Right there in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle, within maybe 30-40 miles of John Edwards’ Presidential campaign headquarters, is a hotbed of public-domain activity. It’s the University of North Carolina’s virtual ibiblio library, whose servers help house Project Gutenberg’s 10,000 e-books. And that’s not all. Within ibiblio, to quote a Wired News item, sharing isn’t a dirty word, and you can “listen to some classic Southern folk music, hear a Nobel Prize-winning poet read his work, learn how to upload your mind, tend bees, speak Japanese or heal with herbs. Or you might just want to download some free software.”
“Making the invisible visible is what ibiblio does best,” said ibiblio director Paul Jones.
Ibiblio’s staff and contributors rescue documents, videos, audio and image files from dusty archives or attics where few could view them and put them on the Web, where anyone with an Internet connection can retrieve the information…
“We’d like to demonstrate that the best way to protect and preserve so-called intellectual property is to share it freely with everyone,” said Jones. “Shared information is enhanced and improved, so its value can only increase. Hoarded knowledge just stagnates.”
Notice? Ibiblio contributors upload public-domain material and other legal content and work with it as part of their own creative efforts. This is the very kind of laudable project that the Sonny Bono Act Copyright Term Extension Act has harmed by greatly shrinking the amount of material that would have entered the public domain by now, and one hopes that sooner or later, in line with his education rhetoric, John Edwards will stop wimping out and take a stand against Bono and different but equally obnoxious laws such as the DMCA.
Guess what. Both Edwards and his wife went to the UNC Law School, and she serves on the university’s board of visitors. Can’t the Senator set a good example for the law and poli-sci students at Chapel Hill? Just consider the sleazy circumstances under which the Bono law was passed by voice vote–right when the nation was preoccupied with the Clinton impeachment debate. Does John Edwards really want to tolerate behavior of this ilk? Why won’t he speak up? So far, while Edwards’ Net strategist has been approachable on technical matters, his actual policymakers have not on the actual issues. Wonder if any buddies of Jack Valenti are among them. And is Edwards himself thinking about a lucrative lawyer-lobbyist routine if he can’t cut it in the presidential primaries? He is not, after all, running for a second Senate term. Voters beware.
Let me repeat, however, what I said in my discussion of Edwards’ fund-raising–I’m a great believer in redemption. With a more Net-hip policy toward copyright law, he’d vastly reduce my concerns and other people’s and actually stand a chance in the presidential race. Yo, Senator?
