Re: Copyright/everincreasing times

Spot-on Martin - restrictive legislation should never be drafted widely 
when the precise intention is clear. Congress must be on its knees to the 
media to have opted for this course. Now it has affected and diminished 
us all. 

I think it is Mr Sonny Bono who should recognise the responsibility to 
seek for rectification. It is his name on the indulgence.





06-Jun-03 06:14:15, Martin Ward <[email protected]> wrote:

>On Thursday 05 Jun 2003 3:22 pm, Juhana Sadeharju wrote:
>> Hello. It looks nothing can be done for the everincreasing
>> copyright protection times. People should look for alternatives
>> where authors/publishers give up the rights.
>
>Here's an alternative:
>
>http://www.petitiononline.com/eldred/petition.html
>
>To:  Members of the United States Congress
>
>We, the undersigned, while believing in the importance of copyright, 
also 
>believe in the importance of the public domain. We believe the public 
domain 
>is crucial to the spread of knowledge and culture, and crucial in 
assuring 
>access to our past. We therefore write to petition you to reconsider 
major 
>changes that you have made to the copyright system. These changes 
>unnecessarily threaten the public domain without any corresponding 
benefit to 
>copyright holders.
>
>In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act 
(CTEA). 
>That Act extended the term of all existing copyrights by 20 years. But 
as 
>Justice Breyer calculated, only 2% of the work copyrighted during the 
initial 
>20 years affected by this statute has any continuing commercial value at 
all. 
>The balance has disappeared from the commercial marketplace, and, we 
fear, 
>could disappear from our culture generally.
>
>For example: The vast majority of film created during the 1920s and 
1930s is 
>not commercially available. Because of the CTEA, much of it remains 
under 
>copyright. Yet because it is often impossible to track down the 
copyright 
>owners for these films, commercial and noncommercial preservationist and 
>distributors cannot safely restore and distribute these films. And 
because 
>these films were made from nitrate-based stock, by the time the 
copyright to 
>these films expire, most of them will have dissolved.
>
>The same is true with many other copyrighted works that are no longer 
>commercially available. Though the Internet could facilitate the 
distribution 
>of this work if the copyright owners could be identified, the costs of 
>locating these copyright owners is wildly prohibitive. Schools and 
libraries 
>are thus denied access to works that otherwise could be made available 
at a 
>very low cost.
>
>Such burdens on access to work that has no continuing commercial value 
serves 
>no legitimate copyright purpose. It certainly does not "promote the 
Progress 
>of Science" as the Constitution requires. We therefore ask Congress to 
>consider changes to the current regime that would free unused content 
from 
>continued regulation, while respecting the rights of existing copyright 
>owners.
>
>One solution in particular that we ask Congress to consider is the 
Public 
>Domain Enhancement Act. See http://eldred.cc This statute would require 
>American copyright owners to pay a very low fee (for example, $1) fifty 
years 
>after a copyrighted work was published. If the owner pays the fee, the 
>copyright will continue for whatever duration Congress sets. But if the 
>copyright is not worth even $1 to the owner, then we believe the work 
should 
>pass into the public domain.
>
>This legislation would strengthen the public domain without burdening 
>copyright owners. It would also help clarify rights over copyrighted 
>material, which in turn would enable reuse of that material. The law 
could 
>thus help restore balance to the protection of copyright, and support 
the 
>public domain.
>
>We therefore call upon Congress to introduce this legislation, and to 
hold 
>hearings on the benefits that it might have to reviving a vibrant public 
>domain.
>
>When technologists have given us a tool that could spread knowledge 
>universally, we should not allow the law to get in the way. The law does 
so 
>now. This Congress should change it.
>
>Sincerely,
>
>The Undersigned 
>
>-- 
>			Martin
>
>[email protected] http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/ Erdos number: 
4
>G.K.Chesterton web site: http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/
>
>
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