The Public Domain Enhancement Act

Let a Thousand Googles Bloom

January 12, 2005

Copyright reform is vital to the spread of culture and information, Lessig writes in the LA Times, commenting on Google's ablility to withstand the potential liability issues with scanning in books to search, liability which chills almost everyone else. He notes that legislation is needed to promote simple techniques for filtering out works that have no continuing need for copyright protection:

How would it work? One proposal calls for copyrights to be renewed every five
years -- a process that today could be made technically quite simple and that
would create an accessible database as well as quickly clear away unneeded
copyrights.

Clarifying the system, however, has been universally opposed by the content
industry -- Hollywood, book publishers and the like. It fears that any reform
would weaken Congress' resolve to strongly protect intellectual property. So
while it insists upon increased regulation to protect commercially valuable
work, it works to block reform that would enable a wide range of creative work
to be efficiently built on by others.

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