Lessig Petition (Idle Words)#

06.02.2003

Lawrence Lessig and other have launched a petition to try and save the public domain. The basic idea is clever - require copyright owners to pay a token sum ($1) fifty years after the publication date. If the copyright owner doesn't pay, the work goes into the public domain.

This preserves the rights of copyright holders who are still making money off of their work, while permitting orphaned content to lapse into the public domain before it rots away completely.

Read the petition and sign it if it makes sense to you. Much of the content now locked under copyright is being lost because of decaying film and paper stock - it's a wholly preventable tragedy, and the token payment idea would save that content without threatening anyone's rights.