Great op-ed piece by Kevin Kelly on why copyright extension is a bad idea for everyone.
Owners of an about-to-expire copyright have several favorite arguments for extending it. One is that it spurs creativity by making original works more valuable. But an extension actually restricts creativity by narrowing the shared universe of works artists can build upon. Another is that they need an extension as an incentive to convert old material into new media. As Jack Valenti, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, has pointed out, digitizing films is expensive. "Who is going to digitize these public domain movies?" he asks.
I have an answer: movie buffs. Not only have fans moved almost all of music into the digital era, they have been busy moving hundreds of millions of documents onto the Web and are producing millions of pages of daily reporting and news in Weblogs. And without the help of paralyzed publishers, avid readers have already converted nearly 20,000 books in the public domain.
