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Abstract

All librarians and libraries have information policies, and so do most people. The big issues, like censorship or intellectual property ownership and use, crowd our minds but the process of decision making is the same at every level and in every context, whether we are concerned with government secrets, advertising standards, or our children's reading and viewing habits. This book examines the issues from varying standpoints, including the human rights approach, the commercial approach, and the states-interest approach. These are all placed within the context of arguments about the public sphere. The working librarian has to be in a position to justify every stock purchase and information access decision, and in the strategies they follow to legitimate the library. The form and construction of arguments and the discussion of issues in this book will give librarians the context and arguments they need to identify and apply appropriate information policies and strategies. Key areas addressed in the book include: the information policy problem; policy sectors; information regimes; and, policies and strategies: models and cases. This book is essential reading for library students, researchers and policy makers as well as for all LIS practitioners wishing to widen their awareness of the important issues surrounding information policy.

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Abstract

The Nobel prize-winning author of "A Different Universe" argues that ours is an age of disinformation and ignorance, in which access to knowledge is becoming increasingly restricted and even criminalized. We like to believe that in our modern, technologically advanced world, information is more freely available and flows faster than ever before, and that this free flow of ideas is behind our remarkable creativity. The second part is right: the free flow of ideas is indeed essential to creativity. But according to Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin, many forces in the modern world conspire to make acquiring information a danger or even a crime. More and more of the really valuable information is private property or a state secret, with the result being that it is now easy for a flash of insight, entirely innocently, to infringe a patent or threaten national security.Within the past ten years it has become illegal to circumvent anti-piracy measures (i.e. to understand encrypted communication) or to distribute code-cracking devices; it is now legal for corporations to monopolize certain forms of communication; and it is possible to patent sales techniques, hiring strategies, and gene sequences. Broad areas of two sciences, physics and biology, are now off limits to public discourse because they are national security risks. Our society is sequestering knowledge more rapidly and thoroughly than any before it.Thus we find ourselves dealing more and more with the bizarre concept of the Crime of Reason, the antisocial and sometimes outright illegal nature of certain intellectual activities. The increasing restrictions on such fertile scientific and technological fields as cryptography, biotechnology, and computer software design are creating a new Dark Age: a time characterized not by light and truth but by disinformation and ignorance. This short, passionately argued book, by a Nobel laureate in physics, offers a stern warning and protest against our apparent collective decision to relinquish our intellectual rights.