NEWS: Audio Covered by Copyright Laws That Differ Widely in Duration Between the U.S. and Europe

In Europe which has a fifty rather than ninety-five year span of copyright protection, music from the fifties is now public domain.

Same old song, different meaning for P2P By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
January 7, 2003, 12:49 PM PT
<http://news.com.com/2100-1023-979532.html?tag=lh>

A difference between American and European copyright law threatens to carve out a free-swapping zone for popular decades-old music, hampering record companies' antipiracy efforts online.

European and Canadian copyright protections for sound recordings last just 50 years, compared with 95 years in the United States. As reported earlier in The New York Times, that means that a boomlet in sales of bootlegs of 1950s artists, ranging from Miles Davis to Elvis Presley, is becoming perfectly legal.

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But the industry is on the watch for people creating archives of material that is in the public domain in one country but still illegal to trade freely in the United States. If a Web-based service comes online, it might be possible to block access to the site from the United States by going through ISPs, Turkewitz said.

<snip>

It would be more difficult to block access to people offering songs via peer-to-peer services, however.

Full story may be read at the URL above.

Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jwne[_at_]astro.temple.edu Received on Sun Jan 12 2003 - 07:17:11 GMT