Re: [BP] The Eric Eldred Act

Eric's post went to two different forums: CNI-COPYRIGHT and spok+bookpeople. My response goes to both forums as well.

On Sun, 26 Jan 2003, Eric Eldred <ericeldred[_at_]usa.net> wrote:

>

I like your proposal as well as some other suggestions. However, this has very little chance of getting support from the majority of authors and artists because it misses one key point as following.

Copyright is not only about economic value. It is also about control issue. Many or almost all of authors and artists want to have control over their works for as long as possible or even forever. The enormous power and breadth and depth of freedom in the public domain really scares the hell out of them. Nay, they rather have keys to the jail houses so that they can control over who can come in to touch their works regardless of how much economic value they have.

Another comment on your proposal is that authors and artists always have the option to dedicate their works to the public domain any time in their lives before their copyrights expire. Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org) has a process to make this possible. However, because of the reason explained above, many of them choose not to dedicate their works to the public domain.

It makes sense to use the force of law to compel them give up their copyrighted works to the public domain when copyrights in these works no longer function. On the other side of coin, that the Congress will accept your proposal is a bit unrealistic.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com>

Number of days left until 1-1-2019 when all knowledge of 1923 in the land of the U.S.A. will be freed from their copyright owners' prisons: 5,817

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain. Received on Mon Jan 27 2003 - 22:58:46 GMT