revising copyright law

This was one of the things we talked about in Atlanta.

Following Ray's suggestion to think about rewriting the law from scratch in a way that would suit the contemporary world, here's one contributed idea.

That since information is "global" these days, because of the "global" nature of the internet (albeit sometimes subject to the whims of nations), perhaps "copyright law", or whatever its replacement should be called, should also be "global" in nature. --jcorneli

You may also want to look at the Aldephi Charter.

This was discussed (for better or worse) on slashdot. --norm

I have very serious reservations about global law and am opposed to it given the current situation. United States copyright law is based on the principle that the purpose of copyright is to promote progress in the arts and sciences whilst copyright law in most of the rest of the world is based on the idea that an author has an intrinsic right to his/her work. Unless the rest of the world first accepts the conception given in the U. S. constitution, I think that any attempt at a global law would be disastrous. In particular, consider WIPO. --rspuzio

A couple points: First, the right to be identified as the author is the one that comes to mind for me in non-US copyright law, and while I don't know the details, that single right is the one that we'd been focusing on in our conversations. Second, an international law might not be as relevant as a world-wide license. In the end, I'm not going to cling to the international nature of the law as a driving point, but I do think that if we can put together a proposal for the US, we should then ask ourselves whether it can be "continued" to a proposal that would apply on a world-wide basis. --jcorneli

You're right — I might have been a bit panicky there (which is not hard to do, given the sorts of abuses that have been prepetrated). Perhaps the right thing to do is to pick and choose the best features from the different laws around the world to combine into the new proposal. So far, two ideas seem to be:

1. (From U.S. law) The purpose of copyright is to promote progress in the arts and sciences.
2. (From U.K. law) The author of a work has a right to be recognized as such.

--rspuzio