Re: Copyright Extension Bill Passes Congress

Edward Barrow <edward[_at_]plato32.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Much as I would like to blame Disney for everything - the dumbing
> down of society, creating a generation of insufferable whining children
> whose imagination has been replaced by Disney imagery, etc etc ... I
> don't think they are entirely to blame for this extension. Rather, it
> is the Germans. As part of the process of creating the single market
> in Europe, the European Commission decided that copyright terms had
> to be "harmonised" across the community (there had been a number of
> unsatisfactory judicial cases arising from the disparity). Since it
> would have been unlawful under the Treaty of Rome to deprive German
> citizens of their property, it meant that all copyright terms in Europe
> had to be harmonised upwards to the German maximum. Once life plus 70
> became established as the European norm, the US moved to extend; partly
> no doubt to protect the competitive position of its copyright industries
> in Europe where the additional 20 years are only granted to non EU works
> on the basis of reciprocity. This economic force is also likely sooner
> rather than later to push through database protection in the US to
> parallel the European position.

But there was no real legal (i.e. treaty) requirement for the added 20 years, and there is absolutely no indication that it will make U.S. companies any more competitive. What it will do of course is significantly increase the value of copyrights that were about to go into the public domain. And thus, really the only thing that it did was to increase the value of companies, most notably Disney, that had significant numbers of these works. It doesn't make Disney more competitive, just more profitable.

My view is that the harmonization argument was mere pretext. We could have just as easily pushed them to roll things back, or indeed, survived quite nicely with terms differing between Germany and the U.S.

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The preceding was not a legal opinion, and is not my employer's.
Original portions Copyright 1998 Bruce E. Hayden,all rights reserved
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Bruce E. Hayden                      bhayden[_at_]acm.org
Phoenix, Arizona                     bhayden[_at_]ieee.org
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