Copyright law has always walked the tightrope between monopoly and community. It was designed to allow creators, authors, and inventors to exclusively benefit from their work for a period of time (a monopoly providing incentive for them to create, author, or invent), while also ensuring the public/community benefit of those creations by eventually terminating that monopoly and releasing them to the wild.
There are books and speeches and diatribes aplenty about whether the current balance of copyright tilts toward monopoly or community (with general consensus around the monopoly). But either way, arts, culture, and heritage organizations invariably find themselves smack-dab in the middle of the circus. We are, after all, in the business of both generating creative and technical invention and also ensuring broad and generational access to those creations. We are simultaneously ”the masses” and ”the man.”
The Library of Congress commissioned a thorough and rather disturbing perspective on this tension in the recent report The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age (available in print or PDF, and discussed by both OSNews and BoingBoing). The report suggests that under current copyright law, any individual or organization committed to preserving recorded sound for public access must essentially break the law to do so.
Were copyright law followed to the letter, little audio preservation would be undertaken. Were the law strictly enforced, it would brand virtually all audio preservation as illegal.
As a result, organizations like libraries, universities, and others do their work as best they can, and hope to ‘fly under the radar’ as they do. Also as a result, much or most of the recorded heritage of the United States is preserved by commercial interests for its current or future financial value rather than its scholarly or cultural significance.
Many passionate people have been ringing this bell for long while now — Larry Lessig, Bill Ivey, among others. It’s both gratifying and terrifying to have our national archive ring it too.
