From: Andrew Sly <sly@victoria.tc.ca>

This [Berne] convention (first formulated in 1886) is the most wide-spread international copyright agreement.

It sets out a basic minimum copyright term of life+50.

Maybe they were wrong then as well. The term should decrease nowadays. The trend today is to have the old material available. Nobody gains if the old books are out-of-print. But we can also blame the authors who gives their soul... work for life+70+. If Berne and equivalents cannot be changed, then authors should sign only contracts which does not sell their soul. Has anyone statistics how books does sell? How many years the books sell with profit? Have we asked permission to make out-of-print and still copyrighted books available? That would save the publisher the trouble. Juhana -- http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev for developers of open source graphics software