Patrik wrote:
... I'd refer you to Loren, Building a Reliable
Semicommons of
Creative Works, 14 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 271, 318-28 (2007) (arguing that
section 203 is inapplicable to CC licenses under a suggested doctrine of
limited copyright abandonment); Armstrong, Shrinking the Commons, 47 Harv.
J. on Legis. 359, 405-09 (2010) (expressing skepticism as to whether courts
would adopt Professor Loren's approach, suggesting, alternatively, an
analogy to the abandonment provisions of the Patent Act to justify limits
on the termination of open-content licenses); and Greenberg, More than Just
a Formality, 59 UCLA L. Rev. 1028, 1060-63 (2012) (suggesting legislative
action). All three articles are also freely available online (in one case
at least in a pre-publication version), at
<https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Loren.pdf>,
<http://scholarship.law.uc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1146&context=fac_pubs>,
and <http://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/59-4-4.pdf>, respectively.
Here is a potentially more accessible popular treatment, which
directly addresses the motivation for expiring copyright grant terms:
http://www.kelleydrye.com/publications/articles/1558/_res/id=Files/index=0/…
The reason Congress mandated the expiration of copyright grants was
specifically to address the common case of the value of a work far
exceeding the authors' original compensation, for whatever reasons.
Isn't this a very pertinent ethics issue for the Foundation? If the
law of the land is designed to compensate authors' for windfalls in
the value of their effort, do we want to be in support of or opposed
to that goal, and why or why not?
This law review article may be considerably more mainstream than
Professor Loren's:
https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1811/64395/OSLJ_V48N3_0897.pdf
(None of them are touching upon the derivative work
issue, which is a
rather Wikimedia-specific consideration. It could arguably not provide a
universal solution to the potential problem, since the availability of a
derivative work is the exception, rather than the norm, even in an
open-content world. I have therefore not looked into this.)
Best,
Patrik
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