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News for Feb 3

News for ICSTI Members Feb 3 2002


1. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in cooperation with the United
States Copyright Office, is planning a conference in celebration of
World Intellectual Property Day. The conference is titled "Beyond the
DMCA: A Copyright Conference" and will take place April 25-26 in
Washington, D.C. Further details will follow (presumably on the
copyright office website).

If any Member will be attending this would they be willing to write a
short report? 

2. The Lemur Toolkit for Language Modelling and Information Retrieval

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~lemur/

Sponsored by the Advanced Research and Development Activity in
Information Technology (ARDA) under its Statistical Language Modelling
for Information Retrieval Research Program, the Lemur Project has
recently announced the availability of the Lemur Toolkit for Language
Modelling and Information Retrieval, version 1.0. The Lemur Toolkit is
designed to help carry out research in areas such as ad hoc and
distributed retrieval, cross-language IR, summarization, filtering, and
classification. The toolkit supports indexing of large-scale text
databases, the construction of simple language models for documents,
queries, and more. The system, which is written in C and C++ languages,
is designed as a research system to run under Unix operating systems,
although it can also run under Windows. As part of the Lemur Project,
the Lemur Toolkit is a collaboration between the Computer Science
Department at the University of Massachusetts and the School of Computer
Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

3. Extract from: "Time to rewrite the DMCA" (Digital Millennium
Copyright Act); By Rick Boucher 

At the time [of the passing of the Act], libraries, universities,
consumer electronics manufacturers, Internet portals and others warned
that enactment of the broadly worded legislation would stifle new
technology, would threaten access to information, and would move us
inexorably towards a "pay per use" society. That day is now close at
hand…….

You can read the rest of the article at:
http://news.com.com/2010-1078-825335.html

4. Extract from:
http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3LYJ5H3XC&live=true

"The DMCA is having the effect of eviscerating the concept of being able
to make fair use of the material that you legally possess," says Barry
Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
"Further, it is not preserving intellectual property rights but
expanding them." 

When enacted into national laws the European Copyright Directive is
expected to attract similar criticism. "The situation will vary," says
Charles Oppenheim, professor of information science at Loughborough
university. "In some countries, fair dealing will remain pretty much
unscathed. In others, there will be a drastic reduction in the ability
of users to copy for private purposes." 



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Howard Flack        http://www.unige.ch/crystal/ahdf/Howard.Flack.html
Laboratoire de Cristallographie               Phone: +41 22 702 62 49
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