She almost spilled her drink attempting to nod a reply. "Yeah, that's him. I recently discovered that the films he made for Franklin Roosevelt's depression-era Works Progress Administration were just the tip of the iceberg. Unlike those records of WPA construction projects, which were in the Public Domain because the government bankrolled them, his other films were copyrighted by the studio that had hired him, and they're all still locked up as a result."
"Even after all this time? I thought the copyright would have expired by now."
"And it would have," she said, "if Congress hadn't kept extending the length of copyright every time the big content companies whispered sweet campaign contributions in their ears."
"So..." He paused, stirred the whipped cream into his drink, and took a long, thoughtful sip. "So you were leafleting something about the DMCA?"
"Indirectly. That, and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which were both passed in 1998, were just the latest attack on the Public Domain."
"Hold on, hold on... Didn't Congressman Bono die before those bills were even passed?"
She nodded. "Yeah, he did. But I'm not convinced it was an innocent skiing accident. He might have caught on to what the bill he co-sponsored was really about. In any case, the twenty-year extension the Bono bill added to the nineteen tacked on in '76 and the nudges made in the sixties weren't the worst of it. What really threatens the PD is the fact that the DMCA gave blanket protection to all copyrighted content, not just for the part that's worth anyone's time to protect, and the fact that those same media companies want to enforce their control by undermining the Internet's promise of global access." She paused, and took another sip. "I was leafleting about the intentional destruction of the Public Domain."
Robieri gazed beyond his former student for a long moment before saying anything. When he did, he crossed his arms and straightened in his seat. "Intentional destruction?"
"Yeah. They want you to think it's just a side-effect of locking up all the profit-making content in perpetual copyright, along with the much larger body of work that they don't even offer for sale any more. But I don't buy that. I think somebody out there has been trying to kill the Public Domain for a hundred years now."
"But who? Who would benefit from that?"
She flashed a humorless smile. "The same people who did this to me."
He leaned forward a bit. "What did happen to you?"
"Do you remember the day I got really sick in your class? It was the first period after lunch, and I'd forgotten to bring a sandwich, so I ate in the caf."
"Peanut oil, wasn't it?"
Colleen made a face. "Yeah. So what do you think the odds are on me making a sandwich with rancid peanut oil?"
He gripped the arms of his chair. "Someone tampered with your lunch? But... who would do a thing like that? And why?"
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