Issues and developments related to ethics, information, and technologies, examined in the ethics and intellectual property graduate courses I teach at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information. My Bloomsbury book "Ethics, Information, and Technology" will be published in January 2026. Kip Currier, PhD, JD
"The National Park Service removed references to transgender people from its Stonewall National Monument web pages on Thursday, as the Trump administration continued its push for federal agencies to recognize only two genders: male and female, as assigned at birth...
Dr. Carla Smith, the chief executive of the L.G.B.T. Community Center, said in a statement that the website changes were “factually inaccurate” and “an affront to our entire community,” and she urged the Park Service to “immediately restore accurate and inclusive language.”...
On Wednesday, according to a version of the Park Service website saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the introductory text on the monument’s main page said: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.
By Thursday afternoon, the word “transgender” and the letter T in the abbreviationhad been removed from the page. By Thursday evening, the word “queer” and “Q+” had also been removed from the website."
"We’re looking to document changes in the physical appearances of federal buildings during the transition to the Trump administration.
If you work in a federal building and have seen differences in your physical environment — newwall décor, artworkcoming downor being put up,photos covered upor anything else — we’d like to see photographs of the new space. If you have photos of how it looked before, you are also encouraged to enclose those.
The form below will allow you to submit photos of federal buildings and provide information about where and when the photos were taken. You can also reach us securely atnytimes.com/tips.
We may publish any photograph you share in The New York Times. We will never publish your name without permission, but it would help to provide at least one method of contacting you in case we need to reach out about your submission."
"Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who wastapped as the acting directorof the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) just days ago, is taking on another new role in President Donald Trump's new administration.
Rubio is now also serving as the acting director of the U.S. Archives,ABC News reported,citing a high-level official. Fox News Digital reached out to the State Department for comment, but they did not immediately respond.
Trump signaled last month his intention of replacing the now-former national archivist Colleen Shogan, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, during a brief phone interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. The National Archives notified the Justice Department in early 2022 over classified documents Trump allegedly took with him to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after leaving office. That would later result in an FBI raid, and Trump being indicted by former special counsel Jack Smith. However, Biden nominated Shogan to run the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) later in 2022, and the Senate confirmed her the following year.
The source told ABC News that Rubio has been the acting archivist since shortly after Trump was sworn in as the 47th president last month."
[Kip Currier: Information professionals and centers can be leaders in preserving histories -- like that of influential astronomer Vera Rubin. Right now, too, libraries, archives, and museums can continue to collect books by and about these kinds of trailblazers. They can digitize and make available illuminating records and artifacts, like diaries and photos. They can create interactive exhibits and virtual reality experiences to raise our awareness of their struggles and triumphs.
Once this phase of selective erasure and targeted minimization of historically marginalized persons and groups has inevitably passed, so too can information professionals, historians, reporters, authors, and myriad others work to restore these pioneering people to the historical record.
A larger question is why the current administration is laboring so hard to erase and undervalue the histories and achievements of individuals who have inarguably faced discrimination -- and in countless inspiring instances have surmounted formidable barriers -- as members of disenfranchised communities?
Why do they fear these histories and uplifting achievements?
They work to erase these histories so that others won't be empowered by these stories and lessons. Not knowing these stories enables the erasers to control the narratives and, more importantly, influence how people think. They don't want people to be aware of what boundary breakers have done to break through barriers to equal opportunities. Why?
They benefit from unequal power structures. They fear equality and change. They want to define "truth". So, they stoke fear, apathy, division, and distrust to fortify the inequitable power structures that advantage them and disadvantage everyone else.
The world has seen revisionist campaigns like this many times before, though, and I'm confident that truth and reason will eventually prevail again. But it's going to take hard work and strategy and creativity and resilience and teamwork to achieve.
Media outlets, like ProPublica and others committed to truth telling and accuracy of information, serve inestimable roles in uncovering deception, revealing truths, and reporting the facts. As the renowned lawyer John Adams (and future 2nd President of the United States from 1797-1801) pointed out to a Massachusetts court in 1770, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
Those of us in the information professions who care about truth and the historical record -- and the stories of everyone, not just the privileged few -- are going to have to do our parts to stand up to the self-appointed revisionists, censors, and erasers. Many information professionals are already stepping up in ways that make a positive difference every day. Like challenging those who want to remove books from our libraries.
Filmmakers, graphic novelists, photographers, screenwriters, faith leaders, investigative reporters, musicologists, grant funders, poets, independent bookstores, lawyers, actors, civil watchdog groups, data analysts, publishers, ethnographers, artisans, and countless others are also working to push back against erasure and disenfranchisement of diverse peoples.
I will share stories about ongoing efforts to counter the silencing of diverse voices in future blog posts throughout this year.]
[Excerpt]
"During his first presidential term, Donald Trump signeda congressional actnaming a federally funded observatory after the late astronomer Vera Rubin. The act celebrated herlandmark research on dark matter— the invisible, mysterious substance that makes up much of the universe — and noted that she was an outspoken advocate for the equal treatment and representation of women in science.
“Vera herself offers an excellent example of what can happen when more minds participate in science,” theobservatory’s website said of Rubin— up until recently.
By Monday morning, a section of her online biography titled, “She advocated for women in science,” was gone. It reappeared in a stripped-down form later that day amid a chaotic federal government response to Trump’scampaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
While there are far more seismic changes afoot in America than the revision of three paragraphs on a website, the page’s edit trail provides an opportunity to peer into how institutions and agencies are navigating the new administration’s intolerance of anything perceived as “woke” and illuminates a calculation officials must make in answering a wide-open question:
How far is too far when it comes to acknowledging inequality and advocating against it?"
[Kip Currier: The late Toni Morrison, 1993 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, observed that "Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations.” Fittingly, that inspirational declaration greets visitors at an entrance to New York Public Library, one of the world's greatest repositories of knowledge.
As the Trump administration, in just its first weeks, continues to "disappear" information and impede access to knowledge, as illustrated by this NBC News article, the role of libraries, archives, and museums in preserving information and providing access to knowledge and the full range of human experience has never been greater in the nearly 250 year history of the U.S.
It is incumbent upon those who work in and on behalf of libraries, archives, and museums to prepare themselves for the concerted governmental and oligarchic efforts and pressure that will likely soon manifest against them, as they strive to safeguard the nation's memory, historical record, and collections from censorship, removal, and destruction.]
[Excerpt]
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday is scrubbing a swath of HIV-related content from the agency’s website as a part of President Donald Trump’s broader effort to wipe out diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the federal government.
The CDC’s main HIV page was down temporarily but has been restored. The CDC began removing all content related to gender identity on Friday, according to one government staffer. HIV-related pages were apparently caught up in that action.
CDC employees were told in a Jan 29. email from Charles Ezell, the acting director of the U.S. office of personnel management, titled “Defending Women,” that they’re not to make references or promote “gender ideology” — a term often used by conservative groups to describe what they consider “woke” views on sex and gender — and that they are to recognize only two sexes, male and female, according to a memo obtained by NBC News.
Employees initially struggled with how to implement the new policy, with a deadline of Friday afternoon, the staffer said. Ultimately, agency staffers began pulling down numerous HIV-related webpages — regardless of whether it included gender — rushing to meet the deadline. It was unclear when the pages might be restored.
“The process is underway,” said the government agency staffer, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions. “There’s just so much gender content in HIV that we have to take everything down in order to meet the deadline.”
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Communications representatives within the CDC’s HIV and STD prevention departments did not return requests for comment; last week, the Trump administration ordered all employees of HHS, which includes the CDC, to stop communicating with external parties.
Trump’s sweeping executive order to wipe out DEI programs across the federal government threatens to upend the CDC’s efforts to combat HIV among Black, Latino and transgender people — groups disproportionately affected by the virus — according to public health experts."
"We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation
We continue to fight for a version of copyright that does what it is supposed to. And so, every year, EFF and a number of diverse organizations participate in Copyright Week. Each year, we pick five copyright issues to highlight and advocate a set of principles of copyright law. This year’s issues are:
Monday: Copyright Policy Should Be Made in the Open With Input From Everyone:Copyright is not a niche concern. It affects everyone’s experience online, therefore laws and policy should be made in the open and with users’ concerns represented and taken into account.
Tuesday: Copyright Enforcement as a Tool of Censorship:Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right essential to a functioning democracy. Copyright should encourage more speech, not act as a legal cudgel to silence it.
Wednesday: Device and Digital Ownership:As the things we buy increasingly exist either in digital form or as devices with software, we also find ourselves subject to onerous licensing agreements and technological restrictions. If you buy something, you should be able to truly own it – meaning you can learn how it works, repair it, remove unwanted features, or tinker with it to make it work in a new way.
Thursday: The Preservation and Sharing of Information and Culture:Copyright often blocks the preservation and sharing of information and culture, traditionally in the public interest. Copyright law and policy should encourage and not discourage the saving and sharing of information.
Friday: Free Expression and Fair Use:Copyright policy should encourage creativity, not hamper it. Fair use makes it possible for us to comment, criticize, and rework our common culture.
Every day this week, we’ll be sharing links to blog posts on these topics at https://www.eff.org/copyrightweek."
[Kip Currier: As the proud son of a U.S. Air Force veteran captain, I respectfully call on the U.S. Air Force to again make available to its instructors and students these important parts of its history, as a force for making our country and the world safer and more representative of the promise of America.]
[Excerpt]
"Donald Trump’s order halting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives has led the US air force to suspend course instruction on a documentary about the first Black airmen in the US military, known as the Tuskegee Airmen, a US official said on Saturday.
The famed Black aviators included 450 pilots who fought overseas in segregated units during the second world war. Their success in combat helped pave the way for Harry Truman’s decision to desegregate the armed forces in 1948.
Another video about civilian female pilots trained by theUS militaryduring the second world war, known as Women Airforce Service Pilots, or Wasps, was also pulled, the official said.
The air force did not directly comment on the decision, which was confirmed by an official who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity."
"The annual flow of copyrighted works into the public domain underscores how the progressive lengthening of copyright protection is counter to the public interest—indeed, to the interests of creative artists. The initial U.S. copyright act, passed in 1790, provided for a term of 28 years including a 14-year renewal. In 1909, that was extended to 56 years including a 28-year renewal.
In 1976, the term was changed to the creator’s life plus 50 years. In 1998, Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, which is known as the Sonny Bono Act after its chief promoter on Capitol Hill. That law extended the basic term to life plus 70 years; works for hire (in which a third party owns the rights to a creative work), pseudonymous and anonymous works were protected for 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.
Along the way, Congress extended copyright protection from written works to movies, recordings, performances and ultimately to almost all works, both published and unpublished.
Once a work enters the public domain, Jenkins observes, “community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable both access to and preservation of cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history.”"
The lawsuit was brought last year by several major music rights holders, led by Universal Music Group and Sony Music. They claimed the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project — an unprecedented effort to digitize hundreds of thousands of obsolete shellac discs produced between the 1890s and early 1950s — constituted the “wholesale theft of generations of music,” with “preservation and research” used as a “smokescreen.” (The Archive has denied the claims.)
While more than 400,000 recordings have been digitized and made available to listen to on the Great 78 Project, the lawsuit focuses on about 4,000, most by recognizable legacy acts like Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Ella Fitzgerald. With the maximum penalty for statutory damages at $150,000 per infringing incident, the lawsuit has a potential price tag of over $621 million. A broad enough judgement could end the Internet Archive.
Supporters of the suit — including the estates of many of the legacy artists whose recordings are involved — claim the Archive is doing nothing more than reproducing and distributing copyrighted works, making it a clear-cut case of infringement. The Archive, meanwhile, has always billed itself as a research library (albeit a digital one), and its supporters see the suit (as wellas a similar onebrought by book publishers) as an attack on preservation efforts, as well as public access to the cultural record."
Lauren Coffey, Inside Higher Ed; Internet Archive Court Loss Leaves Higher Ed in Gray Area
"Pandemic-era library programs that helped students access books online could be potentially threatened by an appeals court ruling last week.
Libraries across the country, from Carnegie Mellon University to the University of California system, turned to what’s known as a digital or controlled lending program in 2020, which gave students a way to borrow books that weren’t otherwise available. Those programs are small in scale and largely experimental but part of a broader shift inmodernizing the university library.
But the appeals courtruling could upend those programs...
Still, librarians at colleges and elsewhere, along with other experts, feared that the long-running legal fight between the Internet Archive and leading publishers could imperil the ability of libraries to own and preserve books, among other ramifications."
"So far, Amara Yad has completed two volumes focused on the anatomy of the heart and is enlisting teams at other universities for more. The plan is to draft a freely available, ethically sourced road map to the entire body that eclipses the weathered volumes of watercolors from Pernkopf and honors the Nazis’ victims.
Anatomists have told him, “‘You’re crazy. It’s impossible. How could you ever surpass it?’” Shivkumar said of the Pernkopf atlas in a speech last year before members of the Heart Rhythm Society.
But “can it be beaten? The answer is yes...
Amara Yad is also an act of “moral repair” meant to honor the victims, said Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, a UCLA cardiologist and evolutionary biologist who helped support the project. The Nazi atlases “were like documents of death. The atlases that Shiv is creating are really living, interactive tools to support life.”
When Shivkumar decided to launch the project, he had been inspired by the words of USC emeritus professor of rheumatology Dr. Richard Panush, who had pushed to set the atlas aside in the library of the New Jersey medical center where he had worked, moving it to a display case that explained its history.
Panush said the old atlas should be preserved only as “a symbol of what we should not do, and how we should not behave, and the kind of people that we cannot respect.”"
"“The library has been able to play a tremendously therapeutic role,” said Raquel Ukeles, head of collections at the library. She said that many visitors have been evacuees from the country’s borders with Gaza and Lebanon, where communities are regularly targeted with rockets and shells, or reservists on leave from the Israeli military.
The library has helped stock mobile libraries that travel the country. Its staff members have also assisted in setting up a “pop-up” school in the previous National Library building for roughly 100 children displaced from their homes by fighting along the Lebanese border.
In the library’s reading room stand scores of chairs, each one holding a book chosen to represent one of the hostages taken on Oct. 7...
The library also has found new ways to serve its core mission as a custodian of collective national memory — painful as this new chapter is.
Library workers are salvaging and digitizing local archives from the ravaged communities overrun on Oct. 7. And staffers like Ms. Cooper are gathering and archiving WhatsApp conversations, in recognition of their documentary value. In Kibbutz Be’eri, the site of some of the worst atrocities on Oct. 7, one the more reliable logs of the day’s events are the messages sent on the community’s group chat."
Over the past 20 years, the organization has worked tirelessly to collect and honor the oral histories of its participants while finding new ways of sharing their contributions to the world, including National Public Radio (NPR) broadcasts, animations, podcasts, and five bestselling books. According to StoryCorps’s most recent Annual Report, in 2021, the broadcasts featured on NPR Morning Edition reached 12 million listeners each week.
“We have a scale of recordings, stories, and first person accounts of historical events that is really unmatched,” said Virginia Millington, StoryCorps director of recording and archives. The archive contains stories recalling pivotal historical events that include World War II, the rise of Hip Hop, and 9/11, as well as personal stories of happiness and heartbreak.
In order to make sure that the diversity of experiences are represented, StoryCorps has developed several initiatives over the years to target particular parts of US society. For instance, there is the Military Voices Initiative, to collect interviews from veterans, military families, service members; another initiative works to honor the stories of LGBTQ+ in initiative StoryCorps OutLoud; while StoryCorps Griot collects the experiences of African Americans.
Other programs focus on Latinos, people working in the end of life care facilities (hospitals, palliative care), juvenile and adult justice system, refugees, immigrants and Muslim communities to name a few."
"Amy Kurzweil said the chatbot project and the book that came out of it underscored her somewhat positive feelings about AI.
"I feel like you need to imagine the robot you want to see in the world," she said. "We're not going to stop progress. But we can think about applications of AI that facilitate human connection.""
"Weeding books by publication date raises concerns...
Libraries not Landfills, a group of parents, retired teachers and community members says it supports standard weeding, but shares Takata's concerns about both fiction and nonfiction books being removed based solely on their publication date.
The group is also concerned about how subjective criteria like inclusivity will be interpreted from school to school in the later stages of the equity-based weeding process."
"UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP, Sony Music Entertainment, Capitol, and other record labels filed a copyright lawsuit on Friday against Internet Archive, founder Brewster Kahle, and others over the organization’s “Great 78 Project,” accusing them of behaving as an “illegal record store.” The suit lists 2,749 pre-1972 musical works available via Internet Archive by late artists, including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Chuck Berry, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Bing Crosby, among others.
The suit, which was filed in federal court and reviewed by Rolling Stone, claims the Internet Archive’s “Great 78 Project” — launched by Internet Archive as a community project for “the preservation, research and discovery of 78rpm records,” according to its blog — has violated copyright laws. By “transferring copies of those files to members of the public, Internet Archive has reproduced and distributed without authorization Plaintiffs’ protected sound recordings,” the suit alleges.
The nonprofit Internet Archive began in 1996, stating its mission is to “provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.” It purports to be a digital library that provides free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public. Its “Great 78 Project” follows suit; the community project dedicates itself to “the preservation, research and discovery of 78rpm records” per a post about the project. It provides free access to “over 400,000 recordings” as Internet Archive estimates in its post."
"The work of the state archivists during the course of the Ukrainian war is simple – to keep what they have out of Russian hands and in existence. “Our mission is crucial because the destruction of archives can be seen as part of cultural genocide,” Khromov says. Russians have destroyed more than 300 state and university libraries since the start of the war. In May, the National Library conducted an online survey on the state of its system. By then, 19 libraries were already completely destroyed, 115 partially destroyed and 124 permanently damaged. The Russians have destroyed libraries in Mariupol, Volnovakha, Chernihiv, Sievierodonetsk, Bucha, Hostomel, Irpin and Borodianka, along with the cities they served. They have destroyed several thousand school libraries at least."
