SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that's ever been published. Books still in print you'd have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.
At the terminal you were going to be able to search tens of millions of books and read every page of any book you found. You'd be able to highlight passages and make annotations and share them; for the first time, you'd be able to pinpoint an idea somewhere inside the vastness of the printed record, and send somebody straight to it with a link. Books would become as instantly available, searchable, copy-pasteable—as alive in the digital world—as web pages.
It was to be the realization of a long-held dream. "The universal library has been talked about for millennia," Richard Ovenden, the head of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, has said. "It was possible to think in the Renaissance that you might be able to amass the whole of published knowledge in a single room or a single institution." In the spring of 2011, it seemed we'd amassed it in a terminal small enough to fit on a desk.
"This is a watershed event and can serve as a catalyst for the reinvention of education, research, and intellectual life," one eager observer wrote at the time.
On March 22 of that year, however, the legal agreement that would have unlocked a century's worth of books and peppered the country with access terminals to a universal library was rejected under Rule 23(e)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
When the library at Alexandria burned it was said to be an "international catastrophe." When the most significant humanities project of our time was dismantled in court, the scholars, archivists, and librarians who'd had a hand in its undoing breathed a sigh of relief, for they believed, at the time, that they had narrowly averted disaster.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday April 27 2017, @06:18PM (1 child)
Copyright was never intended to be the vast money making machine it is today. It was intended to be limited in duration.
No, it was not
Yes, it was:
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday April 27 2017, @07:39PM
Copyright was never intended to be the vast money making machine it is today. It was intended to be limited in duration.
No, it was not
Yes, it was:
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Well, that's just it: The difference between securing exclusive rights for limited times and producing a vast eternal money making machine. That's what we mean when we say, above, that Copyright was never intended to be the monkey-making machine it is now, but rather, was "intended to be limited in duration."
Take this difference over the lifetime of the work of, for example, "Snow White." [wikipedia.org]*
Published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 as "Tale #53, 'Schneewittchen'", "Snow White" featured the storybook concepts of a magic mirror, a poisoned apple spell, a coffin made of glass, the evil queen, and the Seven Drawfs.
By 1937, this work was out of copyright worldwide--as it should have been--and as such, Disney was able to release a derivative work, an animated feature film which they titled "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
But don't get your hopes up on doing the same thing that Disney did... Copyright as it was then is dead, replaced now with ever extending terms such as life+70 years (egregious enough) and beyond. The trans-pacific partnership, whose fate is admittedly uncertain at this point, even includes language barring fair use rights among signatory countries and extends the worst, least favorable rights of any of the countries to them all, so that "businesses may profit" and "trade may abound."
Meaning that a few existing rightsholders may profit from trade abounding in squeezing ever-more profit from their already-extant works now protected nearly to infinity, instead of everyone able to be unrestrictedly creative, expanding from and upon an ever growing public domain which is valuable to all rather than to a select few.
So, to sum up, copyright was then a protection for a limited time for the balanced good of all, and now is an evil mantle which cloaks, steals, and seals away all works which may or may not have already been touched by a select few.
To use words of one syllable: It was good, but now it is bad. Real bad.
---
*Snow White--or Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, etc. ad nauseum--reworks of public domain stories, some barely out of public domain at that. The choice of Disney as an example [roarofwolverine.com] here is not random.