Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Lawrence Lessig, Standford Prof and IP-Law notable is asking for your help. He wants you to write your Congressional Representatives and urge them to ammend the Sonny Bono ('Mickey Mouse') Copyright Act.

Here is the thrust of it:

The idea is a simple one: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner must pay a $1 maintanence fee. If the copyright owner pays the fee, then the copyright continues. If the owner fails to pay the fee, the work passes into the public domain. Based on historical precedent, we expect 98% of copyrighted works would pass into the public domain after just 50 years. They could keep Mickey for as long as Congress lets them. But we would get a public domain.

The need for even this tiny compromise is becoming clearer each day. Stanford’s library, for example, has announced a digitization project to digitize books. They have technology that can scan 1,000 pages an hour. They are chafing for the opportunity to scan books that are no longer commercially available, but that under current law remain under copyright. If this proposal passed, 98% of books just 50 years old could be scanned and posted for free on the Internet.