Petition to Reclaim the Public Domain
Our friend LawrenceLessig has written a petition urging congress to reclaim the public domain. There's a brief about it at eldrid.cc and some discussion at SlashDot. Check it out, and if you think it's worthy take a second and sign the petition.
I've had a couple people ask my why we want to allow corporations to renew copyrights for an amount as negligable as $1. Lessig has a response on his blog, and here is the response I've been sending:
Lessig's Eldred case was an attempt to do the right thing and get the supreme court to reset copyright terms to sane lengths. It failed so that avenue of attack is no longer available. The courts judgement was that it wasn't their place to make the determination of what "limited time" meant. Thus we are in the situation where we have to lobby congress to get our views heard ... and thus are almost certainly doomed to fail.
An important part of the Eldred case was the claim that the majority of the harm that current copyright causess is with old works where it's almost impossible to track down who the actual copyright holder is. Even if you can track down who it is, it can almost impossible to contact with them to gain permission to reuse a work (for pay or for free). This especially effects small companies and organizations like Gutenberg and Eldred who are trying to preserve the public domain, because of the overhead and uncertainty involved in contacting copyright holders we are daily loosing material from the public domain because by the time it's available to be preserved by the public, it's already physically lost forever.
By charging a negligable fee after X years of copyright monopoly is up, you force corporations to track what it is they want to want to control *and* you get a centralized, easily queried, database of works that are under copyright. When you find an old work, and want to use it, all you have to do is query the database. If it's not there you can use it. If it is then you know who to ask for permisssion.
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