A Digital Library and A Public-policy Advocacy Organization
Aozora Bunko has joined with others in organizing to oppose changes in Japanese copyright law. That opposition has led to encouraging Japanese citizens to submit letters and petitions to the Japanese Cultural Affairs Agency and to members of the Diet.
Japan and other countries have accepted the terms of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, an 1886 international agreement about common copyright policies. Japan and other countries with laws that do not go beyond the minimum copyright terms of the Berne Convention have copyrights that run for the lifetime of the author plus 50 years. Aozora Bunko has adopted an advocacy role in favor of construing this status quo as preferable to changes proposed by a number of powerful forces.
The evolution of Aozora Bunko from a digital library to a public-policy advocacy organization is an unintended consequence which developed only after the perceived threat to the Aozora Bunko catalog and mission became otherwise unavoidable.
Read more about this topic: Aozora Bunko
Famous quotes containing the words library and/or organization:
“Our civilization has decided ... that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men.... When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Democracy means the organization of society for the benefit and at the expense of everybody indiscriminately and not for the benefit of a privileged class.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)