Retroactive Continuity in Copyright

This caused some thought last week: what happens if a someone publishes something on the net for free and for the whole world to dowload, and then decides to finally put it behind the firewall again. A few years ago I downloaded a whole bunch of very interesting articles from the research journal of this large IT company - well very interesting if you are an IT historian, and I noticed they are for sale for $27.99 apiece now from the same website. I see I made an incredible amount of money in that short time, almost as much as my uncle who went on that boat trip where the booze was cheap.

Now if we take the copyright notices seriously, I cannot put these articles up on a website. I could have linked to them earlier, but those links are worthless for people that are not going to buy them. My thought here is that the content has been put into the public domain years earlier. I could search the net and look if the content behind the links was archived earlier. I can freely link to that. The large company should have issued takedown notices; and not exercised copyright is - well, not exercised.

Now if I was in the business of having an internet archive, I would have put them online. Actually I can start being an internet archive any day, and use anything that I have ever downloaded for free. I can put up anything that I did not receive takedown notices for - yet. The interesting part here is that it is not the thoughts here that are copyrighted - they could have been patented but that is a different ballgame. If I re-tell the content of these articles, I can put it in wikipedia without consequence. It is only the media, in this case a bunch of ones and zeroes following the structure of a file containing pdf, which is fortunately as open as something that is patented and copyrighted can be. If I watermark these files with my own IP, I have added content of my own. I will offer to cross-licence that to everyone sending me a takedown notice. If they send me a takedown notice, they must have knowledge of that content.

It is time to end this madness. We have paid already for all of this. If it is research done with public funding, it is ours. If it was produced by a company, we have paid for it by buying the products of that company. If we did not do that, the company would have gone under. Most of those companies' early research was done under US defense sponsorship anyway. When I started out in IT, thought was free and operating systems were given out on tape and microfiche. We would learn from each others work. Programmers from different companies exchanged ideas and programs. This was to the benefit of all. Now knowledge is closed and people in my trade have to be 'certified' by paid for teaching programs of which the content offends the intellect.

Ironically, government regulation forced IBM to close down operating system source and government regulation forced Microsoft to abandon their everything-will-be-Unix strategy. Picture and music companies are now stifling intellectual development - by putting out dumb pictures and bad music and protecting them so vigourously that there is a knock-on effect on intellectual history. This certainly is a lose-lose scenario. The dumbing down works both ways, and the governments have, as always, no clue. Here is a novel idea: let's spend a fortune of our defense budget on fundamental research like in the fifties and sixties, planning for the next war - and then just not have that war, stay home, and call it win-win.

This, by the way, is the difference between the true left and right. The true left should be OK with spending a fortune on defense budgets as long as it is not spent on war. The true right wants to go to war, accuses the government of socialism and then pockets the government industry crisis bail-out money.