[Commons-l] Dream a little...

Sun Oct 15 20:16:58 UTC 2006

On 10/15/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> How much money would it take to shorten US copyright? Everything else
> is just picking at the edges of the problem.

There are humongous amounts of currently PD content which we do not
yet have... Much of it rotting away on paper or celluloid because even
under today's ridiculously long copyright terms there is not a clear
business case for someone to digitize it and restore it.

Making copyright reasonably shorter would only make the preservation
of old works even harder by removing the incentive to preserve old
works and even creating an incentive to package new works in
self-destructing wrappers that remove the work before it has a chance
to become free... so I could counter your position with the argument
that shortening copyright is just picking at the edges of the problem.

There are many groups which are trying to 'free' content by taking
apart modern copyright, such as creative commons and (to an extent)
the internet archive.  This is important work, but  I don't think that
our strengths rest in this area... our models of execution have thus
far shown themselves to be inferior to the models used by groups like
internet archive for that sort of work... but have proven themselves
to be superior for the sort of work we do: creating new free works,
and digesting old free works into more usable and accessible forms.

The real genius of Richard Stallman's work is existence proof that, at
least in the field of software, you could create a sustainable
universe of free works without abolishing a system of copyright law
that automatically makes all works unfree.  Wikimedia extends that
evidence to the field of useful non-software content... and this is
by-large what makes our efforts distinctive to other groups (yes, our
methods are distinctive as well, but to outsiders it doesn't matter
much how the sausage is made).

So while we could certainly benefit from a bit of liberated content
here or there, if the intention of such funding is simply to increase
the size of the free world by buying some content (or, buying changes
to copyright law).. it would, perhaps, be money better spent with the
assistance of another group.

Instead I'd like to see us describing not just what stuff we'd buy and
stick in a warehouse, but how we'd take the content and integrate it,
enhance it, translate it, and transform it.. into works which are
truly useful for the world today and for the world of the future.