[Frameworks] UbuWeb...HACKED!

[Fred Camper]

I heard a talk by copyright lawyer Lawrence Lessig that's quote a propos here.

When he saw that the copyright to Mickey Mouse et al. was going to get  
extended yet again, he made a proposal: to get an extension the owner  
would have to register and pay a reasonable fee. His point is that the  
fee would be immaterial to Disney and companies like it, but that  
there are millions of objects out there, and this would include the  
old newsreels and instructional films beloved of found footage users,  
for which the copyright owner cannot even be located, or doesn't care  
and wouldn't register, and that most such things could then become  
public domain. The mad dog right wing corporate whores who are our US  
congresspeople would not buy it.

Unfortunately the mad dog Bush right wingers on the Supreme Court  
ignore the "original intent" of the Constitution that they say they  
follow when it comes to the rights of corporations. It's a pretty good  
guess that the framers' idea of "limited" times for copyrights did NOT  
extend to 95 years!

By the way, I don't exactly think of myself as a "leftie" either. It  
just simply isn't rational to make copyrights this long, and it's  
contrary to the intent of the framers, who never intended them to  
support grandchildren.

An interesting fact: if you are a publication who wants to run Martin  
Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech, you have to pay  
thousands of dollars to his estate. Thus the speech is not reproduced  
as often as it might be otherwise. WHAT???

Fred Camper