Reform copyright laws

RE “A Dust-Up Over Old TV Tapes” [Calendar, June 10]: I’m getting tired of stories about how much power copyright holders have in the U.S. and how they’re using it to suppress important parts of the culture and keep audiences from enjoying them. Whether it’s the prohibitive fees they want to charge Internet radio broadcasters, the denial to American audiences of the wide selection of historical recordings of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s available to European consumers, or their attacks on the collectors who are posting vintage clips on YouTube, it’s clear that U.S. copyright law is no longer encouraging the creative marketplace, but the opposite.

I’d feel a little better about the enforcement actions of the giant corporations that own the copyrights and pay attorneys $1,000 per hour to write cease-and-desist letters to people like Ira Gallen if they wanted to make this material available to us, but they don’t. It would be technologically possible for them to upload it to their own websites and charge a fair price for access, but they won’t.

It’s time to repeal the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and reduce the term of U.S. copyrights to the European standard of 50 years. That’s enough time for the original creators to recoup their investment and make a fair profit on their work without giving them the power to keep it under wraps until it is lost or disintegrates completely.

MARK GABRISH CONLAN

San Diego