The digital redefinition of childhood? Another kind of digital enclosure?

Here is a link to a story about how certain words are being removed from Oxford University Press's young people's dictionary, to be replaced by others. The story's title is Words associated with Christianity and British history taken out of children's dictionary but as Michael Gillelan notes in Laudator Temporis Acti
the words removed include many terms used to describe the countryside: Acorn, ash, sycamore, beech, chestnut, dandelion, holly, ivy, pasture, primrose, willow, and walnut among them. New words in the dictionary include blog, broadband, MP3,chatroom and voice mail. If you've read Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, or Steve Talbott's Devices of the Soul: Battling for Ourselves in an Age of Machines, you'll be as horrified as I am.

A new book on the digital enclosure trend.

A new book, James Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind is available for free download from Yale University Press.

Digital Enclosure again

Library Law describes how state archives' acceptance of "grants" from Ancestry.com may hobble people's ability to access archive materials on-line for the long term. Even the submitting of index materials to Google will be restricted, limiting people's ability to even find the materials. Restrictions will last for the life of the copyright on the digitized materials.

Digital Enclosure

Noted in the German archivists' blog Archivalia, a study that takes note of the process of digital enclosure:

The public domain is a rich resource and an essential foundation for the Internet public library. It includes centuries of great literature and is a chronicle of civilization and learning. Before the Internet, there was little argument over what people could do with public domain works. They could do anything. But technology makes it possible to impose new technical and contractual protections that can be applied willy-nilly to in-copyright and public domain works alike. The lawyers and economists call this the “enclosure” of the public domain and it looms large as the future of the Internet public library plays out.

http://www.blc.org/news/BLC_summit_white_paper_9-29-08.pdf