Re: Re: Abolishing perpetual copyright in unpublished works

• Original Message ----- From: Terry Carroll <carroll[_at_]tjc.com> Date: Monday, August 28, 2006 3:55 pm Subject: [CNI-(C)] Re: Abolishing perpetual copyright in unpublished works
  >
  > > Canada has sorta done the same, with one transitional period
  > > that expired in 2004, and another which stupidly lasts until 2049.
  >
  > That description sounds like you could apply that to the US
  > scheme, too,
  > just substituting 2003 and 2048 for 2004 and 2049, respectively.
  > I don't
  > know Canadian copyright law, though, so I don't know if the US and
  > Canadian provisions are analogous.
  

Not quite. The US abolished perpetual copyright with a 25-year transitional period that ended on January 1, 2003. Henceforth, until some powerful literary estate gets its fangs into Congress, the life+70 term applies to unpublished literary works, so that every year a new batch becomes public domain in the US.

In Canada, the clock started ticking in 1999 for unpublished works by those authors who died before 1949. For them, there was a five-year transition which ended on January 1, 2004. All works by authors deceased before January 1, 1949, are PD in Canada.

For those authors dead between 1949 and 1998 inclusive, though, the term is fixed as lasting until January 1, 1949, which is increasingly stupid. Published works by those authors transtion to the PD on the usual life+50 expiry, but unpublished works will be under copyright for up to a century in the most extreme cases. (This is the "Mackenzie King class" of "authors"; the former Prime Minister whose published works are already PD, but whose unpublished works have a 99 year posthumous copyright term; he died in 1950).

For those authors dead in 1999 and later, the life+50 term applies to all works. Received on Tue Aug 29 2006 - 02:20:30 GMT