If these bills are passed, it will mean the elimination of 1 million books from the Public Domain, and another step in creating a virtual
"Land of the Information Rich."

Copyrights will be extended to cover nearly all information, and for
periods longer than our unborn childen can expect to live in a whole
human lifetime, on the average.

Please call your congresspeople with your opinions.  You can find at
least most of them in Project Gutenberg's 251st Etext:

United States Congressional Address Book, 1995

Thanks!!

Michael S. Hart
Project Gutenberg Executive Director

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 97 15:48:48 EDT
From: John Mark Ockerbloom

Two bills have been recently introduced in Congress that would seriously weaken the public domain, the source of the majority of the books now available on-line free of charge.  Both appear to be placed on a "fast track", so stopping them will require rapid action.

The first is a revision to the copyright law that would extend all
copyrights now in force for an additional 20 years (long past the lifetimes of the authors that copyright was designed to encourage).  This would keep older works out of the public domain for nearly a century after publication.

Copyright extension bills have been proposed for the last couple of years, and have generally not gotten past the subcommittee hearings stage.
However, this one has apparently already passed through the subcommittee without hearing, and is now in front of the full House Judiciary Committee, with a nearly identical bill now in the Senate as well.  For full information on the bill, why it's harmful, and what can be done to stop it, see Professor Dennis Karjala's page, at

http://www.public.asu.edu/~dkarjala/

The second bill is a "database protection bill" being pushed by a few
big database companies to put certain public domain materials
under intellectual property controls.  Unlike the bill above, which
would simply freeze the public domain for at least 20 years, this would effectively remove material already belonging to the public from the public domain.  It would take away a right that the public has had up till this time to freely use factual information.  This too
could seriously hurt the dissemination of knowledge.
A critical report on the bill, including the full text of the bill, can be found in a Hyperlaw report at

http://www.essential.org/listproc/upd-discuss/msg00599.html

(Thanks to Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg for forwarding me that report!)

This information has also been placed on the News section of the On-Line Books Page, and on a new sub-page we've started for resources on free speech, fair use, and the public domain.  I'd love to hear about any links that would be useful to include on the latter page.