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Holmes Wilson Interviewed About Open-Source TV
flippy writes "Videoblogger Steve Garfield has a new interview with Holmes Wilson of Downhill Battle and Participatory Culture Foundation, talking about the F/OSS internet TV platform that Participatory Culture is developing and their recently released video publishing package, Broadcast Machine. Their RSS / BitTorrent / VLC application ("TiVo for the Internet") is expected to be released for Mac and Windows by the end of this month."
fast, active relief from the ./ effect
Either that, or they should bring it back to the way it used to be, so that the rights of the public and the rights of the copyright holders are balanced. Things should go out of copyright after a good fifteen years or so.
There are many reasons this is so. There have been many books published at the turn of the 1900's that you can buy today, brand new. Books with ingenius information about how various mechanical systems were constructed, etc. This information would be all but missing if these books never went out of copyright, because it would be illegal to reprint them today without the permission of someone who is long dead or a publishing company that long got bought out, shut down, or simply disappeared.
Mechanical books are not the reason. The reason is that too much valuable information gets lost when copyright extends for practically forever. Games for the Atari that nobody cares about anymore and nobody makes a profit off anymore; Software made in the '70's or '80's that some companies are held hostage to because it would literally cost millions to replace them, but when they break down it costs ridiculous quantities in terms of lost uptime, lost production, etc.; books published in the same era that are out of print and impossible to find, yet you wish you could find a copy; television series from the same era that people would like to duplicate, sell, watch, enjoy, etc., but cannot legally do so, while the studio stands to make nothing from it because it has absolutely no interest in doing so... Many things like this that do exist and happen on a daily basis.
It's like this: You have tons of perfectly good food, but you don't want to eat it. So you're going to put it in the trash. Some hungry person comes up and begs for the food. You refuse to give it to him, but since you don't want it, you throw it away anyway. If you give it to him instead of throwing it away, you gain and lose nothing, but the hungry man eats. If you throw it away, you still gain and lose nothing, but the hungry man goes hungry. You don't gain or lose anything either way, but the overall economy benefits, and value is created. Therefore, copyright should expire after a reasonable (and SHORT, meaning 10 to 15 years MAX) amount of time, so that existing information can continue to generate value for the economy. Otherwise, the information is lost, forgotten, deleted, or otherwise destroyed, whether deliberately or simply as a matter of elapsing time, and what could definitely benefit a later generation will be forgotten. Imagine if the classic literature were lost in the same way that out-of-print literature from the 80's is going to be. Yes, you could say it's worthless, and that's why it's out of print. But people thought Moby Dick was worthless until years after the author's death! Copyright is a short sighted thing. It should be balanced.
Either that, or abolished altogether.