Re: [ARSCLIST] MP3 bit rates and usage factors for Web pages

["Steven C. Barr" <stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Richter" <mrichter@xxxxxxx>
> Tom Fine wrote:
> > Is your university a state-funded institution? Does it receive federal
> > tax-supported grants? Then why don't the taxpayers of Mississippi and
the
> > larger United States have an ownership stake in what you produce and are
> > therefore entitled to free access? Just curious.
>
> Why do you assume (assert?) that an ownership stake means free access?
> One purchases copies of public-domain documents from conventional
> libraries - costs are recouped. One pays a fee to use the facilities of
> a park supported by national, state or other government.
>
> There are costs associated with providing the materials for public
> access. We are intimately familiar with the overhead of the facilities
> and staff to acquire and maintain the material and to produce the
> post-able selections, but there are also servers, connections and
> traffic costs. They may not be visible if you use the facilities of your
> institution (as they are for those of us paying for them ourselves), but
> they are present and can be substantial.
>
> In fact, the Subject here depends on those costs in practice. Those
> recommending high bitrates and multiple channels are likely to be in an
> environment where the pipe to the Internet is presumed infinitely wide
> and the users are presumed to have broadband connections in the
> institutional class (T1 or better). A substantial number of visitors to
> my primary site are on dialup and I rarely post anything which would
> burden them. That affects not only selection of content but also bitrate
> in a way that others need not consider.
>
This actually is part of a much larger and more complicated
question that is still being debated...namely, do public
libraries have a right to provide free access to any
copyrighted material? I have frequented both municipal
public libraries and libraries operated by government-run
schools (i.e. State/Provincial Universities, etc.) and
have never had to pay anything except fines on overdue
borrowed books. This could, of course, be seen as
depriving authors and publishers of revenue!

Steven C. Barr