The U.K. is looking to change copyright laws that make it illegal to copy music for personal use and for libraries to archive material under copyright.

It used to be that you could safely assume a work was public domain unless there was a highly visible warning printed on it, containing both the copyright owner and the date of copyright (at least in the USA). This system also ensured that, when the work’s copyright expired, you could tell from any copy that this was so—by simply adding the duration of copyright to the date printed in the work’s copyright notice. The Berne Convention, however, changed all that by replacing the assumption of freedom with the assumption of monopoly, and it now takes extensive research to be sure a work is public domain.

Candidates for a unified theory justifying copyright in all its manifestations include the value of the copyright owner’s efforts in creating the work. This value can take a natural rights form – the value of genius – but it can also take the more mundane Lockean agricultural form – copyright owners are the sowers of their intellectual labor.

"In cooperation with Digital Freedom, Free Culture @ NYU will be hosting the first American a screening of the 2007 film Good Copy Bad Copy. The documentary highlights the current state of copyright and culture, and features prominent copyright players such as Girl Talk, Lawrence Lessig, Renaldo Lemos, and Dan Glickman..."

"So. This week it seems to be about privacy. Not so much me, but the fabulous workings of my government's leadership, who by the way, I did not vote for. [...] Finally, this week is the likely the week that the Canadian version of the DMCA, Digital Millenium Copyright Act, is to be tabled..."

Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools. We imagine that Adobe has no illusions that this will stop copyright infringement -- any more than dozens of other DRM systems have done so -- but the introduction of encryption does give Adobe and its customers a powerful new legal weapon against competitors and ordinary users through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

"...The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright to promote progress, for the benefit of the public then we must make changes in the other direction..."

By rights, copyright really shouldn’t apply to binary executables, because they are purely “functional” (not “expressive”) works. The decision to extend copyright to binaries was an economically-motivated anomaly, and that choice has some counter-intuitive and detrimental side-effects.

RMS: « Disney bought a US law to extend the copyright on the drawing of Mickey Mouse, but it may have lost that copyright in 1929 through an error.