From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Tue Jun 03 2003 - 16:49:02 MDT
I am faced with the unfortunate and perhaps hypocritical
situation of wanting to recommend that other Extropians
go sign an online petition that I cannot sign myself.
Since the failure of the Eldred case at the Supreme Court,
he and Lessig have been pushing for a minimal piece of
legislation to take back at least some of what has been
removed from American culture and discourse by the excesses
of copyright law. He proposes that copyright holders must
specifically renew their copyrights 50 years after first
publication of a work, and every five years after, for the
remainder of whatever term Congress has specified for the
work. This would allow Disney to maintain its stranglehold
on their bits of culture, while allowing the vast sea of
50-year-old abandoned works whose authors can't even be
tracked down to pass gradually into the public domain.
I think this is a marvellous step in the right direction of
making older works available for distribution and use,
increasing the amount of freely available information from
which to create new ideas and works of art. I think this is
an important issue for futurists, and I support the effort
to pass this legislation, limited though it is. So, please
go take a look at this petition:
<http://www.petitiononline.com/eldred/petition.html>
Now my ethical conundrum is that the first sentence of the
petition says something along the lines of "while we believe
in the value of copyright, we also believe in the value of a
strong public domain..." Well, I personally don't believe in
the value of copyright at all. I see this bill as a very
tiny step in the right direction, so I support its goals,
but I cannot in good conscience sign a statement I don't
agree with. However, I believe most people here actually do
agree with it as written, and since I support its goals, I
want it to get lots of signatures from people who do agree
with it. While I reject pragmatism as an ethical value, I
don't think I actually think of it as a sin, so perhaps I
can be forgiven this bit of pragrmatism to request support
for a cause by less-than-ideal means.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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