Re: Lessig in the NY Times

[Balázs Bárány <balazs@xxxxxx>]

> From: informania@xxxxxxxxxxx

> families of all dead authors would lose their rights to works that had
What "rights" do the families of dead authors have? E.g. in contrast to
the public?

The families of dead authors can pay the 50 $ if they think that their
profit of the work will be higher than that. But for the huge majority of
works, this won't be the case - the public will win if lots of works fall
into public domain.

Remember, the idea of copyright (= a temporary monopoly) is to provide
incentives for creativity. How could dead authors be motivated to write
more books?

Copyright as a personal/moral right as (partly) seen in Europe wouldn't be
harmed by the Lessig proposal. Shakespeare's works are in the public
domain, but nobody alleges that s/he him/herself wrote them. Those rights
(protection of author and title information) could even be protected
separately from the economic monopoly rights.

> This proposed loss of rights by people who have no likelihood of knowing
> that they are losing them strikes me as unfair and, indeed, unethical.
The public had no likelihood of knowing that the copyright term will be
extended to the insame lengths it is now. Also, the public had no
likelihood of knowing that the circumvention of copyright protection
mechanisms will be illegal and therefore access to works will be denied
long before they fall into public domain. This is at least as much unfair
and unethical in my view. Lessig (and lots of other people) just try to
reduce the harm done by bad copyright legislation.
-- 
_________________________________________________________________________
Balazs Barany       balazs@xxxxxx        http://tud.at       ICQ 10747763

A good engineer will make considerable effort to avoid additional effort.