[free-sklyarov] Your AAP Membership

[Mark K. Bilbo]

Editors,

Once again, I am writing about my concerns over your association with the
American Association of Publishers. According to their website at:

http://www.publishers.org/home/abouta/members.htm#s

Scientific American is a member of the AAP. I cannot describe how deeply
dismayed I am that a reputable publication of science is a member of an
organization so hostile towards intellectual freedom. The statements of the
organization, particularly their celebratory press release concerning the
Sklyarov arrest (found at: http://www.publishers.org/home/press/index.htm)
and the comparison of librarians to "Ruby Ridge" style extremists (found at:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-6545588-0.html), show a distinct
hostility toward intellectual freedm--an essential to science and human
progress.

The AAP has taken a pro-DMCA stance and a very pro-corporate profit stance.
Positions that threaten the basic freedoms of the US as regards the free
flow of information and scientific inquiry. Positions that only serve to
enhance the profits of media corporations at the expense of the rights of
citizens.

As you know, we in the United States are already having serious trouble
educating the public in the sciences. How can the DMCA and other such
restrictions enable us to curtail or reverse the very serious decline in
science education? If publishing corporations destroy fair use rights as
they seek to do, if libraries become "pay per view," and research in such
fields as cryptography becomes criminalized, what will become of science and
science education?

I would hope that Scientific American would live up to its commitment to
intellectual freedom and withdraw from the AAP so long as the organization
takes such extremist, anti-intellectual positions. I simply cannot fathom
why Scientific American would fund an organization that has set itself on a
course of destroying fair use and the free flow of information for what
appears to be nothing more than the desire to sate the increasing greed of
short sighted media corporations.

Mark K. Bilbo