Jumping In On The Lessig / Adkinson Copyright Debate

An Anonymous Coward writes: "LawMeme has an excellent response to William F. Adkinson's critique of Larry Lessig's ideas on copyright reform. What I found most interesting about the article though, was the link to this paper by Ernest Miller (of Yale's Information Society Project) and Joan Feigenbaum (editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cryptography) that says we should take the copy out of copyright."

Re:when is enough, enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Create (or find and join) a grassroots organization that's designed solely to mass-mail his constituents a pamphlet describing the things he's done that you aren't pleased with and you don't think they'll appreciate either. Get a web presence that you can direct people to in your mailing, preferably with an online forum where you can reach them on a more frequent/less expensive basis. Ramp up your efforts when he gets some competition you feel will do the job better in the next election, preferably someone who will respect the honest opinion of the electorate, and make sure you can talk to him from time to time to educate him on the issues.

That's all that the PR lobbyists do. It isn't really that hard if you can dedicate some time to it.

trivia: "copyright" is not from "right to copy"

[Adam J. Richter]

Chapter two of The Nature of Copyright: A Law of Users Rights by L. Ray Patterson and Stanley W. Lindberg discusses the origin of the word copyright ("Copyright In The Beginning: A Publishers Right"). According to the book, copyright does not come from a "right to copy", but rather from copie, which was a noun meaning "manuscript" (not a verb meaning "to duplicate"). The title of the copie was recorded in a registry maintained by the Stationers Guild in the late 1500's to mid 1600's to record who they gave a monopoly to to publish a given book. This right lasted in perpetuity, but was only legally binding on members of the guild, which is apparently where the big push came from to turn this arragement into a law in order to prevent non-members from breaking the monopoly.

Authorship of the work apparently did not matter. Instead, a guild member could claim a monopoly in this registry for six pence (no idea what that translates to in today's dollars).

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