Last week I wrote about the defeat suffered in the US Supreme Court
by a group trying to reverse the trend for a continuing,
progressive extension of copyright.
Although this case was in the US, the global nature of intellectual
property - to say nothing of the internet - means that what happens
there is bound to have an impact elsewhere in the world.
Legal principles aside, the issue is crucially important to the
internet because the net provides the perfect medium for accessing
materials that are in the public domain.
Indeed, it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that until the
internet came along, the right to access public domain works was
more theoretical than real, and depended on publishers - such as
Dover
Publications and
Eldritch Press, two of
the plaintiffs in the Eldred case discussed last week - reprinting
material.
Now, though, all that is needed is a scanner and some OCR software
and any work in the public domain can be converted into a text file
and made freely available online.
This is precisely what the great
Project Gutenberg has been doing
for more than
30
years. One of the most interesting recent developments is the
Distributed
Proofreaders project. Although not an official part of Project
Gutenberg, it represents an important extension of it. As the
FAQ
explains, the idea is to use the distributed power of the online
population to check the OCR files of texts that are being added to
Project Gutenberg. Since the work involved is parcelled out one
page at a time, the burden on individuals is small.
Of course, this is one of the principles behind open source
software, which builds on a distributed development process and
allows many people to make small contributions that cumulatively
turn into big projects. Not surprisingly, then, the Free Software
Foundation is also interested in helping to make more texts
available, and has crafted the
GNU Free
Documentation Licence to this end.
As its name suggests, this licence is intended for technical
documentation, and so is inappropriate for many materials. A more
ambitious project aims to craft a range of licences that provide
various options for those who wish to apply a rather less selfish
form of copyright than that currently deployed.
The name of the endeavour is
Creative Commons, a
reference to the idea that there is, or should be, an intellectual
equivalent to the commons - land held in common for the good of the
community. One of the key figures behind Creative Commons is
Lawrence Lessig, the lead lawyer in the Eldred copyright
case.
There is a
FAQ,
some
examples of why new licences can be useful, and a list of
projects. There is a
page that helps
people choose an appropriate licence, and an interesting licence
called the founders'
copyright.
This is a pointed reference to first copyright law in the US, which
gave monopoly rights for just 14 years, with the option of renewing
the monopoly for another 14 years. The technical publisher O'Reilly
has pledged to adopt this licence for some of its books.
More radically, a group of leading biologists, fed up with the way
journals have demanded the copyright when their work is published,
has created what it calls the
Public
Library of Science, which will be launching several new
journals where content is always freely available online, and the
scientists retain copyright.
The established commercial publishers seem, at last, to be getting
the message: the prestigious scientific journal Nature has recently
announced that authors will no longer be asked to sign away their
copyright.