Lessig's issued a call-to-action for a bill that would require people who want to keep their copyrights after 50 years to pay a dollar a year (presumably, a tax-deductible dollar at that) to keep their copyrights active. The idea is to allow Disney to keep Steamboat Willie for as long as Congress thinks they should, but not at the expense of all the movies made contemporaneously with the early Mickey cartoons, whose owners are dead, and whose film stock is decaying, such that all copies of these works will have expired long before their copyrights do.
The need for even this tiny compromise is becoming clearer each day. Stanford's library, for example, has announced a digitization project to digitize books. They have technology that can scan 1,000 pages an hour. They are chafing for the opportunity to scan books that are no longer commercially available, but that under current law remain under copyright. If this proposal passed, 98% of books just 50 years old could be scanned and posted for free on the Internet.
Stanford is not alone. This has long been a passion of Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive, as well as many others. Yet because of current copyright regulation, these projects — that would lower the cost of libraries dramatically, and spread knowledge broadly — cannot go forward. The costs of clearing the rights to makes these works available is extraordinarily high.
Yet the lobbyists are fighting even this tiny compromise. The public domain is competition for them. They will fight this competition. And so long as they have the lobbyists, and the rest of the world remains silent, they will win.
Lessig's asking us to write to our congresscritters to ask them to bring forward a law like this, and to spread the word.
(Thanks, Prodrick!)
