Harvard’s $600K+ copyright project: NIHing of TeleRead to come?
Will the NIH Syndrome apply? Harvard has just received a $600K grant from the MacArthur Foundation to continue fleshing out copyright scenarios. It’ll be interesting to see what if anything is said about a TeleRead-style national digital library system.
About the only time we’ve heard from a Berkman Center type–well, actually it was probably just a hanger-on instead–was when a blogger apparently from that circle took after TeleRead for relying on users for voluntary payments to copyright owners. Wrong, as he admitted later. Payments actually would be from a national digital library fund (a mix of public and private money) and reflect works’ popularity (although standards woud be in place to prevent “Make Money Fast” books from ripping off the national digitial library system). The guy also couldn’t understand the need to adjust the proposal as the technology changed, which it, ugh, has since the Gopher era. I at one point invited him to phone me, but that, of course, would never do for someone from such a rarified circle.
If TeleRead gets the standard Harvard treatment, I predict either a knock or, “Hey, we invented it”–just like the old Soviets or Chinese. This’ll be fun. In case you’re curious, the TeleRead proposal first appeared in print in 1992 in ComputerWorld and later was a chapter in Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier published in 1996 by the MIT Press/ASIS, as well as a 1996 op-ed in the Washington Post, as well as a column in U.S. News & World Report. Lately the Carnegie Reporter from the Carnegie Corporation of New York has published a favorable reference to TeleRead, in the Fall 2003 issue, calling the proposal “one of the most intriguing alternatives” to the existing business and legal models. Regardless, I predict that Harvard will minimize the idea or at the very least assiduously avoid contact with a grubby nonJD. Sorry for the skepticism, and I hope I’m wrong, but I can only go by the past.
Leave a Reply