[LINK] European libraries join forces against Google

[Robert Hart]

On Fri, 2005-04-29 at 13:09 +1000, Antony Barry wrote:
> On 29 Apr 2005, at 12:19 PM, Craig Sanders wrote:
> 
> > woohoo! won't they be the suckers when Disney & Microsoft & others
> > get the next round of copyright term extensions pushed through the US
> > Congress. it's already been pushed from 14 years to 75 years - the next
> > stage will be 100 or 150 years (and eventually they'll get provisions
> > to "land grab" anything in the public domain or which doesn't have a
> > visible or powerful enough owner...after all, it's wrong for "property"
> > to be lying around without an owner. it's unamerican).
> 
> I see the need to simplify all this. Let's push it back to a fixed date 
> instead of needing to extend all the time.
> 
> 1450 comes to mind.

Hey - that still leaves one or two gems lying around - I am sure that if
Latin were still being taught someone would want to grab royalties on De
Bello Gallica.

And before that there were one or two Greeks who wrote some interesting
and well quoted pieces.

But that misses out the really interesting possibility that some
corporation could actually own the copyright to the Bible, Torah and
Koran.

I am sure that this would make life interesting for committed members of
those religions.

Mind you, you could annoy a large segment of the population of Utah if
someone could grab the copyright for Joseph Smith's writings - which
were only in the 19th century!

(Gee it must be Friday afternoon :-)

-- 
Robert Hart                                      hartr at interweft.com.au
+61 (0)438 385 533
Brisbane, Australia                        http://www.hart.wattle.id.au