Re: droit de suite

On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Pat Sloane <patsloane[_at_]aol.com> wrote:
>
> So what drives the raging against copyright, if it isn't any kind
> of desire for the public good? Seems to me it's the larcenous lust.
> Eliminate copyright and you deprive the writer of the opportunity to
> profit from his work. But you've correspondingly opened the door for
> anyone other than the writer to profit from the writer's work.

I see two very big problems with the current state of copyright law:

1. Copyright is being misused to try and silence whistle-blowers. The "Cyber Patrol" case and the Lighthouse Ministry cases spring immediately to mind, plus the perennial lawsuits by [That Church Tom Cruise Belongs To]. This isn't about protecting authors from pirate sales; it's about stopping the public from seeing various embarrassing-but-true things about certain wealthy corporations and congregations.

   Proposed solution: if a work is (a) copyrighted by an organization    rather than a human, (b) published within the organization but not    sold to the general public, and (c) contains reasonably newsworthy    information, it should be made legal for third parties to copy and    publish the relevant parts for news reporting purposes.

2. Copyright term extension vastly increases the number of "lost"

   works (i.e. the work has been out-of-print for half a century;    current copyright holder can't be identified; no copies exist    outside of museum rare-book collections; and it'll be another    thirty years before Dover Books or Project Gutenberg are free    to try and revive the work from the dead).

   Proposed solution: if a work (a) has been previously published,    (b) no new copies of the work have been offered for sale in the    last 28 years, and (c) the Copyright Office has no contact info    for the current copyright holder, then it should be made legal    for third parties to copy and republish the work upon payment    of a mechanical royalty.

Lance Purple
<lpurple[_at_]netcom.com> Received on Wed Apr 05 2000 - 03:47:13 GMT