[Wikimedia-l] Romney and copyright

[phoebe ayers]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 8:12 AM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>> On 29 October 2012 13:39, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> If the question is indiscreet/offtopic forgive me and ignore it/more it
>>> another list, but: what are Romney's views on copyright?
>>> I read on today's Financial Times Europe (p. 4) that he has a couple
>>> millions dollars invested on Hollywood funds, so is it pessimistic to say
>>> that he must hold horrible positions on copyright?
>>
>> Both parties appear to strongly support the present regime.
>
> I'm not sure this is totally fair.
>
> I think the White House has somewhat embraced Creative Commons for certain
> works and there's some good work going on at <http://www.data.gov>.
>
> Of course, all works of the United States federal government done by federal
> employees are automatically public domain, so in many ways, the U.S.
> government is way ahead of the curve on this issue. ;-)

And though it's not directly tied to the White House, several US
agencies have made good progress on copyright and open access
initiatives during the last four years; I'm thinking of, for instance,
the NIH deposit mandate and NSF data sharing rules. And I think we are
all familiar with the recent stellar work of the National Archives :)
Obama did speak out against SOPA in the end, as well.

In general I think there is overall friendliness towards open access
and open licensing in this government, more so than we've seen in the
past, if not yet towards real copyright reform -- which as a matter of
law would take Congress as well as the White House to agree anyway.

-- phoebe