Lessig's Next Copyright Proposal

Fiver-rah writes "The Supreme Court voted for Disney in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Lessig's next proposal is a policy solution which needs our help. He proposes that 50 years after publication, a work falls into the public domain unless a small fee ($50 in the NYT piece, but he says $1 is sufficient here) is paid to a governing board. This has two important effects. First, it allows the vast majority of works to fall into the public domain. Second, it gives us a publicly searchable database of copyright holders, so we could easily determine what was free and what was not. Support this proposal by writing to your elected officials! We couldn't make much of a difference with the Supreme Court, but we can with Congress." Update: 01/18 20:50 GMT by T : Related news: An anonymous reader writes "With the support of Lessig infoAnarchy has set up a wiki page devoted to copyright issues."

Comments

Re:How's this for an idea....

[KDan]

Riiight... hold on, I'm not following you too well. You're saying that to prove that we don't support Disney, we should buy their shares??

ARE YOU NUTS?

Daniel

Re:How's this for an idea....

[Chris Canfield]

Hmmm... To buy out half of a 35 billion dollar company would probably cost about 25 billion dollars (counting your effect on stock prices). Assuming we can get all 290,063,529 people in the United States to donate 50 dollars each, we'd still be 15 billion short of our goal. We could do it if we managed to convince all 6,306,439,451 people in this world to donate 5 dollars to the cause, but that would be difficult considering China's per-capita / per annum GDP of $3,600, and understandable distaste for Mulan.