[Festa] Tell me why this is an Internet problem. Why should the tech industry care about this, particularly?
[Lessig] This is an extremely important issue for people to get. Before the Internet, long copyright terms sometimes didn't matter. What were you going to do with a book that was out of print before the Internet? How were you going to republish it? Now that we have the Internet, we can imagine taking an extraordinary amount of knowledge and culture and making it available on the Internet so that it can be provided for free to schools, to libraries, to other creators. This is a possibility that didn't exist when Congress originally abolished the requirement that you had to renew your copyright, in 1976. They did that because they thought it was an unnecessary burden, and there was not so much benefit in letting work pass into the public domain. The Internet has now made the public domain a million times more valuable. So we have a chance to restore the material--if you don't have to get the permission. And we want Congress to reconsider what they've done in light of the potential that the Internet creates.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
