le 28-year
extension, only on request) before that, and 14 years (+ a
possible 14-year extension) before that. So, as you can see,
this is a serious degrading of the public domain, as a matter
of continuing policy."

John Mark Ockerbloom, founder of The Online Books Page in 1993,
got also deeply concerned by the 1998 amendment. He wrote in
August 1999: "I think it is important for people on the web to
understand that copyright is a social contract that is 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 U.S. 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. (...) 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