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Lessig - Public Domain Dead in 35 Years
tcd004 writes "Lawrence Lessig, in an article on the Foreign Policy site, predicts that the public domain will die a slow death at the hands of anti-piracy efforts. From the article: 'The danger remains invisible to most, hidden by the zeal of a war on piracy. And that is how the public domain may die a quiet death, extinguished by self-righteous extremism, long before many even recognize it is gone.'"
Yeah, and the concept of open source copylefts won't help this matter. Open source software written nowadays won't be in the public domain for about a century.
I think Dr. Lessig overlooked copylefts as a viable alternative to public domain.
Few people on this site dispute that the ability to automatically have your work copyrighted by default helps Sam Slashdot by making it easier to cover his stuff. However, it also means that more and more areas end up having its entire body of work covered under copyright. With the practically indefinite term of copyright being bought^W lobbied for by Disney and others, it's no wonder that Lessig talks in this kind of language...
I think the only way to save the public domain is for serious reform - be it soapbox, ballot box, or revolution - to take place sooner rather than later.
As to my understanding, it is not possible to "release things" into the public domain. If an author publishes a statement that a given work is being made "public" or something to that effect, and you use that work, or distribute it, or copy it, or whatever, you might still be infringing. If the origional author decides to take you to court over it, we don't know what the outcome of the case would be. I don't think that there is a legal way to say "this work can be used/copied/distributed by anyone, anywhere". This, I believe, is why the "Creative Commons" was formed. I don't know how defensable this agreement is, and IANAL, but I think this is the best we have so far.
Agreed. Copyleft serves two major purposes, and one of them is not addressed by Public Domain.
The first, of course, is to make work available to the public.
The second is to protect the author from others using thier work against them (ie share and share alike).
But even with copyrights, if a work is not published, but is something internal (say, the code to Google servers), then 50, 75, 100 years can pass, and even though it may (may!) end up technically in the public domain, it's still a trade secret, and if it never gets published externally, it's not public domain.
Copyleft and CC address this issue by getting more works out, but Copyleft and CC only cover works that are specifically placed under those licenses, which are not the majority of works. Both are essentially workarounds for a system that is fundamentally broken and has lost its balance of profit vs public good.
"releasing material into the public domain" does not equal "sharing my Ray Charles Mp3s on Kazaa". Trying to release material into the public domain just won't work in fifty years, anyhow; with the continual extension of copyright and the accumulation of greater and greater amounts of material in the hands of big corporations. Eventually anyone who even wanted to make something public domain would be sued into oblivion for copy infringement, as it becomes harder and harder not to be derivitive of something that is in the vaults of the media which will stretch back over a century and a half.
That's strange, I thought that when I didn't pay the maintenance fee on my last patent that it went into the public domain. I'd be glad to hear it's still in force.
Patents may have their problems, but at least the length of time and the requirement of maintenence fees to keep them in force are appropriate.
As an intellectual property owner, I worry when Congress goes overboard in an attempt to "protect intellectual property holders' rights". Yes, I like that what I create can benefit me. However, when other people use IP as a cudgel to abuse people, it makes me worry about the stability of the whole system. If you were an aristocrat in France in 1780, wouldn't you be a little concerned about the other aristocrats who beat and starve the peasants? They might just have a revolution.
The parent post wasn't complaining about the price - he was complaininng about trying to enforce the division of the markets into regions. If corporations are able to take advantage of globalization to get the best possible price (eg. by outsourcing), why aren't consumers? The end result would be, of course, to level prices worldwide - which might raise the price in some markets while lowering it in others. But, it seems like the only fair way to do things.
I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be allowed to set different prices in different places - but that other people should not be prohibited from buying in the cheaper market, shipping to a more expensive market, and selling the product at an intermediate price. For example, why shouldn't Americans be allowed to buy cheaper drugs in Canada? The drug companies may profit less; they would have to raise Canadian prices and lower American prices. But, why should the law be set up to benefit the pharmaceutical company at the expense of the consumer, any more than it should benefit the consumer at the expense of the company? Efficient markets generally require a level playing field.
I like the idea of having copyrights start off at $1 for the first year and double each year there after. That way copyrights will naturally expire as soon as they aren't profitable enough to be worth maintaining and yet anyone would be able to afford to file their copyright. And I do think copyrights should have to be filed to be valid! Nonsense like having everything I write being automatically copyrighted is just stupid. They should have to be filed and filed again every year (with some reasonable grace period).
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.