[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Thu Oct 19 08:01:28 UTC 2006

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Roger Luethi wrote:
>  
>
>>That comparison is misleading. The real comparison is with the money "our"
>>side is spending now. The battle over software patents in Europe showed
>>that the better arguments have a fair chance of winning against monied
>>interests if you can get your arguments heard. And there's no shortage of
>>good arguments in this case.
>>    
>>
>Right.  So one of the things I am hearing loud and clear is that our 
>community would generally like to see more money spent on lobbying 
>efforts for copyright reform.  That is a point very well taken.
>
>However, our task at the moment is not to dream about _that_ per se, but 
>rather to dream about what kinds of work under existing copyright, we 
>would like to see made free.  There have been many good suggestions, and 
>I welcome more.
>
Some consideration to copyright reform would clearly be worthwhile.  The 
emphasis here should be on the doable, or on those laws that are filled 
with ambiguities.  Urging governments to get on to the task of freeing 
orphan works would be a great help with no significant damage to the 
unknown owners.  Getting more governments to put their own material in 
the public domain, particularly their laws would be very helpful.  It 
seems to me that copyright claims by some governments seem to be 
motivated by some kind of desire to protect accuracy, or to restrict the 
publication of some material; financial gain is often a more limited 
motivation.  Accurate texts are both in our and their interests.  
Governments also need to be made aware that having US material in the 
public domain while theirs isn't will make the US point of view more 
predominant than it would be otherwise.  The other important campaign 
would be to oppose the expansion of database protection laws that 
already exist in the EU and apply even if the contents of the database 
are already in the public domain.  I can forsee Google eventually 
claiming this kind of protection for its public domain material.

One area of copyright material where we could provide great service is 
with journals.  Peter Suber and The Open Access movement is already 
working at freeing the more recent issues of journals, and receiving 
co-operation from publishers.  Publishers who are amenable to the open 
access idea may be unwilling to make the effort to digitize back issues 
that may go back many decades.  These publishers, who often operate on a 
shoestring, could be open to a mutually beneficial arrangement for 
keeping their old material alive.  Without access to a major university 
library some of this material can be very difficult to find.

Ec