Elsevier has clarified for the list how articles from its e-journals should be handled: the article should be printed, and then "mailed, faxed or scanned into Ariel (or a similar system) as means of delivery to the borrowing library." (Ariel is an ILL system that is widely used by libraries to deliver digital copies of documents.) To recap the Ariel workflow, the digital article should be printed and then it should be digitized for delivery via Ariel.

If It's Property Why No Property Tax Via slashdot, a letter in the Los Angeles Times by Dallas Weaver raises an interesting point. While propogandists for the copyight and patent mills are eager to have their exclusive grants treated as "property" they don't seem terribly interested in paying property tax. Since they've successfully managed to press the term "intellectual property" into the dictionary, why not charge them a property tax? This is a serious suggestion with serious benefits for two reasons. First, it would go a long way to solving the problem of automatic copyright and orphan works - it would force copyright holders to emerge from the shadows or give up their copyrights. Moreover, it would get around some ridiculous language in the Berne convention to the effect that "The enjoyment and the exercise of these rights shall not be subject to any formality." It's not that you wouldn't get your rights if you didn't pay your property tax, any more than you would if you didn't pay property tax on your car. You would of course go to jail. Second, owners of houses and automobiles and the like pay taxes on their property in exchange for real government services they receive ranging from roads to police. So also with owners of "intellectual property" who receive a variety of government enforcement services - which at the current time they do not help to pay for.

At the assertion that to be patentable something must be novel we can only laugh or cry. There is an article on apple insider: James and Marguerite Driessen of Lindon, Utah are suing Apple Computer claiming they have patented the idea of a gift card where the gift is downloadable over the internet. The actual patent 7003500 - which took six years to issue for some reason - is vastly worse than that. They have patented the "idea" of "selling of merchandise or media content on the Internet [using] at least one in-person contact with the buyer." I want to emphasize: this patent was approved by the U.S. Patent Office.

To what extent does research now focus on "what can we patent?" and not on "how do we cure X?"?