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:A partial solution

[Henry V .009]

No, the maximum copyright term would remain the same--70 years after death of the author.

Don't make the date from *publication*

[stienman]

Make the expiration 50 years from the creation or publiction, whichever is earlier.

There may be an established definition of publication, but with the internet and other forms of publication, I can see this becoming a loophole. If it's 50 years from creation or publication, whichever came first, then no matter what the definition of publication is, the time limit is still fairly well defined. Even handing a finished manuscript to a proofreader could be considered creation.

I can just see someone claiming that just because their work was available through some means for 30 years, it was never "published". Creation still has some thorny issue (it was a work in progress, even though 99% of it was available to people generally), but by making it the limit of both it becomes much harder for corporations and individuals to abuse it.

-Adam

This is even better because...

[samjam]

...as Lessig shows; we can easily see who will "let us play" and who won't. Let Disney keep their "better" ball which they paid all of $1 to retain;

once we can identify all the other public domain stuff we'll leave Disney to play on their own while we have a jolly good party and rediscover all the old stuff that is worth holding on to. And that will be a good networking project; discovering promoting the "good" old stuff.

And when Disney trot out some new toy, we'll go and pay a bit of attention till it gets old and go back to ignoring Disney again and playing with all the other old stuff.

And it still has the effect of making new stuff even better if it is to get our attention in place of the public domain stuff.

Heh heh

Sam