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Put the "public" back in the public domain
Lawrence Lessig is looking for a few good congressmen:
| | The idea is a simple one: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner must pay a $1 maintanence fee. If the copyright owner pays the fee, then the copyright continues. If the owner fails to pay the fee, the work passes into the public domain. Based on historical precedent, we expect 98% of copyrighted works would pass into the public domain after just 50 years. They could keep Mickey for as long as Congress lets them. But we would get a public domain. |
It seems that there was one member of congress willing to introduce this bill, but the lobbyists got to him/her. So Prof. Lessig is calling on people to write their representatives and ask them to do something relatively small and achievable to redress the copyright imbalance that prevails today.
| | 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. |
This, it seems to me, is a good fight, worth giving some long-haul energy.
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"The Bug"'s life
One of the things I'm proudest of from my tenure as Salon's technology editor was whatever role we played in helping the writing of Ellen Ullman -- some of the most thoughtful, accessible prose on programming you'll find anywhere -- reach a wider audience. We excerpted her "Close to the Machine" when it came out in 1997, and I had the pleasure of interviewing her at the time. She later did some more memorable writing for Salon.
Now she's written a wonderful novel called "The Bug." You can read the excerpt here, and my new interview with her here.
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