As argued in my recent article on private copyright enforcement and feedback loops, a deficit of transparency and public participation in private copyright enforcement has fostered gross overreach by copyright owners. A recent example of copyright overreach is amply demonstrated by the so-called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which was negotiated secretly and addresses far more than mere “counterfeiting.” (See here for a law professors’ letter I’ve signed against ACTA.)

It’s good to see such concerns echoed in the Congress’ just-released Declaration. For example:

International intellectual property policy making should be conducted through mechanisms of transparency and openness that encourage broad public participation. New rules should be made within the existing forums responsible for intellectual property policy, where both developed and developing countries have full representation, and where the texts of and forums for considering proposals are open. All new international intellectual property standards must be subject to democratic checks and balances, including domestic legislative approval and opportunities for judicial review.

Along similar lines, the Declaration calls excessive IP enforcement out to task, noting that “Government and private IP enforcement are commandeering greater social resources in order to impose stricter penalties than ever before, with fewer safeguards and less procedural fairness.” The Declaration contains many other important ideas, such as making sure that new IP protections are rooted in transparent research that demonstrates the need for new IP rights, including addressing the fact that fair uses and other IP limitations also generate economic value. Other important mentions are the importance of libraries and archives, strengthening IP exceptions, rejuvenating notice-based formalities, and much more.

I’d go on, but instead you should read the full document at http://infojustice.org/washington-declaration. Even better, sign it. (I did: I’m # 95.).

So what did I do? For my fancy graphics-intensive computer, I bought a database program and used it to catalogue my books and records. My wife — we were newly married and she had yet to realize what a geek I truly am — thought that cataloguing books (by year and by ISBN, which I thought was very cool) was one of the saddest wastes of time she had ever seen.

Maybe she was right, but for different reasons. It was a waste of time because the fruits of my labors were short-lived due to the short life of the Amiga platform. I had two Amigas in succession, first an Amiga 500 like the one pictured above, and later an Amiga 3000 (with a real hard drive!). I loved my Amigas but they never caught on with the public. Very little software was ever written for it. A cool but unsupported computer is a paperweight.

Frustrated at the lack of software for the Amiga, I sold my Amiga 3000 around 15 years ago. I also long ago threw away the database discs, which were in a proprietary AmigaDOS format, and probably in a proprietary database format as well, neither of which would probably have been readable (or easily readable) on a Windows PC. Digital garbage to the core.

Anyway, though my Amiga is long gone, now the web allows me to do the same thing, better and in tandem with thousands of other book cataloguing geeks. A while back, the Wall Street Journal reported on a very cool site, LibraryThing.com. Think of MySpace meets the Dewey Decimal System. It’s an online card catalog that you can use to list all your books, to see others who own the same books, to get recommendations, and to write and read reviews. Books can be tagged Web 2.0 style, and thumbnails are shown when they’re available. It’s a great example of the power of social networking. You can enter up to 200 books for free, but after that, you need to purchase a membership. Better yet, you can export your data, quelling my Amiga file incompatibility woes.

I’ve entered some of my books into the site; you can see my listings at http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=nathenson.

I do suspect, however, that some people will only list books that make them look thoughtful and intelligent. (Count me guilty.) At least for now I can point to the 200-book limit as an excuse for not entering my embarrassingly large collection of Star Trek novels (though I did list Spock Must Die, a true classic and the first original Trek novel published by Bantam Books.)

Check out the sidebar for a LibraryThing widget with random books from my collection. I’ll add more.

Hat tip to Boing Boing. And thanks to Farnea at Flickr, who licensed the Amiga 500 photo shown above through this Creative Common license.