While browsing through a SL blog I came across an (in-world) interview with Laurence Lessig, the inventor of the Creative Commons license:
[quote:lbr9pxfs]Think for example about the Google book search project. Google wants to index 18,000,000 books and make them searchable. If the book is in copyright, you'll get a "snippet" around the search. If it is not in copyright, then you can see the full book. Of the 18 million books, 16% are out of copyright. 9% are in copyright and in print.
That means 75% are in copyright, but out of print.
Now the publishers say you need to ask permission before you index these books. But how do you ask the 75% of 18 million authors when we have no list of copyright owners, no record of who owns the rights, no way to track down current claimants at all. Yet it stands in the way-- and now threatens Google with a huge law suit-- because the term gets extended and extended. The term for the framers was 14 years, renewable once. It is now life of the author plus 70 years-- [..]
So, [...] does blocking access to 50-75% of the books in our tradition constitute a burden on our culture?[/quote:lbr9pxfs]
All right .. thank you copyright holders.
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(This quote seems to be related to a US Supreme Court case. The quote is a year old so there are probably new developments in the Google case.)
Source: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/01/the_second_life.html
