NINCH: Copyright Town Meeting 2000 Contact NINCH Join NINCH NINCH PROGRAMS Information Exchange Tools for Today Future Environments SITE MAP SEARCH OUR SITE NINCH >> NINCH Programs >> 2000 Town Meetings >> San Francisco HEADLINE: REPORT: The Public Domain: Implied, Inferred and In Fact Wednesday, April 5, 2000 Visual Resources Association Conference San Francisco, CA ● Overview of Public Domain Theory and Practice; Howard Besser, Kathleen Butler ● Rights Management and the Public Domain; Robert Baron, Dave Green, Dakin Hart ● Questions and Discussion INTRODUCTION The local organizers, Martha Winnacker, from the University of California and Maryly Snow, Architecture Slide Librarian, University of California, Berkeley, and representing the Visual Resources Association, welcomed the audience of more than 200. This was the second session in this series that focused on the Public Domain and reference was made to the earlier meeting at the Chicago Historical Society. David Green also welcomed the participants and set the meeting in the context of the whole Town Meeting series. Martha Winnacker, acting as chair of the meeting, then introduced the first two speakers. OVERVIEW OF PUBLIC DOMAIN THEORY AND PRACTICE Howard Besser, "The Disappearing Public Domain: What is it, What's happening to it, and Why should we care?" (See PowerPoint slides for this presentation) Howard Besser reviewed what he saw as the demise of public space in public life - from the Greek agora, the medieval commons and the public spaces important for early 20th-century political organizers, to the rise of privately controlled pseudo public spaces (the shopping mall), the disappearing public bathroom and the proliferation of streetcams or surveillance cameras today. The recent history of broadcasting also demonstrates a similar demise of public space – from the 1924 Telecommunications Act that set aside the airwaves as a public code to the recent squabbling among factions to defeat the FCC’s proposal to establish local community radio using low-powered radio signals (see the March 31, 2000 New York Times editorial, “Static Over Low-Powered Radio.”). http://web.archive.org/web/20041023083835/http://www.ninch.org/copyright/2000/sfreport.html (1 of 12)6/27/2005 4:10:13 PM