[Commons-l] Dream a little...

Sun Oct 15 20:22:22 UTC 2006

On 15/10/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Possibly. But I do recall Larry Lessig arguing real-life examples of
precisely the opposite to the Supreme Court: old films that weren't
old enough to be PD, rotting away precisely because untangling the
copyright would be too much work.

> 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).

The comparison that sprang to my mind when this was mentioned was: if
someone had said to the FSF "we will free some proprietary software of
your choice; which one do you want?" in 1985, what would they have
answered?

(Now, I think they'd answer "none; take away the software patent laws
and we can write it ourselves.")

> 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.

Sounds good.

- d.