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:
“... as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the ideal library is in the wish of its maker.”
—Carolyn Wells (1862–1942)
“Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)