Open Sourcing books

Lawrence Lessig has been arguing pretty vehemently that copyrights should expire within a reasonable amount of time and require some action (like paying $1) on the copyright holder to extend protection. This would prevent the problem of many works being lost because no one can find the copyright holder to find out if they even care anymore and allow the public domain to continue to grow while still protecting Mickey and freinds. Sadly, the powers that be don't want even this kind of rational restriction on their copyrights and won't be happy until it's "foreever less 1 day".

Given this glum outlook, it's great to see that some people are actively releasing their older books into the public domain. Lessig has been releasing some of his books openly with a Creative Commons license and is using a public wiki to edit the next version of Code and I recently came across the following:

• Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt from IEEE - a classic text on Economics
• Wall Street by Doug Henwood - a disection of how Wall Street really works