Quantum Forest

I read a very interesting presentation to Microsoft’s Research Group by Cory Doctorow on Digital Rights Management (DRM), and why the technology does not make any sense. By the way, Cory works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organisation that aims to “defend freedom in the digital world”. It was a quite coherent and well presented argument, going point by point on the lame excuses used by people that want to control content.

The presentation made me think a bit more on how I do make available the contents of my web site, basically about copyright. The contents of this site are available under three different copyright agreements:

• Copyright is not mine but belongs to scientific journals, which covers some of the material under publications,
• Work using a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial and non-derivatives license, which covers my Forestry in Tasmania pages, and
• Work using a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial license, which covers the rest of the site, including this weblog.

The latter license is the most liberal, and allows you to do any non-commercial activity with the material, except claim that you wrote it or designed it. Any of the conditions can be waived if you get my permission as copyright holder.

As a researcher, I am always keen on making the results of my work freely available. In fact, I am now favouring publication in journals that respect my right to make copies of my work freely available to colleagues, for example the Canadian Journal of Forest Research (with some limitations so they can make a buck). Meanwhile, I am busy uploading PDF files for all publications for which I have the right to distribute copies (luckily that includes most of them). The rationale behind my decision is that I am using work by other people as the basis of my own work, so the decent thing to do is to allow others to use my work. I still may have to sort out ways of convincing my employer that this is the best course of action, but I am convinced that that is the case.

Incidentally, this is the last post for this financial year. Better I finish shopping so I can claim everything in my next tax return. As the Angry Economist points out “you may ignore Economics but Economics won’t ignore you”.