Public-Domain Bookmobile Hits the Road

At Belle Haven Elementary School in Palo Alto, right about... *now*, the Internet Archive Bookmobile is starting its ten-day, cross-country trip to the Supreme Court. They're putting the hammer down (itinerary) (blog) to make it to Ohio for the Bookmobile Conference. Then they'll drive into Washington, D.C. on Oct. 8, the day before the nine Justices hear the copyright-extension case Eldred v. Ashcroft. The contraption is a Ford Aerostar with decals, satellite dish, wireless LAN, laptops... and a printer and binder to do on-demand printing of any of the thousands of public domain books on the internet. (The webpage says 20,000 but the decals claim 1,000,000... maybe they have 50 fonts :) Update: 10/01 01:33 GMT by T : Nick Arnett writes "The piece about Belle Haven School's bookmobile put the school in Palo Alto. It's not; it's across the freeway, in a far less wealthy and privileged neighborhood, where access to technology is much less common than in Palo Alto. (I'm on the board of Plugged In, a community technology center in the same area as Belle Haven.)"

Comments

Re:The Future of all Printing

[Planesdragon]

The benefits, of course, is that the number of copies printed matches exactly the number of copies purchased.

That's a very, VERY big advantage to a publisher. It means that there's no tax-penalty for large print runs, and thus the incentive to roll out "crappy book of the month" goes away.

Unfortunately...

The downside is that many people use hands-on browsing to find books they want, which won't be possible when the books are in digital format.

That's not the big downside; bookstores could just select a few and print them themselves, if the system works.

The problem is that it's inefficient. Book runs benefit from economy of scale, and "one book runs" may be good for out of print material like Public Domain stuff, but it's not nice as the primary book sale method.

Beat the inefficiency, and I (and all the publishers in the world) would love it. Imagine--instant corrections, no returns... it'd be great!

I don't need to eat after I'm dead & solution?

[Interrobang]

First of all, I'm a writer. Secondly, I like to eat (my reason for ongoing membership in the Great International Tech Writer Conspiracy). Thirdly, I approve of limited term copyright in certain circumstances. (There are a lot of instances where copyright comes in handy; there are also a lot where copyright is just no damn good, but that's another story.)

However, I don't think that I, my heirs and/or assigns, and/or my legal-entity estate, and/or the corporation which bought up my catalogue before or after my demise (particularly this latter) should be able to profit from my works forever, or even for three quarters of a century after I'm dead. There's no reason for it.

There are a lot of good reasons against it, though. First of all, it isn't exactly fair for other people (and/or corporations) to get fat off my legacy (let them make their own art instead of just collecting royalty cheques on my work in perpetuity). Secondly, a lot of art (books, movies, short stories, etc.) is getting "lost" in ever-extending copyright boondoggles. Many early films are decaying in their canisters, unshown and unrestored, because the copyright holder is long dead, but the work hasn't passed into the public domain. Same with thousands and thousands of what would be "mid-list" books written since 1910. Thirdly, the commonweal (that is, society at large) deserves (and, at least in the US, is Constitutionally assigned) the right to use my artistic work (after a set period) to enrich itself, which I support.

I won't need those hypothetical royalties, anyway. I'll be dead. Next question for the lawyerly types out there: Upon her demise, is it possible for an author to will her works into the public domain?

Death of the public domain

[dpilot]

We're dancing around the real issue, here. It's far bigger than how long Disney gets to keep exclusive rights to Mickey Moust. Unfortunately far worse damage is being done than merely overextending Mickey's copyright.

If retroactive copyright extension is upheld, then the public domain is essentially dead. At the very least, the last public domain music/literature ends up coming from early in the 20th century.

If retroactove copyright is upheld, does anyone believe that some Senator won't be for-hire next time Steamboat Willie is about to expire, and again and again after that.

At the moment, I don't give a %^&* about Mickey Mouse, nor of any of the $%^& Jack Valenti wants to protect "for Eternity minus one day." It's all the other stuff that gets dragged along with it. Essentially the cultural "abandonware" that sometimes becomes important much later. In the name of Mickey Mouse, we've prevented EVERYTHING from lapsing into the public domain.

It stinks, and I'd like to see retroactive extension reversed. Even better, I'd like to see terms more "limited". Even though Jefferson himself did sign extensions, I don't believe he envisioned going beyond "threescore and ten". After all, that's Eternity, to me.

If we can't have reversal or rollback, I'd prefer to require copyrights to need renewal. Abandonware (be it music, print, movie, or software) simply should fall into the public domain.