Sony and Sonny: Could the Sony Reader gizmo unwittingly help fight copyright term extension?

Sony is among the worst of the copyright and DRM trogs nowadays, despite the good work it did eons ago in the Betamax case. If the company hates two new calls for copyright reform, I’ll hardly be surprised. Take the Librie, the predecessor of the Sony Reader. It debuted along with Sony-supplied books that expired after only two months. You couldn’t own them for real—just one example of Sony’s oft-consumer-hostile ways.

But what if the Sony Reader defies my expectations and is a wild success, not just a niche gizmo? Could the Reader accidentally help the fight against the Hollywood-bought Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and other copyright-related atrocities so beloved by many entertainment lawyers? I’ll elaborate later in this post.

Better for kids’ minds: Gatsby or Sonny and Cher reruns?

For those outside the U.S. who don’t know, Sonny is the late singer and congress guy who wanted copyright terms to last forever, who skied into a tree, and who then got immortalized with a legislative tribute to his worst side—a law extending the terms by decades. Thanks to Sonny The Law, U.S. high school students can’t, say, download The Great Gatsby from the Net for free. Better that they spend their time watching old Sonny and Cher reruns, right? (Yes, that’s S&C together in the photo.) Perhaps out of fear of reprisals from Hollywood donors, even “populist” politicians such as John Edwards have tended to be mute on Bono.

But if the Sony Reader really takes off, then it might accidentally help undo the damage from Sonny The Law—by giving a boost to public domain books. The Sony can read DRMed books only in its proprietary BBeB format, and its new e-store will carry a mere 10,000 or so titles at the start, and not necessarily at the best prices. Result? People will be prowling the Net not just for nonDRMed titles from small publishers, but also for free public domain and Creative Commons books, and I suspect that sites such as manybooks.net will be delighted to help them. The early-adoption crowd is already hip to the public domain. Can others catch up with the help of the Reader? I won’t count on it. But it’s an intriguing thought.

The more, the merrier

After all, the more widely people use public domain content, the more they’ll understand that the issues here are not so esoteric. Over the long term, Sonny’s congressional friends will have helped the special-interest elite steal billions from the public domain—harming Jane Doe Sony Owner, not just schools and libraries. The law badly needs to be repealed or mitigated; see Prof. Dennis Karjala’s site for more information.

Details: Nope, not everyone at Sony is evil. I can recall someone there expressing an interest in the public domain scene on the Net—I’d hope this wasn’t just for marketing purposes. Meanwhile thanks to if:book and (separately) Roger Sperberg for pointers to the copyright reform manifestos from the U.K.