Do you like having portions of the Laking and Petersen texts on line? Would you like to see more? Our Congress is presently pondering a little present to the media companies which may not be in your interest. In the House, it is known as HR 2589 and in the Senate as S.505
You can find out more about this proposed legislation at http://thomas.loc.gov/ which also will link you to where you can find your Representative's and Senator's e-mail (or snail mail) address.
Here is the text of an e-mail I sent my Senator:
Dear Senator D'Amato,
During the past weekend I was speaking with a university librarian and was told of the current proposal, S.505, of which you are a co-sponsor, to extend the term of copyright protection from 75 to 95 years.
I strongly believe that the extensions to copyright duration previously enacted with NAFTA were excessive, and that this further giveaway to the media companies, in the form of the present bill, is not in the public interest. I can imagine the lobbyists for these companies (and I hold shares in several) portraying the issue as artists and writers starving in their twilight years. However, the present law protects such corporeal creators in their lifetime. What is at issue here is that the essentially immortal media companies wish to retain control and continue to milk assets which, under the laws in force at the time of the creation of the assets, would have long been ceded to the public domain had it not been for a series of extensions to copyright duration made over the years. I strongly believe this bill is a taking from the public of what they have paid for in order to benefit a special commercial interest.
Why should I personally care, aside from seeing the public interest cheated? In operating a noncommercial web site as a hobbyist project, I have been able to include text and illustrations from rare works created just before of the present 75 year copyright duration. This makes this information once again freely available to anyone with web access, essentially to the public at large, which hopefully benefits many readers. As copyright terms are extended, many of these works, whose time of significant commercial value has long since ended, enter a special kind of limbo, in that they cannot be used because their owners cannot be identified. Much of the public is thus denied access to these works.
The whole point of the Constitutional provision is to promote the public interest by giving creators a reasonable and sufficient duration of exclusivity to encourage the creation of works. When you consider the time frame that publishing works in now, the present duration far exceeds that necessary or optimal for public benefit.
I hope that you will reconsider your support for this example of special interest legislation.
Sincerely,
Lee A. Jones