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Kahle vs Ashcroft: Copyright Battle Continues
Robotech_Master writes "People may remember librarian Brewster Kahle as the man behind Archive.org's Wayback Machine and the Internet Bookmobile. He was one of the big supporters of Eldred in the Eldred vs Ashcroft case. Well, he's at it again. A new lawsuit, Kahle vs Ashcroft, has been filed as of March 22nd. Lawrence Lessig comments on this case in his blog." Question number 3 of the FAQ explains that while the Eldred case challenged the length of copyright expansion, this case challenges the breadth.
Since authors are, largely, unlikely to care about the rights of people who want to derive from their works, couldn't a reinstatement of copyright registration for works within the United States theoretically drive authors to nominally publish their works in other nations (in order to get automatic protection as per the current U.S. system), and thus drive creativity out of the U.S.?
I don't know if this would occur in practice, and I'm not saying it's a good reason to maintain a flawed system, but it seems like something to think about if/when we design new copyright policy.
Would this case, if ruled in Kahle's favor, make abandonware legal?
People have been distributing old, abandoned software (mostly from the 1980s) on web sites for years, knowing that it is illegal but under the likely correct assumption that they are doing the publisher no harm whatsoever. I have never heard of any true abandonware resulting in legal action, but currently a company that holds the copyright for a program can go after someone distributing it online for free. It makes no difference if they still sell it, support it or even remember it exists.
Of course, there would have to be some kind of definition for what constitutes abandonware, but that would be the case with all other works as well so I'm confident they'll figure that part out. I hope Kahle wins this one, personally.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
- If the author doesn't want the work released, he should have the right to keep it that way.
THE HELL HE DOES.That line of thinking has caused thousands of hours of vintage TV programming to be lost forever.
If you can't legally buy it, you should be able to freely trade it around.
Besides, since everything is supposed to end up in the public domain eventually, what better way to preserve something?
You forget that copyright is not meant to solely benefit the copyright holder, and noone else.
Amiga Unix is now being spread around the net thanks to someone who had a tape of it and had the forethought to back it up before it degrades. The source code was already lost long ago, so if this were lost, there would be no existence of Amiga Unix at all. And it's said that AMIX is one of the better implementations of it's time, I believe. With your line of reasoning, AMIX would be lost.
Abandonware could be set at, say, 15 or 20 years. More than plenty to let something sit around. And if it can be legally acquired (not used, brand new), then copyright protection is fine. But something like this literally allows someone to destroy a part of history, intentionally or otherwise. And that should be prevented above all, because what good is it if the future generations can't benefit from it?