[Upd-discuss] the upd website

[Stark]

Hi everyone.

Being perhaps one of the more poorly informed people on this list I 
mostly keep my mouth shut, and sound off to my friends and colleagues 
who are even more poorly informed than I am.   My impression is that 
most people in the real world and in the academic world don't even think 
about these issues, and I'm always trying to get people to get a little 
interested in what's going around them, in particular with regard to 
patent  and copyright law.    For instance, being in Europe, I was able 
to get a few people here in the office to contact their MP about 
European software patents.

But when it comes to the war against the public domain I find it 
difficult to point people to an intelligent, cohesive source that sums 
up the isuues (the best I can do is Lessig's book Free Culture, but I'm 
afraid most people won't read the whole thing).  Can we depart from our 
People Liberation front of Judea imitations long enough to come up with 
a mission statement to put on the upd website?  Perhaps it could be a 
very simple paragraph at the top of the site saying something to the 
effect of "The public domain refers is the wealth of cultural tradition 
from which all literature, art, music an science draws from.  This 
resource is under assault from various forces which are destroying the 
ability of people to create and share culture through mechanisms such 
the insance prolongation of copyright law, innapropriate extensions of  
the patent system and abuse of trademark law.  The UPD exists to protect 
and expand the public domain, and to raise public awareness of the 
plundering of our culture.  For more information, please consider the 
following links: ... "

Okay, so probably everyone has some suggestions/modifications they might 
like to make this bit of boilerplate I have included only to illustrate 
what I would like to see.  Maybe someone can write something a bit more 
precise or eloquent?    But I think it would be nice to be able to link 
to public-domain.org and know that people who have thus far only been 
indoctrinated by the copyright owners agenda will find a bit of a 
roadmap on the issue. 

What does everyone think?