Jimmy Wales wrote:
Roger Luethi wrote:
That comparison is misleading. The real comparison is with the money "our" side is spending now. The battle over software patents in Europe showed that the better arguments have a fair chance of winning against monied interests if you can get your arguments heard. And there's no shortage of good arguments in this case.
Right. So one of the things I am hearing loud and clear is that our community would generally like to see more money spent on lobbying efforts for copyright reform. That is a point very well taken.
However, our task at the moment is not to dream about _that_ per se, but rather to dream about what kinds of work under existing copyright, we would like to see made free. There have been many good suggestions, and I welcome more.
Some consideration to copyright reform would clearly be worthwhile. The emphasis here should be on the doable, or on those laws that are filled with ambiguities. Urging governments to get on to the task of freeing orphan works would be a great help with no significant damage to the unknown owners. Getting more governments to put their own material in the public domain, particularly their laws would be very helpful. It seems to me that copyright claims by some governments seem to be motivated by some kind of desire to protect accuracy, or to restrict the publication of some material; financial gain is often a more limited motivation. Accurate texts are both in our and their interests. Governments also need to be made aware that having US material in the public domain while theirs isn't will make the US point of view more predominant than it would be otherwise. The other important campaign would be to oppose the expansion of database protection laws that already exist in the EU and apply even if the contents of the database are already in the public domain. I can forsee Google eventually claiming this kind of protection for its public domain material.
One area of copyright material where we could provide great service is with journals. Peter Suber and The Open Access movement is already working at freeing the more recent issues of journals, and receiving co-operation from publishers. Publishers who are amenable to the open access idea may be unwilling to make the effort to digitize back issues that may go back many decades. These publishers, who often operate on a shoestring, could be open to a mutually beneficial arrangement for keeping their old material alive. Without access to a major university library some of this material can be very difficult to find.
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