[conspire] Book Burning continues thanks to the Feds

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 17:52, Ruben Safir <ruben at mrbrklyn.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 04:50:18PM -0400, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 23:34, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
>> > Quoting Edward Cherlin (echerlin at gmail.com):
>> >> My proposal would be for the settlement to allow anybody to set up a
>> >> registry and digitize books, with a requirement for data sharing
>> >> between all such registries.
>> >
>> > 'The settlement'.  Let's talk about the concept of 'the settlement' for
>> > a moment, here.
>> >
>> > The matter at hand is a civil lawsuit -- which is to say, a private
>> > property dispute between two parties, heard in front of a judge --
>> > filed by Authors Guild and several other such groups against Google, Inc.
>> > over gross violation of copyright law that Google, Inc. pretty much
>> > admittedly had been conducting while offering the plaintiffs'
>> > proprietary works (among others) in their entirety to the public
>> > electronically in a way that asserted unique rights to Google in so
>> > doing.
>> >
>> > (_After_ being sued, Google trimmed the offered electronic content on
>> > other people's works still under copyright to just excerpts, with the
>> > amount and nature of the excepts chosen by them.)
>> >
>> > A civil lawsuit can legitimately duke out in court -- various sanity
>> > provisions permitting -- litigator group A's effort to raid litigator
>> > group B's property rights and vice-versa.  However, if A or B attempted
>> > to get the judge to expand that claim to _everyone's property on Earth_,
>> > we would call that utterly crazy.
>>
>> You're right. I was speaking with great inexactitude. What I want
>> cannot legitimately be put into a settlement. I still like the idea,
>> if it can be achieved in some legitimate way.
>>
>> Another proposal, then, is that we all get together to change
>> copyright law worldwide so that something useful can be done about
>> abandoned copyrights. We could take escheatment of abandoned bank
>> accounts as a precedent (a social precedent, not one that a court is
>> bound to observe). Let all abandoned works in the US go to the
>> government, and then pass immediately into the public domain in
>> accordance with other precedent. ^_^
>
>
> Technically speaking all the copyrighted works do go to the government
> when they are registered, hence the LOC.

There are two problems with this statement.

1. Escheatment means the government taking ownership, not registering
ownership by someone else.

2. Under the Berne Convention, the LoC is no longer the statutory
copyright registry. There is, in fact, no requirement whatsoever to
register a copyright.
-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://www.earthtreasury.org/