On 15/10/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)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.