Patrik wrote:
... I'd refer you to Loren, Building a Reliable Semicommons of Creative Works, 14 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 271, 318-28 (2007) (arguing that section 203 is inapplicable to CC licenses under a suggested doctrine of limited copyright abandonment); Armstrong, Shrinking the Commons, 47 Harv. J. on Legis. 359, 405-09 (2010) (expressing skepticism as to whether courts would adopt Professor Loren's approach, suggesting, alternatively, an analogy to the abandonment provisions of the Patent Act to justify limits on the termination of open-content licenses); and Greenberg, More than Just a Formality, 59 UCLA L. Rev. 1028, 1060-63 (2012) (suggesting legislative action). All three articles are also freely available online (in one case at least in a pre-publication version), at https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Loren.pdf, http://scholarship.law.uc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1146&context=fac_pubs, and http://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/59-4-4.pdf, respectively.
Here is a potentially more accessible popular treatment, which directly addresses the motivation for expiring copyright grant terms: http://www.kelleydrye.com/publications/articles/1558/_res/id=Files/index=0/1...
The reason Congress mandated the expiration of copyright grants was specifically to address the common case of the value of a work far exceeding the authors' original compensation, for whatever reasons. Isn't this a very pertinent ethics issue for the Foundation? If the law of the land is designed to compensate authors' for windfalls in the value of their effort, do we want to be in support of or opposed to that goal, and why or why not?
This law review article may be considerably more mainstream than Professor Loren's: https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1811/64395/OSLJ_V48N3_0897.pdf
(None of them are touching upon the derivative work issue, which is a rather Wikimedia-specific consideration. It could arguably not provide a universal solution to the potential problem, since the availability of a derivative work is the exception, rather than the norm, even in an open-content world. I have therefore not looked into this.)
Best, Patrik _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe