On 10/15/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
How much money would it take to shorten US copyright? Everything else is just picking at the edges of the problem.
There are humongous amounts of currently PD content which we do not yet have... Much of it rotting away on paper or celluloid because even under today's ridiculously long copyright terms there is not a clear business case for someone to digitize it and restore it.
Making copyright reasonably shorter would only make the preservation of old works even harder by removing the incentive to preserve old works and even creating an incentive to package new works in self-destructing wrappers that remove the work before it has a chance to become free... so I could counter your position with the argument that shortening copyright is just picking at the edges of the problem.
There are many groups which are trying to 'free' content by taking apart modern copyright, such as creative commons and (to an extent) the internet archive. This is important work, but I don't think that our strengths rest in this area... our models of execution have thus far shown themselves to be inferior to the models used by groups like internet archive for that sort of work... but have proven themselves to be superior for the sort of work we do: creating new free works, and digesting old free works into more usable and accessible forms.
The real genius of Richard Stallman's work is existence proof that, at least in the field of software, you could create a sustainable universe of free works without abolishing a system of copyright law that automatically makes all works unfree. Wikimedia extends that evidence to the field of useful non-software content... and this is by-large what makes our efforts distinctive to other groups (yes, our methods are distinctive as well, but to outsiders it doesn't matter much how the sausage is made).
So while we could certainly benefit from a bit of liberated content here or there, if the intention of such funding is simply to increase the size of the free world by buying some content (or, buying changes to copyright law).. it would, perhaps, be money better spent with the assistance of another group.
Instead I'd like to see us describing not just what stuff we'd buy and stick in a warehouse, but how we'd take the content and integrate it, enhance it, translate it, and transform it.. into works which are truly useful for the world today and for the world of the future.