I am finding this to be a very interesting conversation, since members of our little community are actually probably among the most copyright observant of people. US Copyright law is a balance that is supposed to give the creator the opportunity to profit for a limited time by having a monopoly on proceeds from the work with the understanding that eventually the work will pass into the public domain and the public will benefit from it. Thus everyone will benefit eventually from the temporary incentive given to the creator. Prior to 1978, US copyright was 25 years with an option to extend it another 25 years. Thus many authors died, forgot about it, had no heirs, etc. and the works passed into public domain rather quickly while they still had some value to the public. In 1978, the new copyright law came in with the rights to profit extended to 70 years after the author's death. The first thing created since 1978 to come into the public domain will do so in 2048, and that assumes that the author died on the very first day the law was signed. In most cases the work will not come into the public domain until 100 plus years after it was created. It is doubtful that there is much that will still be relevant or of value to the public by the time most items pass into public domain. The law was heavily influenced by Disney and a few other unusually profitable entities, certainly not with the idea of lace books in mind. One has to question whether the lines have been properly drawn. I think it is going to create a lot of tensions not fully felt yet, and actually result in a net loss of valuable intellectual material as people forget that it exists long before it goes into the public domain. Quite likely Catherine Barley's excellent book will be one example of this. The fact that Catherine Barley has had to become a broker of second hand copies of her own book is a particularly ironic development. Although the best solution to the problem would be for Catherine Barley to be able to profit from her own work, if there is absolutely no way for her to put out another edition or to publish on demand and if she only wants the effort not to go to waste and enrich second hand book dealers, could she give the copyright to Creative Commons and thus make the work available to all for free? If she still hopes that there will be a solution in the self publishing area, she might want to hesitate, but she might consider putting it in her will, or suggesting the option to her heirs. One thing that I think is happening that is quite fascinating, is that young people who have access to public domain books on the internet and who tend to be poor are deciding to limit their exposure to lace literature to those items that are in the public domain. Thus they are doing without the books that have been written in the interim and are preferring to "reinvent the wheel" rather than to take advantage of all the work done by our generation of authors. My visit to the Young Lacemakers Symposium, and also a conversation that I had with a young person encountered on Arachne revealed that in many cases the young are unaware of the universe of material that we have produced since the 1970s. For the most part it is not widely available on Amazon or in commercial bookstores. Also, even if they are aware of it, the prices which are entirely dictated by the cost of production and distribution of material on such a small scale, are prohibitively high, so that only the richest of young people could buy more than a few lace books. Market competition drives them away from the books that we have produced to the free material on the internet. I happen to think that our generation did a great service by taking books like the DMC ones with very few illustrations and making books with nice photos and diagrams, etc, but the price differential between the material that is free and everything under copyright is substantial, whereas the benefits are not as clear to many people. If young people are aware of the material that our generation has produced, they seem to think that if we could recreate it all from the books published prior to 1923 (date at which everything in the US is in public domain), they can too, and possibly in a different way. So, more than likely, Catherine's book will be forgotten in time, and someone else who has never seen Catherine's book, will take the materials in public domain, study pieces of lace, and then with a similar amount of effort and research create a similar book. So where is the benefit to the public from Catherine's work? There is none. I have to say that I am very impressed with the Deusche Kloppel Verband in that they have produced a curriculum, Lace for Beginners, in which they specifically say the material can be reproduced for teaching purposes. Although the curriculum is somewhat expensive, it does create a situation where a teacher does not need to produce all her own patterns and materials. How many people are deterred from teaching by the time consuming nature of producing all the materials? The alternative, for law abiding people, is to require all the students to buy a beginner book that is currently on the market. Many students don't want to invest the money to buy such a book when they don't know if they will go on with lace. Also, beginning books on the market go on and off the market very quickly, as the first, and usually the last print run of the book is exhausted. And, not all beginning books are equally good.
Regarding the Aussie's experience. In the US, one may use material in a slide show without going through elaborate permissioning because it is an evanescent image, shown to a limited number of people. However, what happens when one has taken protected images with that in mind, and one is giving a slide show at a lace convention and others decide that it should be filmed? I guess that one can deny permission to film it, since one knows that some of the slides are under protection, but this puts the presenter in an awkward position. Also, these days, everything everyone does is filmed by cell phone cameras. The recent Boston Marathon police investigation is illuminative of how integrated this has become in our culture. The fact that we have had a technological development comparable to the invention of the printing press that has occurred since the US copyright laws were devised hasn't helped matters any, because no one really knows what to do in many cases. Regarding Anje's experience. Is it possible to contact the provider of the internet service, Google, GoDaddy, whatever, and tell them that they are being complicit in a crime by allowing the subscriber to the service to broad cast the book? I think that sometimes the provider is willing to take something offensive or illegal down. Devon - To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [email protected]. For help, write to [email protected]. Photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/
