[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Mon Oct 23 17:45:57 UTC 2006

David Gerard wrote:

>On 23/10/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>When the $100 million dollars is spend in the United States, we have
>>achieved something for the United States.. At this moment the amount of
>>traffic is slowly but surely moving away from the English language
>>domination in both our traffic and in in content. Given that there is a
>>lot available in English in the first place, I expect that we have a
>>better return on investment from what we do for other languages and
>>cultures.
>>The other cultures are underfunded relatively to the huge amounts of
>>money that are spend on English language content in the first place.
>>    
>>
>The reason for changing the laws first in the US is because they tend
>to pressure the rest of the world into 'harmonising' with their
>copyright laws.
>
I don't see that as necessarily the case.  For a long time US copyright 
law had renewals.  Despite some completely understandable difficulties I 
think this was a good idea in general.  That is gone.  The US also based 
copyright terms on date of publication rather than the death date of the 
author; that too was changed in 1976 to conform with international 
rules.  The US has not (yet) adopted database protection laws that could 
result in keeping some material protected indefinitely even when it is 
already in the public domain. 

The EU has done a fine job of building laws to support bureaucracy, and 
there is an unfortunate unwillingness on the part of EU members to adopt 
legislative positions that would run contrary to the bureaucratizing 
trends of the EU administrators.  While it is important to keep US 
legislation moving in the direction of openness, it is as illusory to 
believe that this openness will trickle down to other countries as it is 
to believe in trickle-down economics.  Far more effort needs to be 
directed at the EU, whose administration only magnifies the 
amateurishness of our own AfD clique. 

Too often when the issue of making information available to everybody 
the brick wall is not in the US but in the EU.  In many respects other 
activities by the US in other unrelated matters have pointed to an 
abandonment of moral leadership.  The effect of that is toward a 
disinclination on the part of other countries to follow the US lead, 
even when it would be beneficial to do so.  I don't see Europe doing 
anything to accept leadership.  I see one fat orange cat sitting in 
Brussels ignoring its herd of Odies.

Unlike Gerard I don't think this should become a matter of the English 
language versus other languages.  If the issue is a question of laws 
that has nothing to do with the language in which those laws are 
written.  If it has to do with the language of material to be put into 
our databases, there are non-English materials in US depositories that 
can as easily be put into the database.  The fact nevertheless remains 
that it takes people familiar with a language to make informed decisions 
about what should be included.  I understand the lack of support for OCR 
in other scripts, notably those of Asia, but again don't expect people 
whose everyday life is exclusively in a Roman script to have the ability 
to develop that technical support.

Ec