Debate Topics

The class will break into 4 groups, as follows. Consider the second letter of your last name. If it is A-G, you are in Group 1. If H-M, you are in Group 2. If N-S, you are in Group 3. If T-Z, you are in Group 4. Now, Group n should tackle questions whose number mod 4 is their number. Thus, Group 1 will handle questions 1, 5, 9. (Slight adjustment may be made in the groups for hashing nonuniformities, etc.)

Think about your group's debate topics, since people involved in that discussion group must discuss them (either pro or con). After your group has a discussion on its 3 topics totalling about 45 minutes, work together to send an email summary to the instructor, that has the name of each person in the group, and gives the consensus viewpoint on each of your 3 topics.

  1. Technology will cause the demise of print publishers, because they will be unable to prevent theft and widespread distribution of electronic forms of their publications.

  2. People won't take computers to the beach or put them on their night tables or spread them out to read the comics, since books and other print forms are much cheaper, friendlier, lighter, easier to use in a variety of lighting situations, and cover a larger surface area.

  3. ACM should allow electronic submissions for all of its publications to be made according to authors' wishes, and should ignore issues of standardization.

  4. Electronic publication should be funded by a system of subscriptions, so users are encouraged to make use of published materials that are covered by any of their subscriptions.

  5. ACM should not call for proposals but should instead carry out an ambitious electronic publishing effort in-house, that should rapidly break even financially.

  6. There are too many electronic publishing forms and standards, and too little user-oriented access software, to motivate people to buy into the new technology.

  7. Copyright is a useless concept for digital libraries because publishers will control and charge for access to and use of digital works.

  8. Given the federal government's role in NSFNET and the NREN, ubiquitous networking seems imminent, and means that there will be national networked access to future digital libraries. One result will be serious problems with international copyright violation due to the ease of transmission.

  9. Derivative works will be commonplace, and primary publishers will suffer greatly from those who have shaped and combined prior work in such a way as to abandon giving credit to original sources.

  10. Copyright law cannot hope to deal with classifying works by media type, given that multimedia publications will become widely used.

  11. Storage hierarchies, with personal, departmental, campus, state, regional, national, and international levels, will operate with multiple copies of each work available, in places chosen to optimize performance.

  12. With highly linked collections of materials like hypertexts and their search trails, whose raw materials originated from numerous sources, copyright protection and remuneration should go to the new editor, and not to the original authors.


fox@cs.vt.edu
Mon Aug 29 15:21:44 EDT 1994