On 23/10/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: The reason for changing the laws first in the US is because they tend to pressure the rest of the world into 'harmonising' with their copyright laws. - d.

And resources. I contribute to the Wiki to help provide an alternative to the marketingspeak and lawyer-writen short-term memory that forms a surprising amount of the 'web. Political lobbying is the sort of thing I come to the wiki to avoid.

I still think everyone is much too focused on "big content". I'm much more concerned about the huge amount of non-commercial content that gets stamped with a copyright without the author having any idea of how that works. I have posted on this before, and the answers were always "well that's what CC is for". True as that may be, no-one's ever heard of it. _I_ never heard of it until coming to the wiki.

Consider the millions of snapshots that are taken every week and posted on the 'net. One or two of them would improve the wiki, I'm sure, but we can't use them. Not because the snapshot-taker has any intension of making money, but because it was copyrighted "by default" and they are completely unaware of it. This has happened to me repeatedly when trying to get images for articles. And contrary to the claims here, most librarians and archivists are completely unaware of either the problem or the solutions.

So I still think education would be a good use of these funds. Who cares about the big media houses when there is so much content out there that's free but shackled? Let's try to fix THAT problem, lets make sure people know there is a better way.

Maybe, but you have to hear about it first. I didn't. No one I know has. So who HAS heard of CC other than a few wiki-laywers and nerds? Can the number of people in the general public that are aware of these issues be represented on a handheld calculator?

David Gerard wrote: I don't see that as necessarily the case. For a long time US copyright law had renewals. Despite some completely understandable difficulties I think this was a good idea in general. That is gone. The US also based copyright terms on date of publication rather than the death date of the author; that too was changed in 1976 to conform with international rules. The US has not (yet) adopted database protection laws that could result in keeping some material protected indefinitely even when it is already in the public domain. The EU has done a fine job of building laws to support bureaucracy, and there is an unfortunate unwillingness on the part of EU members to adopt legislative positions that would run contrary to the bureaucratizing trends of the EU administrators. While it is important to keep US legislation moving in the direction of openness, it is as illusory to believe that this openness will trickle down to other countries as it is to believe in trickle-down economics. Far more effort needs to be directed at the EU, whose administration only magnifies the amateurishness of our own AfD clique. Too often when the issue of making information available to everybody the brick wall is not in the US but in the EU. In many respects other activities by the US in other unrelated matters have pointed to an abandonment of moral leadership. The effect of that is toward a disinclination on the part of other countries to follow the US lead, even when it would be beneficial to do so. I don't see Europe doing anything to accept leadership. I see one fat orange cat sitting in Brussels ignoring its herd of Odies. Unlike Gerard I don't think this should become a matter of the English language versus other languages. If the issue is a question of laws that has nothing to do with the language in which those laws are written. If it has to do with the language of material to be put into our databases, there are non-English materials in US depositories that can as easily be put into the database. The fact nevertheless remains that it takes people familiar with a language to make informed decisions about what should be included. I understand the lack of support for OCR in other scripts, notably those of Asia, but again don't expect people whose everyday life is exclusively in a Roman script to have the ability to develop that technical support. Ec