*Interview of August 5, 1999
= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?
I'm not sure which debate you have in mind. But I think it's important for people on the Web to understand that copyright is a social contract that's designed for the public good — where the public includes both authors and readers.
This means that authors should have the right to exclusive use of their creative works for limited times, as is expressed in current copyright law. But it also means that their readers have the right to copy and reuse the work at will once copyright expires. In the US now, there are various efforts to take rights away from readers, by restricting fair use, lengthening copyright terms (even with some proposals to make them perpetual) and extending intellectual property to cover facts separate from creative works (such as found in the "database copyright" proposals). There are even proposals to effectively replace copyright law altogether with potentially much more onerous contract law. I find it much harder to sympathize with MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) head Jack Valenti's plea to stop copying of copyrighted movies when I know that if he had his way, *no* movie would ever enter the public domain. (Mary Bono mentioned this wish of his in Congress last year.)
If media companies are seen to try to lock up everything that they can get away with, I don't find it surprising that some consumers react by putting on-line anything *they* can get away with. Unfortunately, doing that in turn takes away the legitimate rights of authors.
How to practically solve this? Stakeholders in this debate have to face reality, and recognize that both producers and consumers of works have legitimate interests in their use. If intellectual property is then negotiated by a balance of principles, rather than as the power play it's too often ends up being ("big money vs. rogue pirates") we may be able to come up with some reasonable accommodations.
CAOIMHIN O DONNAILE (Island of Skye, Scotland)
#Maintains European Minority Languages on the main site with information on
Scottish Gaelic
Maintained on the site of the college Sabhal Mór Ostaig by Caoimhín P. Ó Donnaíle, European Minority Languages is a list of minority languages by alphabetic order and by language family.
*Interview of August 18, 1998