The main issue (ignoring the issues in approving this laws, of course), would be the maintenance of such an "escrow office". Nonetheless, many countries already have copyright and patent offices, and this would be just an extra function - there's no pragmatic/bureaucratic excuse.<br>
<br>It would be desirable to have source code for all kinds of productions (specially multimedia), but one should keep in mind that it's hard to define what is 'source code' outside of the software world. Although, media 'binaries' are much more easily modifiable than software binaries.<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/8/12 Felipe Sanches <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:felipe.sanches@gmail.com">felipe.sanches@gmail.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I agree with Richard Stallman when he talks about the duality of computer software (compiled binaries versus source code) and its problematic treatment in copyright laws: we need to guarantee public domain effectiveness for software. We cant simply allow its source code to be forever kept as secret while users are subjected to proprietary binaries (which are hardly modifiable in a pratical manner) even after the binaries have fallen into the public domain. An escrow proposal was made by rms but we are still unsure about what would be the best approach to solve that issue.<br>
<br>I'd like to raise awareness to a similar duality: multimedia productions. Wouldnt it make sense for us to seek guarantees that production files will be available when a movie falls into public domain? It would certainly make derivative creative works easier to produce without the need of recreating the whole thing from scratch.<br>
<br>Think about the open movies we've seen recently: i. e. "Elephants Dream", or "Big Buck Bunny".<br>The creators of these movies have voluntarily released their "source code". Wouldn't we want to have similar access to the production files of Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" in 2020, ten years after the release of the movie? Or would we be satisfied with solely a legalized high definition public domain copy of it in 2020?<br>
<br>Felipe "Juca" Sanches<br>Inkscape.org developer / FSF member / Brazilian Pirate Party<br><br><br><br><br>
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