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I would suggest the money should be used instead to support a powerful well-funded lobbying effort for copyright reform, perhaps helping any number of the existing organisations such as Union for the Public Domain. There are many issues - the unnecessarily huge and increasing length of copyright terms, the inaccessibility of orphan works whose copyright owners cannot be traced, questions of balance between just rewards to creators and fair use/dealing for consumers, non-expiry of DRM even after nominal copyright expiration, etc. Spending USD 100m on a number of popular copyrights is very generous, but copyrights can be extremely expensive, and USD 100m is a tiny bit of the total value of all the still current copyrights. Reforming copyright, however, would change the future for all copyright works, something which could be of greater long-term value to society, commerce and industry including the copyright holders.

See the Union for the Public Domain. We're also working on these issues and have summaries of WIPO proceedings and an analysis of the treaty.

No. They're copyright their various authors. It is that copyright which enables those authors to place the programs under the BSD|GPL|some other licence. CMUCL is an example of a program in the public domain: it ISN'T licenced.

I think your point could have been that ideas are free to all, or not free at all. Good point.

This articel stumbles at the gate:

'Public Domain (AKA "freeware")- help yourself, there are no strings attached;'

According to convention, experience, common sense and the FSF Free Software Definition, freeware is not public domain software. It is propriestary software distributed as gratis binaries without source.

Where is this debate at now? Has the Clinton administration's Evil Copyright Initiative been successfully thwarted? Enquiring minds want to know...

I posted this on superspecialquestions.com, the web BBS that M. Doughty (of the band Soul Coughing) runs.

legislating the number OR i'll chew my audio, thanks.

The 5% nation has switched from offering an mp3-encoded Soul Coughing recording each month in favor of releasing a greater volume of material in the Liquid Audio format -- the catch being that these Liquid Audio files are only playable for 30 days.

The deal, as I understand it, is that more music can be released in the Liquid Audio format, since the 30-day timeout makes a future commercial release of the music more lucrative.

Let me explain why I feel this is a Bad Thing. The issue is complicated, but I'll be as breif as I can.

Liquid Audio is very different from mp3.

First, it's a "secure format". That means that (either by patent or trade secret) only Liquid Audio (the company) and its licensees can make players for these files. It also means that you can't easily convert a Liquid Audio track into another format.

Second, that 30-day time limit is more than just an inconvenience. It raises questions. Clearly I'm not supposed to be able to get around that 30-day limit. But is it a legal restriction, or just a technological one? What's the legal status of a program I might write to to convert a Liquid Audio file into a .wav or .mp3 file? Such programs exist, and they get called "cracks", and talked about as if they're seriously under the table. They're hard to find. Are they illegal? What about the simple solution -- if I get a headphone-plug-to-headphone-plug cable, put one end in the "out" jack on my sound card, put the other end in the "in" jack, and play the Liquid Audio track while I record to a regular wave file? Is that legal? Wave files are easy to encode as mp3s. Am I allowed to redistribute the resulting file?

If we don't ask questions like these, they're going to be answered the way record companies want rather than the way we (as either fans or musicians) might want. Explaining why those answers aren't likely to be the same is a little bit of a task. I'll do the best I can, and provide links. If you're interested, they'll cover the topic much more thoroughly than I'm going to here.

About Mp3:
There is a political battle being fought over the mp3 format. Mp3, like many formats to come (trust me here), makes it possible to store and transfer high-quality audio recordings digitally within reasonable a size range and with reasonable transfer speed. This is becomes increasingly true as storage and network technologies allow for larger and larger files to be reasonable for storage and transfer. Suddenly, it's physically possible to receive and entire albums in digital format over the internet. No one needs to manufacture a CD. No one needs to ship CDs to stores. No one needs to run stores, and no one needs to go out to stores to get music. Record companies are terrified. That's because the business of physically distributing music media is very profitable, and in the near future, it will probably be very outdated -- unless record companies get their way and are able to create an artificial demand for the distribution of music. They've banded together as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to fight mp3. One of the most effective arguments they're using to convince people that such a system needs to be put in place deals with artist compensation and copyright protection. But before I get into that, here are some links for information on mp3 and what record companies are doing about it:

http://www.riaa.com/
http://slashdot.org/ (search for "RIAA")
http://david.weekly.org/writings/sdmi.php3

About Copyright:
There was a time when Copyright made perfect sense. When printing presses were the only way to copy a publishable work, the trade-off was universally beneficial. Printing presses were expensive. Copyright made it possible for people with printing presses to profit from publishing a peice of writing, and didn't limit the rights of people who didn't have printing presses, since they had no reasonable way to copy printed works anyway. People with printing presses were happy, people without printing presses lost nothing of value, and authors could be rewarded for their efforts. When we stretch copyright to cover digital media, however, things get a lot more complicated. Anyone can copy a computer file. In fact, copying digital media is implicit in doing a lot of things that we have other metaphors for as well. To view this web page, for example, you've got to copy it from a server on the Internet. In its journey from that server to your computer, it is copyied between many other computers on the internet that you never have to pay attention to. When it arrives at your computer, it is copied around several times in RAM to get it into a format that will make sense to you, and it is probably copied from the RAM onto your disk for temporary storage to speed things up if you want to view it again in the near future. Then it's copied to a special place in the RAM, which is read by your video card, which then transforms it into the light you're seeing. Then it gets copied about in very similar ways in your eyes, your optic nerves, and in your brain. Worse, the whole web page, like any Liquid Audio track, image, or computer program, is represented within your computer as a number. What are the consequenses of legislating the rights people have over numbers and how they chose to interpret them? Copyright in the present day has become a very complicated issue. It's obviously still important to reward artists and authors for their work, but it's not at all clear how we should do it. Here are some links to pages which talk about what's wrong with the kind of Copyright that many record companies (and software companies before them) are in favor of:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyrig ht.html
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/dat.html
http://www.public-domain.org/old.html

Because of the mp3s released via the 5% nation, I used to count Soul Coughing amoungst the most politically progressive bands in terms of digital media policy. Such venerable (and notably non-major-record-label-affiliated) musicians as Frank Black and They Might Be Giants have released entire albums in the mp3 format. While I'm not sure it's really up to musicians to keep tabs on issues like these, it's certainly nice to see.

and this is an exerpt from a later post in the thread:

// I enjoy it when people like my music, but it's MY music. I did it. I put myself into it, and it's mine. I have a right to be compensated for it if you want to use it. The free distribution of mp3's takes away that right//

I can go out on the street right now and start selling fire. I can make the fire by banging some rocks together near some dry leaves, and I can sell it on sticks. If you've ever actually tried to start a fire by banging rocks together, you know that it's pretty difficult. So it would take a lot of hard work to make that fire. But if someone bought my fire from me, they could just turn around and start spreading it onto other sticks, and giving it away! Shouldn't I have some kind of right to profit from the fire I worked so hard to make? I don't think so. It was just a bad investment. Anyone can make fire cheap, and once fire is made, anyone can spread it cheap. What right do I have to stop them?

It comes back to the issue of how we're goinging to make music something someone can reasonably do for a living. I don't know how we should do that, but I know that a situation in which musicians get paid because people aren't allowed to do something which is essentially very easy to do will never work out. Getting controlled substances is considerably harder than copying digital media, and look how well the War on Drugs is doing. So why don't we drop that idea and start thinking very hard about what we can do instead?

• Union for the Public Domain: their page on Business Practice Patents.
• The League for Programming Freedom: their page on Software Patents
• freepatents.org for activism in the EU
• Phil Karn: his "The US Patent System is Out of Control"

Analysis on Slashdot will do little to change anything, unless there's a bit of activism to go along with it.

There are a number of organizations in existence who apparently work on some aspect or another of intellectual property rights. An incomplete list (with links) can be found here. A cursory look makes me think that Union for the Public Domain is promising (though moving slowly) as an organization moving the right direction.

Anyone know of any others? Or, should another one be necessary? There needs to be someway to focus resources on this matter...

For instance, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act which just went into effect was written for the express purpose of bringing US Copyright law into conformity with those of other countries.

I wasn't at the conference (of course), but it was reported on UPD-DISCUSS that the U.S. delegation was the one really pushing for extending those rights, and that independent lobbyists from the USA as well as other countries had to rally support from such far shots as Libya in order to oppose the worst extensions...

Then the U.S. delegates ran back to Washington, asking Congress to upgrade U.S. legislation to come at par with "international standards". Nice touch, isn't it?

And, you are absolutely right about extending the term of copyright protection for already existing works. The authors agreed to write those books under the terms in effect back then, and were duly paid for it. Neither they, their heirs, or their publisher have any ethical standing coming back to ask for more. They shouldn't have any legal standing either.