Re: [ARSCLIST] National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) Study

[David Seubert <seubert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Your post is either just flippant or displays your profound ignorance of 
how governments work. Lawmakers make laws. Some of these laws are good, 
others bad. Other government agencies often study various issues and the 
effects of laws on these issues and write whitepapers and reports that 
can be used by lawmakers and others in the field to shape public policy, 
which is precisely what the NRPB studies are doing. This is a good 
thing, not evidence of some monolithic "government" where the right hand 
doesn't know what the left hand it doing.

I welcome the NRPB studies and hope they help educate our policymakers 
on the detrimental effects of lengthy copyright terms on preservation.

David Seubert
UCSB

> >    
> Keep in mind that this is the same government who placed sound
> recordings under a blanket copyright that extends (at this point...
> it could be changed!) to 2067! Should someone discover Edison's
> original "tinfoil" recording of "Mary Had a Little Lamb," it would
> be another 61 years before it could be made available to the
> public...130 years after the recording was made! One thinks that
> RIAA may be getting a bit carried away...?! I suspect that this
> interest in the preservation of original recordings may be based
> on the possibilty that money could be made from their reissue...
>
> Steven C. Barr
>