« Countdown Until an Air Marshal Explodes...3...2...1... | Main | Intelligence Reform »

December 8, 2004

Almost...There...

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

\"\;

A lot of effort has lately been going into putting online the contents of major libraries - not just the catalogs, but scans of the actual books. This is, beyond any doubt, a fantastic achievement, and will be one more way to speed progress and learning.

It lacks, in fact, only one thing: relatively recent material. Because copyrights have been repeatedly extended, the public domain in the United States largely stops at the point that Micky Mouse begins (no coincidence, that). After that, copyrights are extended for something like 140 years, now. (What happened to the "for a limited time" clause in the Constitution? The Supreme Court decided that "a limited time" means anything other than "forever", so the Congress could allow copyright for, say, 1000000000000000000000 years, and that apparently counts as "limited".)

The major problem with the copyright system as it now stands is that it allows material to disappear. While a publisher might not care enough to keep alive some minor work on, say, an obscure religion published in the 1920s, which has been out of print since 1930 and has not made anyone any money since then, such a work might be just what a particular person is trying to find. But since no one is keeping the book alive by republishing, and since no one can keep it alive by digitally preserving it (unless they're willing to gamble on extensive fines; and if you don't think holders of dead copyrights wouldn't recognize a revenue opportunity, you're not paying attention), the work gradually disappears as physical copies are lost.

OK, I grant it seems obscure, but consider this: we may very well lose more than 95% of recent books, films and music forever because of this. Star Wars, for example, was almost lost, because no one bothered to keep the negatives in shape until George Lucas decided to release the special editions. Such a loss would put future scholars of today's culture and knowledge in the same position we are currently in regarding the early Dark Ages: you can't study evidence that no longer exists. This would be a tragic consequence of copyrights, and it's currently more likely than not to happen.

Unless we reform our copyrights, at the very least to require them to be actively maintained or lose force, this digitization of the libraries may well be a one-time effort.