Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
Expect big changes in the next 24 months on internet copyright and usage in the United States Congress and Senate. Congress has been getting too many people complaining. One sad note is that Slashdot is no longer "news for geeks" but "news for hackers, and software pirates". The pendulum is starting to swing back the other way and unfortunately, it may swing too far to the right. Experimental internet IP litigation is where WE DO NOT WANT TO BE in the line of fire.
Anything folks can do to limit our exposure here is a good thing. For the most part, WMF and its policies err on the side of caution, and this is a very good thing. The more prudent we can be in this area, the better. There's just been too much abuse of the current copyright laws by the internet community as a whole.
Some would say the pendulum's already swung too far to the right; it needs to become more free. In some ways I feel that the term extension to 95 years helped to awaken the open access community, as did the Ashcroft vs. Eldred case..
I think that copyrights became favorable to the publishing industry because it had no significant opposition.until relatively recently. Previously, serious copyright infringement was primarily an economic act that required a significant capitalization before it could happen Now, everybody has the capacity to infringe just by banging away on his keyboard; that requires almost no capitalization at all because the home computer was likely already bought for other perfectly legitimate uses. With the heightened awarenes of open access, I expect that the lobbying efforts will be more balanced between the two sides than they have ever been. Congress still needs to deal with the problem of orphan copyrights.
All that being said, I don't consider it wise to base policy on speculation about what the politicians may or may not do. When almost any laws are passed they include an effective date which is only exceptionally retroactive. My observation is that copyright enactments are usually made effective at the end of the current calandar year.
I can't comment about Slashdot because I don't participate there. I agree that there is rampan abuse of copyright laws on the net, and that swings both ways. Some are obviously violating the copyrightsd of others, but so too are there numerous people claiming copyrights to which they have no right.
I have no dispute with being cautios. I believe in pushing the limits, but I also believe that there is a point beyond which pushing those limits is stupidity. Taking prudence to excess, however, is also a mistake. There is a point (that remains to be defined) beyond which copyright laws stifle creativity in a way contrary to the US constitution. We owe it to ourselves to encourage a favorable definition of that point.
Ec