aw altogether with potentially much more onerous contract law. (...)
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 is too often ends up being
('big money vs. rogue pirates'), we may be able to come up with some
reasonable accommodations."

Michael Hart wrote in July 1999: "No one has said more against
copyright extensions than I have, but Hollywood and the big publishers
have seen to it that our Congress won't even mention it in public. The
kind of copyright debate going on is totally impractical. It is run by
and for the 'Landed Gentry of the Information Age.' 'Information Age'?
For whom?"

Sure enough. We regularly hear about the great "information age" we
live in, while seeing the tightening of laws relating to dissemination
of information. The contradiction is obvious. This problem has also
affected several European countries, where the copyright law switched
from "author's life plus 50 years" to "author's life plus 70 years",
following pressure from content owners who successfully lobbied for
"harmonization" of national copyright laws as a response to
"globalization of the market". To regulate the copyright of digital
editions in the wake of the relevant WIPO international treaties, the
Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was ratified in October 1998 in
the United States, and the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD)
was ratified in May 2001 by the European Commission.

According to Michael Hart, and Project Gutenberg CEO Greg Newby, "as of
January 2009, the total number of separate public domain books in the
world is between 20 and 30 million, and that 5 million are already on
the internet, and we expect another million per year from now until all
the easy-to-find books are done. 10 million or so will be done before
people start to think about the facts telling them the rate cannot
continue to double as they come up to the point of already having done
half. New copyrights lasting virtually for ever in the U.S. will bring
the growth process to a screeching halt when The Mickey Mouse copyright
laws, literally, copyright laws on Mickey Mouse, and Winnie-the-Pooh,
etc., stop all current copyright from expiring for the forseeable
future."

FROM THE PAST TO THE FUTURE

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