Compulsory licensing
I re-iterated the argument on dvd-discuss in favor of compulsory licensing for all copyrighted works in any medium. The basic concern is that copyright can be used to suppress a work, to stop it from being reprinted or reproduced at all. This is not the purpose of copyright; the purpose of copyright is to get money for authors and artists, not to let them (or their business partners, or their employers, or their heirs) keep works away from the public!
It seems scandalous to me that any work should be out of print simply because a copyright holder refuses to allow it to be reprinted. It's hard to understand how this could serve the public interest, which copyright is supposed to do.
I want to collect stories of cases where works were withdrawn from print using copyright. Sometimes the reasons are rather scandalous -- for example, an author's heirs may be embarrassed by a particular work, and want to protect the author's public image by burying something that the author has done. (Sometimes the author would have agreed, sometimes not.) One famous story concerns early Disney comics, which were often quite racist. Historians want to point out how pervasive racism has been in American culture by reproducing some of these comics for everyone to see. But the comics in question are extremely rare (so public libraries wouldn't have them, for example). Disney won't readily grant reprint permissions, presumably because it doesn't want people to see the kinds of attitudes it once shared with much of the public. If historians or critics do reprint these early Disney comics without permission, though, they may be sued.
Can the public interest be served by allowing copyright holders to inhibit the study and preservation of important pieces of history? Sometimes the issue shows up around personal letters: a famous person or the famous person's estate may not allow letters now in someone else's possession to be printed. Privacy invasion? No, copyright infringement. It's easier to sympathize with an individual letter author than with Disney, perhaps, but we know that copyright has hurt historians' and biographers' work here.
I thought I remembered that there was a famous person who died and who turned out to be gay but whose family blocked publication of a letter of his that would have substantiated this. So, as I said, I really need to find some specific documentation to substantiate stories like that.
There's quite a debate about which reforms are most appropriate; I just think it's an absolute scandal of copyright that things, once published, should go out of print if people are still willing to buy them.
