I have written before about Essex Libraries’ group access to all sorts of online databases — the OED, the Grove Dictionary of Music, Who’s Who and a curiously rebranded version of Lexis-Nexis. But what I hadn’t realised until this moment was that the system also gives access to the NYT’s paywalled content. The Infotrac database finds and gives access to all of Paul Krugman’s columns and presumably everything else. This kind of aggregate payment seems to me the only way to navigate between Wikipedia on the one hand and the grotesque overpricing of authoritative journals like Nature. It will be the future for music, too.
On a related note, the “Pirate Party” in Sweden, which campaigns for legal file-sharing of copyrighted material, now has more members than the Greens. This is, in both cases, fewer than 8,000. But under PR, that can tranlate into a lot of power. The Greens have been a vital prop to the Social democrats for the last three years, along with the other party of silly gesture politics, the Left, formerly the Communist Left. The competition for the adolescent vote is hotting up. The Left wants to abolish homework. Is this more important than free pr0n forever? Only the voters can decide.