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June 09, 2003

You better sign this thing already

Many thanks to Lawrence Lessig for promoting this worth-while effort:

To: Members of the United States Congress

We, the undersigned, while believing in the importance of copyright, also believe in the importance of the public domain. We believe the public domain is crucial to the spread of knowledge and culture, and crucial in assuring access to our past. We therefore write to petition you to reconsider major changes that you have made to the copyright system. These changes unnecessarily threaten the public domain without any corresponding benefit to copyright holders.

In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). That Act extended the term of all existing copyrights by 20 years. But as Justice Breyer calculated, only 2% of the work copyrighted during the initial 20 years affected by this statute has any continuing commercial value at all. The balance has disappeared from the commercial marketplace, and, we fear, could disappear from our culture generally.

For example: The vast majority of film created during the 1920s and 1930s is not commercially available. Because of the CTEA, much of it remains under copyright. Yet because it is often impossible to track down the copyright owners for these films, commercial and noncommercial preservationist and distributors cannot safely restore and distribute these films. And because these films were made from nitrate-based stock, by the time the copyright to these films expire, most of them will have dissolved.

The same is true with many other copyrighted works that are no longer commercially available. Though the Internet could facilitate the distribution of this work if the copyright owners could be identified, the costs of locating these copyright owners is wildly prohibitive. Schools and libraries are thus denied access to works that otherwise could be made available at a very low cost.

Such burdens on access to work that has no continuing commercial value serves no legitimate copyright purpose. It certainly does not "promote the Progress of Science" as the Constitution requires. We therefore ask Congress to consider changes to the current regime that would free unused content from continued regulation, while respecting the rights of existing copyright owners....

Click here to sign if you haven't already, and remember to spread the word.

Personally, I couldn't care less about 1920's cinema, but the point about copyright laws limiting the capacity of the internet to spread content that no longer has any real commercial value is an extremely important point. We have enough corporate interests buying up things for next to nothing and charging exhorbitant fees to sell them back to us. Time to reverse the trend.

Posted by Mike at June 9, 2003 10:50 PM

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