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

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?