I seem to be making a habit of late updates lately. Sorry to those of you who usually read me before work in the morning, but I seem to be in a pattern where I’m actually able to sleep later than 5am, and I’ve been enjoying the extra bits of sleep for now. It probably won’t last.
- Yesterday I commented on free culture and pointed to the archive of the Lessig / DeLong debate. I finished listening to it, and came away thinking that the current copyright system is a mess — mostly because protection is automatic, and even intellectual property that isn’t being actively maintained can’t be reused. I think there are a few changes that would solve the problem. The first is the renewal proposal that Lessig has put forth, which I think is a great idea. Part of the renewal process would insure that the Copyright Office would have current contact information for the owner of a copyright. The second is that there needs to be some sort of deposit requirement. That’s trickier, but there are a huge number of copyrighted works that are becoming increasingly hard to track down, because they’ve fallen out of print, and existing copies are either hard to find, or are decaying. There ought to be a repository, and that’s what the Library of Congress was supposed to be. The third is that I think there needs to be something like the rules for copyright of musical recordings where the original author has the right of first publication, but once they’ve published their version, anyone can cover the song, as long as they pay a fee. If that were applied across the board, I think we’d have a lot better copyright system. Finally, I like Jim DeLong’s proposal for a “right of salvage” that he mentioned in the debate, where if you rescued something that had fallen out of publication, you could get a percentage of the rights, even if the original copyright holder turned up later, as long as you could prove that they’d effectively abandoned the work.
- One of the reasons I’m interested in IP laws is that I’ve had a copy of The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie, Kt., Opened ISBN:0907325769 that was printed in 1910 for a while now. I’d like to republish the book electronically on the ’net and make it available for everyone. As far as I can tell, I’d be in the clear on doing that, but copyright law is convoluted enough now that I can’t be certain. There have been other reprints, but they’ve all been low-quantity, and many have been low-quality, too. And none have made it onto the net. Many of the recipes from the book are now online, but I’d like to see them in the context of the whole book. And I’d also like someone to be able to take my version (don’t expect it soon, I’ve been thinking about this for nearly ten years, and still haven’t gotten it done) and then annotate it with modern names for ingredients, or commentary.