Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Pat Choate Interview

Sam Felton has sent me several pieces relating to Pat Choate and his book, Hot Property: The Stealing of Ideas in an Age of Globalization. I listened to his interview with Leonard Lopate at WNYC. He's usually very thoughtful, and sometimes very nationalistic. I see some logical inconsistencies. For example:

He's in agreement with Lawrence Lessig on having a simple mechanism for renewing copyright after some reasonable period of time. Without renewal, the work enters the public domain. Differing from Lessig, however, Choate wants the copyright to be able to be renewed forever by the copyright owners, including heirs of the author and corporate entities. In the US that runs into to the constitutional dictum that copyright be granted for a limited time ("by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"), unless we continue doing it by incremental extensions as approved by the Supremes. But later he praises the public domain with the example of finding Charles Dickens reaction to the printing of his works without royalty payments in the US in his letters available for free on the internet at a university in Australia (the University of Adelaide?). If Dickens' heir had access to unlimited copyright, then he very likely would not have had free access to those documents.


Monday, July 11, 2005

Fall out and fall in over at the 'Bary

I'm going to go dormant on this site for now and continue any posts relating to copyright and intellectual property over at the 'Bary. I may revive posting here leading up to my talk at the Blue Hill library 29 September.