Derek Stanovsky
Dear President-Elect Obama,
Welcome! We have been waiting for you for a very long time. To have an intellectual and an academic elected to the highest office in the land is an extraordinary, and extraordinarily exciting, event. I am confident you will help usher in many of the changes our country so desperately needs. It will be a thrilling time for us all, and I know I and many of my colleagues are optimistic about the next four years in ways we find strangely unfamiliar. I also know you have no shortage of people offering you unsolicited advice on every imaginable front. I know of no way to spare you this deluge of well-intentioned opinion. So mine, at least, will be brief.
You have much to do. You have wars to end, an economy to rescue, and a planet to save. Those are urgent and daunting tasks and, without doubt, will consume much of your time and attention. If there is any small help that I and my colleagues and students can lend you in these efforts, please do not hesitate to ask. We are eager to help, and eager to help you succeed.
I do have one additional area of academic interest which I hope I can persuade you to devote some small measure of your attention during the coming months, and that is the issue of digital copyright. It may seem trivial compared to the events currently crowding the world stage. It is not a crisis the way global warming, Guantanamo, or Gaza are crises, but it is one area where some very small changes might bring about dramatic results. Currently, the digital archiving of even out of print books, articles, film, music, and images is a violation of copyright law. I believe you may be familiar with this subject already from the work of a colleague of yours during your time teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, Lawrence Lessig – and may I just say once again how thrilling it is to have a President who actually has academic colleagues! Professor Lessig's name is even sometimes mentioned as a possible choice for the newly created position of Copyright Czar in your administration. That would be one appointment that could certainly help create change. Our new digital technologies have created new opportunities as well as new legal difficulties for every form of media. It will require leadership to make sure the promises of these new technologies are not preempted.
For myself, even very modest changes in current copyright law concerning the ways access to out of print books and articles can be provided would transform academic research and the conditions of my teaching and scholarly work. It would create the conditions for a veritable renaissance in the humanities as works long out of print become freely available electronically for the very first time. This is a public good that would cost the public nothing. It would, in fact, cost no one anything since it deals only with works that have no further economic future. This, then, is one of my wishes for change.
Free the archive!
Hopefully,
Derek Stanovsky
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