humans and an attempt was therefore made to use stratified random sampling with quotas for some of the known, and characteristics of a population of engineers and of possibly important, employers of engineers. The use of a postal questionnaire for a geographically nationwide survey was decided on largely because of cost considerations, though the author points out that with a ‘non-response. . . [ofl 30-40 per cent or more, it is questionable whether it would be worth a large effort to use probability methods’ (p. A43). In the event, considerable difficulties (which, to the great credit of the author, are described) led to heroic measures to secure response, even though the sample could no longer be treated as a strictly stratified random one. Nevertheless, for some of the major characteristics, the numbers of engineers in the strata were apparently not too far out of line with the required proportions, so that the results do not appear to be obviously biased in respect of these characteristics. The survey was carried out in 89 firms out of the 140 approached as representative of the 2600 firms in the American (formerly EJC) list of industrial Association of Engineering Societies’ organizations. The 13 15 engineers responding were 39 per cent of the 337 1 engineers approached in the 89 firms, which employed a total of I4 797 engineers and some 260 000 other workers. The questionnaire covered a variety of. topics, including questions on information-seeking problems in the initial stage of a project, channels used, information-type needs and outputs, opinion