When the $100 million dollars is spend in the United States, we have achieved something for the United States.. At this moment the amount of traffic is slowly but surely moving away from the English language domination in both our traffic and in in content. Given that there is a lot available in English in the first place, I expect that we have a better return on investment from what we do for other languages and cultures. The other cultures are underfunded relatively to the huge amounts of money that are spend on English language content in the first place.

Spending all this money on changing the law in the USA is imho largely a waste of money.

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

I'm pessimistic. The best education is for people to go ahead and do it.