https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytimes
"They stole something from you. For decades, they stole it. That thing they
stole? Your entire culture. For all of human history, works created in living
memory entered the public domain every year. 40 years ago, that stopped.
First in 1976, and then again in 1998, Congress retroactively extended
copyright's duration by 20 years, for all works, including works whose authors
were unknown and long dead, whose proper successors could not be located. Many
of these authors were permanently erased from history as every known copy of
their works disappeared before they could be brought back into our culture
through reproduction, adaptation and re-use (copyright is "strict liability,"
meaning that even if you pay to clear the rights to a work from someone who has
good reason to believe they control those rights, if they're wrong, you are on
the hook as an infringer, and the statutory damages run to six figures).
Works that are still in our cultural currents 50 or 70 or 90 years after their
creation are an infinitesimal fraction of all the works we create as a species.
But these works are – by definition – extraordinarily important to our culture.
The creators who made these works were able to plunder a rich public domain of
still-current works as inputs to their own enduring creations. The slow-motion
arson attack on the public domain meant that two generations of creators were
denied the public domain that every other creator in the history of the human
race had enjoyed.
As 2019 drew nearer, the copyright resistance who had fought over this grew
nervous, then…elated. Was Congress actually going to heed the evidence of a
decades-long failed experiment and decline to extend copyright again?
<
https://archive.org/details/MarybethPetersFormerUsRegisterOfCopyrightsOnTermsBeingTooLong>
I had pitched email debates with comrades over this. Michael S Hart, visionary
founder of the Project Gutenberg, was
certain it wouldn't happen (he didn't
live to see it). But then, miraculously, astoundingly, 2019 rolled around and
we got new works in the public domain!"
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
