Librarians against UCITA.

February 7, 2001 7:47 AM

Librarians against UCITA. Librarians on the forefront of preserving the public's right to fair use in copyright law. Kiss your local librarian and ALA member today! For more information, see the ALA UCITA Web site. [Courtesy of ALAWON and NINCH].
posted by leo (3 comments total)

(writing this from my pod inside the ALA this very minute) Yes, go kiss your librarian. Better yet, go breathe down your congressperson's neck. UCITA is evil, evil, evil...so is John McCain's CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act)...it's not that protecting the wee ones is such a poor idea, but the filtering technology mandated by the Act is shoddy and dumb. And without said dumb software, school libraries stand to lose 98% of their funding. The ALA CIPA Web site (www.ala.org/cipa) has plenty to enrage you.
posted by nnnikki at 9:05 AM on February 7, 2001

Now, now. They're not evil -- they're simply misguided and don't represent the interests of all parties. That's why it's important for ALA and other consumer-oriented organizations to speak up -- otherwise all we're going to hear when we pick up our daily copy of Cnet, Wired, etc., is the corporate side of things and that's not fair or, in the long run, healthy.

In any case, it's ALA's (on occasional lonely) views on copyright and censorship which keep me as a proud dues-paying member of the organization.
posted by leo at 9:24 AM on February 7, 2001

ALA has their own troubles, but they're on the right side of this one. My favorite site on this issue has got to be badsoftware.com's meticulous set of links.
posted by jessamyn at 2:19 PM on February 7, 2001