I am in the process of developing a website for a friend to archive his extensive, draw-dropping collection of kitschy, old-timey, and frankly, odd records. I mean, seriously wacky shit - The kind of audio I live for. Recently, we have been discussing the pros and cons of offering, in part or in whole, those albums from his collection that reside in the public domain for download via his website or archive.org. Undoubtedly, it’s a sticky subject, and he’s got a lot of difficult decisions ahead as he weighs the value of releasing these amazing recordings into our cultural commons against his own personal obligations.

As many of you well know, no conversation like this would be complete without a tip of the hat to ephemeral film archivist Rick Prelinger and the amazing contributionto he has made to our culture via The Prelinger Archive. During my research of Mr. Prelinger and his philosophy regarding the public domain and open culture, I ran across this article, penned for Bad Subjects by none other than the archivist himself, entitled Beyond Copyright Conciousness:

Not being a disenfranchised musician or songwriter, I never thought about intellectual property issues when I was young. Access to music was all I wanted. Much later, I began to collect historical film, partly out of fascination, partly because few others were doing so, and started Prelinger Archives in 1985. Needing to support the breadth and speed of my collecting habit, I went into the business of selling stock footage, which means charging commercial users for access to film clips or segments so that they could use them in their productions. Though we owned some of our material outright, much of it was public domain and not subject to copyright. Even before I knew of the Internet, the copyright status of the works in our collection, and the state of copyright law in general, was thus intimately associated with my own archives’ ability to survive financially.

I’m actually most comfortable with the ideas of those who support formative chaos, those who rhetorically call for total and complete disobedience of copyright law, rather than cloaking their efforts under a veil of disingenuous responsibility. In many ways copyright law has outlived its social and economic function. It’s a fact that the most lucrative copyrights are controlled by monopolistic corporations, but it’s also true that copyright can permit comparatively powerless individual authors and artists to exercise a tiny measure of economic clout. But if we’re to transform authoritarian copyright laws into social practices that protect creators and benefit society in general, a period of flux and experimentation will be essential.

In order to be an active reader/listener/spectator, we need access to materials. Yet aside from current pop culture stuff widely available in American superstores, such access is currently quite difficult. One reason for Napster’s popularity, and the rush to embrace other peer-to-peer technologies, may be the sheer diversity of music and sound that has become available. Much of this audio was hitherto inaccessible, locked in record company vaults, private collections, archives and radio station libraries. In this sense the body of Napster material functions as a virtual archive that’s totally available to all.

Quite the opposite is true in other media. Our history and culture are increasingly becoming private property rather than public resource. For instance, consider still photography. Hundreds of millions of historical still images are now controlled by two large corporations, Getty Images and Corbis, who are actively competing for top market rank. (I should disclose that two subsidiaries of Getty Images do an excellent job of representing my own collection for stock footage sales.) Unfortunately, these collections are generally inaccessible without payment of substantial research and licensing fees. In other media, textual material, music and works of art are now owned or controlled by a dwindling number of rightsholders. It is now highly probable that most access to cultural and historical materials will follow the paradigm of “billable events,” with few exceptions or discounts for nonprofit or public users. E-commerce, of course, makes it much easier for rights holders to charge for the experience of listening to or eyeballing content.

To think about strengthening public access to cultural resources is to consider basic questions of property and its privatization. As in so many other situations, it’s worth looking to history and landscape for precedents and a possible solution. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, private corporations exerted unprecedented pressures on the “public domain” — American land and natural resources. They owned or controlled key tracts of productive land, often as a result of government give aways or favoritism. The aggressive pursuit of extractive interests such as mining, logging and agriculture threatened to exhaust public lands and encroach upon naturally or culturally significant sites. In response to this threat, the conservationist movement lobbied to organize a system of national forests, parks and monuments. By preserving a limited public sphere not subject to the exercise of private property rights, the benefits of some wilderness and cultural sites were preserved for all.

Substituting culture for nature gives us the idea of an intellectual property preserve that houses words, pictures, sounds, moving images and digital information, and protects them as public property. How might such a “national park for intellectual property” work? First, the preserve would be a repository for intellectual property rights that had been donated by rights holders. These rights would include copyrights, or in the case of public domain materials, the right to reproduce and disseminate the materials. The activities of the preserve would be closely coordinated with existing institutions, who would often still hold physical materials.

Why would copyright owners (or owners of public domain materials) ever cede their properties to the preserve? First, and perhaps most important, tax incentives. Amend the tax code to allow substantial deductions or tax credits for donating valuable copyrights or materials. Second, following the precedent of public land acquisitions, key donors might be compensated with private funding. Third, promote public recognition that an act of donation is a prestigious deed benefitting the national cultural heritage.

All in all, a very well thought out piece that handily addresses concerns on both sides of the copyright / copyleft fence. Hopefully, it will be discussion like this that will encourage others to follow his fine example in creating a more vibrant, free culture for ourselves and generations to come.