From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2016 22:18:33 -0600

I can't help wondering who those publishers are that Joe says
supported the Bono Term Extension Act. I was on the copyright
committees of both the AAP and AAUP at the time, and they did not come
out in support of it.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2016 19:10:39 -0500
>
> I agree about the Bono extension. No one in any media business invests
> against a timeline of 50 years or more (I have not kept track of how
> long the periods are,but they are more than is needed to comfort an
> investor). The practical effect of such long extensions is that they
> may serve to support what media people call "franchise properties."
> So, for example, you might continue to invest in more and more Harry
> Potter spin-offs over the years and decades if the copyright term for
> the first Potter property is as long as it is now. In academic
> publishing you can imagine a standard reference work being updated
> just enough to keep it going, working under the protection of the
> original copyright. Personally, I support an idea, attributed to
> Lawrence Lessig, that required a copyright holder to pay a fee each
> year, which would then smoke out all the orphan works (whose unknown
> owners would fail to pay the fee).
>
> I also believe that the copyright industries, and publishing in
> particular, has made a strategic error in fighting for long copyright
> terms. All this does is motivate many people--many, many people in the
> academic library world--to fight for expanded fair use provisions as a
> way to get around the long copyright terms. I would think that from a
> business point of view, publishers would be better off with shorter
> terms and limited fair use than what we have now, long terms and
> extensive fair use.
>
> But I am writing this on Election Day and must say that the next
> president probably has bigger things to think about than when "The
> Grapes of Wrath" falls into the public domain. And, according to CNN,
> Donald Trump has just won Indiana and Kentucky.
>
> Joe Esposito
>
> On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 5:34 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>  From: Winston Tabb <[log in to unmask]>
>>  Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2016 04:09:22 +0000
>>
>>  The choice was for "limited times," a concept that has been completely
>>  eroded via the Bono extension