-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 08:55 PM 10/25/2005, you wrote:
I'm sympathetic to this (obviously), though we need to recognize that not everyone who reads or creates our eBooks has the same political views. (The types of political statements MH has included in some newsletters resulted in some criticism on the -d list, which makes it clear that people interested in PG do not share the same views.)
I think it's important to distinguish between the views which MH put forward and the political views of PG. MH published political statements which had nothing to do with Ebooks or the public domain. It was the total lack of relevancy to PG and their potential to drive away volunteers which was objected to. On the other hand, publishing political views which are inline with the mission of PG just makes sense. I doubt anyone will be surprised if we put something on our web site which em plies that we are in favor of shortening copyright terms. Sincerely Aaron Cannon
Disney employs a few senators to "Shrink the Public Domain", we should at least leverage the popularity of PG to build up awareness in the population that "Public Domain" is not a thing that comes to you like the sunrise after a slept-thru night.
"Expanding the Public Domain" is a good slogan, but first you have to explain what "Public Domain" is, that it isn't about downloading freebies but about the people owning and using the literary works their culture is built upon.
This is certainly "on mission" for us. (The second paragraph... not the part about buying our own senators, which might be enjoyable but somewhat too expensive.)
What I really want to do is to put up a good paragraph on the main page (maybe a teaser on every page) and build a section about the cultural/educational/economical advantages of short copyright terms (and maybe some serious discussion about DRM / proprietary vs. open source / software patents etc.)
(A) Why not just link to our pals? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain
(B) There are lots of places for discussion of public domain... Union for the Public Domain is one...Creative Commons another. I think that *hosting* such a discussion is something we'd do less well than other parties. I think hosting educational materials (content, versus discussion) worthwhile.
(C) I see no reason why we can't remove or rotate out Free as in Beer immediately, rather than waiting for any of the above.
-- Greg
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