“The…Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act…was criticized by everyone, including the register of copyrights, Marybeth Peters.” – O’Reilly editor Andy Oram in Autumn Symposium Rakes Over Copyright and Patent Law.
The TeleRead take: This is Good News, since Ms. Peters is not exactly known for copyright policies friendly to consumers. Isn’t it time to migitate the school-hostile 1998 act via Lessig-style compromises, even if prompt repeal apparently isn’t possible? Bono is why high schoolers today can’t read The Great Gatsby on the Net for free. They could be enjoying this classic and many other Bonoized masterpieces today if Hollywood hadn’t manipulated the legislative process.
Andy himself writes: “Big changes in U.S. law–such as reversing the recent copyright extension–are off the table for some time to come, but small improvements can make a difference. For instance, copyright owners should be required to register copyrights, as they did before the 1976 Copyright Act. This would create a database that potential users could search, just as there now exists a patent database.”
Related: Coincidentally the symposium happened at the University of North Carolina, where Prof. John Edwards so far has refused to take a stand against the act and other Draconian copyright laws despite his populism in other areas and despite his past seat on a copyright-related Senate Committee. I fervently believe in copyright–look, I myself have written six books–but harsh intellectual property laws are regressive distributors of wealth and harm valuable public domain efforts. Ideally this possible 2008 presidential candidate won’t let past Hollywood donations won’t get in the way of anti-poverty work. Meanwhile his poverty center at UNC has finally hired staffers and listed them on the Web They’d do well to encourage him to connect the dots, not just in the States but elsewhere. You can’t separate copyright issues from economic issues. Same for other intellectual property issues, as Amazon’s outrageous patent claims show.
