[jkeisling]

Just a brief reminder of the last hundred years of copyright: large lobbies like UMG, Disney, or Elsevier have hugely circumscribed the public domain for all but historical purposes (copyright lengths increased from 28 years to *128*). Open access in academic publishing (for public funded research, even!) has been a decades-long fight that is not fully won. The DMCA has created myriad abuses and denied the freedom to control your own hardware, like allowing companies like John Deere to prevent right to repair. Six studios own most movies, a few labels control most music. The cultural heritage of the last hundred years, which should be the collective property of humanity, is locked up in the coffers of a few megacorps: who, by the way, don't much care how well their artists are eating. Yes, there are edge cases, but spare me the sympathy for the poor artist on Fiverr with five images in LAION: this is a fight between tech titans and copyright monopolists, where the little people are always going to be an afterthought. Come out and say the original copyright term of 28 years (well long enough to eat!) should be brought back, condemn the DMCA and the naked abuse of democracy in the Sonny Bono act, and THEN maybe we can get to chiding the lapses of a few researchers just wanting to understand the world better.

[ahhfgsado6698]

I don't support tech titans or copyright monopolists and mostly just think stuff should enter the public domain earlier as that is what both groups don't want to have happen. And in the case of software I think it ought to be illegal to not release source code into the public domain after a reasonable amount of time, say 25 years. In fact I think it's absolutely crazy we allow large companies to sell infrastructure with software in it and then basically light the source code on fire so that people are forced to buy new versions of their product rather than maintain the source for the old version themselves.