Re: time and bits thoughts and news

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Brewster Kahle
Wed, 18 Mar 1998 16:17:31 -0800


the commission on preservation and access wrote an interesting report (the
movie we saw came from them as well). An interesting idea was for the
government to have the right to proactively do a "save the bits"
intervention. Therefore if the owners are not healthy enough to maintain
the bits until copyrigth runs out (which has gotten to be a very very long
time), then an intervention can take place to put a copy under guardianship.

seems klunky, but it is getting there.

I suggest we shorten copyright and build digital institutions, but that
would be going against some very big property holders and their lobbyists.

-brewster

At 03:59 PM 3/18/98 -0800, Stewart Brand wrote:
>Here's an idea forwarded from Jaron Lanier... --SB
>
>>1) A thought: Copyrighted material currently passes through two gross
>>phases of life; initially proprietary and eventually public domain. It
>>might be good to create a third which benefits archivists. If data is kept
>>alive in the long term, those who keep it alive should be able to benefit
>>in some way. This would create incentives for speculative commercial
>>archivists. There needs to be a concept of "digital stewards' rights"
>>rather like squatters rights, in that such rights would accrue
>>automatically. If well designed, a "stewards' rights" law would give
>>incentives for the preservation of the widest variety of bits. To benefit,
>>a steward would have to show that the bits would have died without
>>intervention- and all holders of copies of the bits would have to split
>>proceeds, creating incentives for divergence.
>>
>>2) Kodak claims to have a gold reflective layer CD that lasts for
>>centuries in accelerated aging tests. I will make the connection between
>>the folks at Kodak and T&B
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