Here's another article about this from the op-ed section of today's Boston Globe:
One fight for rights that's wrong
By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist, 10/8/2002
Tomorrow in Washington, Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig will ask the Supreme Court to overturn the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, cynically dubbed the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act. The act is notorious not only because its sponsor was one of the dimmer bulbs in the Congressional chandelier, but also because it purports to be the handiwork of the evil Walt Disney Co. (remember when Disney was good?), which wants to lock up its rights to Mickey and Donald for another 20 years.
The plaintiff in the case is Eric Eldred, of Derry, N.H., who publishes public domain books on his Web site. With plenty of Visine, you could read, say, Henry James's ''Daisy Miller'' at
www.eldritchpress.org. His legal brief likens his Web site to a public library, except that, unlike a library, he cannot just buy books, he has to buy copyrights to copy books. ''Eldred's need for a rich public domain is therefore greater than the need of an ordinary library,'' the argument asserts. It seems worth mentioning that Eldred's bid to roll back the 1998 copyright extension has yet to succeed in any US court.
The docket names are a social register of American creativity. Eldred's legal supporters include the American Library Association, Milton Friedman, Barry Lopez, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Opposing them, we find media behemoth AOL Time Warner, Houghton Mifflin Co., Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the odious Jack Valenti, Philip Glass, and David Mamet, to name a few.
For right-thinking people everywhere, this case is a no-brainer. Disney wants to lock up their copyrights for 20 more years, in addition to the 50 years after the creator's death allowed under current law. Bad! Eldred and the Webby dreamers who support him insist that ''information wants to be free.'' Good! It all seems so obvious until you realize that the plaintiff's assumptions are totally flawed.
First off, information does not want to be free. Some people want information to be free, usually freeloaders who had nothing to do with creating it. I would estimate, conservatively, that this computer I am typing on has committed 6,000 copyright violations in the last four years, due to my sons' ''liberating'' musical information, i.e. MP3s, from record companies.
But most information comes at a cost. The Globe charges you for the information you are reading now. Do you think you are reading this column on the Web for free? Then come pay my $45 monthly check to the Internet pirates at AT&T Broadband. Free Web service died around the time ''X-Files'' plots went south.
The second flaw in the plaintiff's argument is the myth of the public domain. We accept without question that certain intellectual property, like books, should eventually belong to the public. Why? My friend Dean Crawford builds houses and writes novels. Would we confiscate his rights to a home he built after 70 years? Of course not. Would we restrict his freedom to sell a home to whomever he chooses? No.
I first noticed the Eldred case several months ago, when I was reading Alexandre Dumas's ''The Three Musketeers'' aloud to one of the aforementioned copyright thieves. Would I pay Dumas's heirs a small fee to enjoy this wonderful book? Of course. Who loves the public domain? The creator's enemy - publishers. They take a story like Mark Twain's '' Huckleberry Finn,'' tart it up with some new illustrations, and make a killing. ''You might just as well, after you had discovered a coal mine and worked it 28 years, have the government come in and take it away,'' was Twain's famous comment on the American copyright laws of his time. Sometimes people forget: Writers work for a living.
I am not blind to the allure of works in the public domain. But the distinction between so-called real property - a house - and intellectual property - a book - is not so vast. Plenty of people donate all kinds of property to the public; let's allow authors to make that same choice, instead of having the government choose for them.
SmileyJoyz!
