[Upd-discuss] Time to End the Slavery of Traditional Publishing

[Michael Hart]

I have been writing something a little bit along those lines.



Piracy?  Warlordism?  Or Is It Just Plain Capitalism???


The United Nations sends a billion dollars of aid to an
African nation, but most of it doesn't get to the tribe
to which it was destined:  You can be relatively sure a
Warlord of some sort intercepted it.

This happens so frequently that no one blinks an eye in
response to the fact that our hard fought taxed dollars
are simply ending up in the hands of some renegade.

In fact, it happens so much that it would seem very odd
if it did not happen even for just one month of a year.

We call the United Nations something good even though a
continuation of sending good money after bad is steeped
in traditions that go back about as far as the founding
of the United Nations itself.

Does this mean The United Nations is guilty of piracy?



"The Revolving Door" of The United States Government is
working much the same way, with senators, aides, and an
assortment of Congress moving in with the big corporate
interests they were "overseeing" the day before January
20 and are now "overseers" in completely different ways
for perhaps 100 times yesterday's salary.

Does this mean The United States Government is also the
guilty party in such a sense?



Governments throughout the ages have promised rights to
the public domain, a right which, I should not have the
obligation to remind you, is an "inalienable right."

Do you remember "certain inalienable rights?"

Inalienable means it CAN NOT BE SOLD, STOLEN or removed
by force, law, or any other manner!!!

Yet our rights to the public domain have disappeared in
the same ways the billions of dollars of United Nations aids have 
disappeared, over and over and over again.

Does this mean there is a world of pirates out there?

Does this mean someone is actively plotting more thefts
of our rights to the public domain or other rights?



Who can do such a thing as steal public domain rights?

It appears that it is the very institution we mentioned
earlier at the beginning of this thought process.

The United Nations is the parent organization of WIPO--
The World Intellectual Property Organization who writes
pretty much all the copyright laws in the whole world.

WIPO's goals are just the opposite of what we think the
United Nations is all about.

WIPO wants to kill off all your rights to public domain
access to anything that will ever be written in all the
rest of our world's history.

And they aren't too shy about saying it right out loud.

WIPO wants permanent copyright.



Remember when Ted Turner, the cable television emperor,
gave The United Nations A BILLION DOLLARS???

He was just paying back, right there in public sight, a
debt he owed for the copyright extension of his movies,
movies he bought whose copyrights would have expired by
now several times over.

Let's just take "Gone With The Wind," for example.

Made in 1939, the original copyright expired a 28 years
period later at the end of 1967-68, sometimes they will
be given an extra year for renewal.  Then copyright was
extended for another 28 years, as per US Copyright laws
of 1909, which were the laws "Gone with The Wind" and a
majority of the other movies Ted Turner bought had been
made under and renewed under.

However, when 1976 came around, too many things of such
great value to the corporate world came around to being
close to becoming public domain that lobbyist descended
on Washington, D.C. from around the world like a plague
of locusts to insure that nothing less important than a
new copyright extension would take place.

As a result, "Gone With The Wind," and all those movies
made under similar copyrights, got about 20 more years,
now for 75 year copyright term, and no renewals needed,
IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT 90% OF ALL COPYRIGHTS HAD NOT
BEEN RENEWED IN ALL OF U.S. COPYRIGHT HISTORY.

The 300 million Americans all lost about 1 million book
titles from the public domain as a result, plus movies,
music, magazines, newspapers, etc.

Does this mean there is a world of pirates out there???



Is there any difference between the African warlord who
intercepts The United Nations' aid packages and the new
WIPO induced copyright extensions other than the fact a
warlord is up front about his stealing while copyrights
are extended in a manner no one ever hears about???

Is there really any difference between such warlords in
reality and the copyright lobbyists other than that one
robs at gunpoint and the other robs you with a pen???



No one hears about copyright extension???


The last major U.S. Copyright Act of 1998 was passed in
secret. . .so secret that it was literally covered up a
long time from ANY coverage, and permanently from which
Senators and Congresspeople voted which way.

Why???

How???

When???

The U.S. Copyright Act of 1998 was passed at the moment
President Clinton was impeached!!!!!!!

Or as close to it as could be scheduled so members of a
very strange coalition could vote on both matters.



Did you ever wonder why the Republicans impeached???

After all, they knew they couldn't win. . . .

It was a smokescreen to hide other agendas behind:  and
the most important of those agendas was copyright.



What is so important about copyright???


As mentioned above, a million books that would have had
to expire under the previous copyright law got extended
for about another 20 years in 1976 and then yet another
20 years in 1998, with the addition of a second million
books that got extended for the first time.

2,000,000 books!!!

Lost from public domain access.

Two million books we would have had rights to.

Not to mention the stuff we get on radio or television,
and the various other media.



Why are these two million books so important???


The reason that triggered these changes is simple. . .a
Computer Revolution has taken place that allows persons
to download millions of books from the Internet and OWN
all those books.

Copyright holders don't really care that much about law
when only the rich can make copies.

Nobody in history ever really tried to enforce the laws
of the land on the rich as a whole, they just don't.

So, when a new medium, such as audio or video recording
comes along, no one really cares until the great masses
can afford to make copies.  When it is just the rich it
is never an issue, but let the masses make copies and a
panic ensues for fear that the boundaries between HAVES
and HAVE NOTS might start to degrade and get fuzzy, and
we could never stand to have a civilization in which it
was not perfectly clear WHO was a HAVE and a HAVE NOT.



The "Roots" of the situation


If you ever watched the American film classic, "Roots,"
you might remember when one of the freed slaves came to
his original "home" after gaining a Harvard education--
and after his oratorio on his rights and the rights the
other blacks had, he was simply told that if he spoke a
single time more in such a manner that his punishment's
result would be rather permanent.

Most of our educations leave out that it was illegal to
teach blacks to read, or illegal to teach women.

The same went to keep them from owning their properties
and the MAN who owned or married them got it all.

This was not so very long ago.

Let us not forget that 100 years ago American women had
still over a decade to go to win the right to vote.

Reading, and OWNING our own libraries of a million book
titles, is one of the rights worth fighting for.