Richard Posner is guest-blogging at Lawrence Lessig's Blog this week. In one posting today, he offers comfort to those who wanted Lessig to win the Eldred case in the Supreme Court: "If the Supreme Court had invalidated the [Bono Copyright Term Extension] Act, Congress could have retaliated by allowing states to grant copyright --perpetual copyright, if they wanted, which was the regime for most unpublished works until 1976. All this said, the net effects of the Act and therefore of the Eldred decision are probably bad. But the worst of them should be remediable fairly easily. Stay tuned." (PS: Also read Posner's several postings on fair use. For example: "The beauty of the old (pre-1976) copyright system, with its requirement of renewal beyond a shortish initial term (like 28 years), was that most copyrights, lacking commercial value by the end of their initial term, were not renewed, and so fell into the public domain, and so licensing costs fell to zero.")
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/23/2004 10:10:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
