Is Web 2.0 Fraying at the Edges?

Man, between the article I posted yesterday and this one today, I'm really excited to see what legal precedents get set this year:

To quote from the article, ironically, "Neither Mr. Singleton nor a statement released by The A.P. mentioned any adversary by name. But many news executives, including some at The A.P., have voiced concern that their work has become a source of revenue for Google and other sites that can sell search terms or ads on pages that turn up articles."

The article, titled, "Associated Press Seeks More Control of Content on Web," discusses how smaller websites are profiting from using large portions of AP articles (or entire articles), while advertising money drawn from views of those articles is going to sources other than the AP. Now, I don't think they have a prayer in court of saying that people aren't allowed to quote online from their articles, but maybe they do. Sites that use articles wholesale and reap profit from views, however, will probably have to pay.

And the irony is perpetually in my head that I'm posting these things on a Google-run website.

I _love_ Google. Don't get me wrong. I totally subscribe to the Death Star, daycare and all, but Google is the John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan of this age, and laws need to be adjusted to deal with this behemoth, just as they were changed to deal with the industrialists and bankers of yesteryear.

This academic political controversy brought to you by DSpace

Article title, "MIT to make all faculty publications open access"

To quote, "If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access."

and

"The faculty will have to prepare an appropriately formatted copy of their works to the provost for hosting. MIT plans to place them on its DSpace system, a content hosting system it developed with HP and distributes under a BSD license."

This is actually huge news, particularly for academic researchers AND for users and admins of DSpace. I'm hoping this will mean that a lot more funding gets kicked toward DSpace, Inc. Granted, MIT is the institution that built DSpace, but this is the core reason it was created. I'm really eager to see what the future will bring in regard to this.