Jon Ingram writes:
Yes. The move from life+50 to life+70 in the UK was retroactive, and brought 20 years worth of material back into the copy-restricted realm from the public domain.
Which provisions of the UK Act operate to make the term retroactive? By my reading of the provisions of the Act which I have cited, it expressly does NOT make it retroactive.
Note, however, that if a non-UK work becomes public domain in its country of origin, then UK law states that it is also public domain in the UK... a common provision in copyright law in many countries,
In the EU, yes. "The rule of the lesser term." It's mandated by the EU's garbage copyright directive, as a pressure tactic to try and get the rest of the world to "harmonize". It's not all that common in the non-EU countries I've looked at, though.
On 9/16/06, Wallace J.McLean <ag737@freenet.carleton.ca> wrote:
Jon Ingram writes:
Yes. The move from life+50 to life+70 in the UK was retroactive, and brought 20 years worth of material back into the copy-restricted realm from the public domain.
Which provisions of the UK Act operate to make the term retroactive? By my reading of the provisions of the Act which I have cited, it expressly does NOT make it retroactive.
I don't claim to be a lawyer (in fact I am very happy that I'm not one!), but I believe the general principle is that the EU copyright directive has primacy over the laws in individual countries, and this basically revived copyright in all EU countries if the work was currently in copyright in *any* EU country at the time of the directive -- this means Germany's life+70 infected the rest of us. Similarly, the UK's 50-year term of protection for sound recordings retroactively infected the rest of the EU, most of which previously had much shorter terms. Of course, being law, and law involving different countries, it's never simple enough to be able to summarise in a couple of sentences. I've been hunting for some more detailed articles on the consequences of the EU copyright harmonization, and have found the following quite useful: Zombie and Once-Dead Works: Copyright Retroactivity After the E.C. Term Directive (2000) by Paul Edward Geller http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgeller/ecterm.htm "In the fall of 1993, the E.C. adopted the Term Directive. Against the deadline of mid-1995, E.C. countries enacted legislation to implement the Term Directive. Article 1 of this Term Directive required E.C. countries to extend the normal copyright term of life plus 50 years to life plus 70 years; article 3 also required that related or neighboring rights normally last 50 years... As of the deadline of mid-1995, article 10 of the Term Directive was retroactively to bring protection to many works and media productions that either apparently or effectively had fallen into the public domain."
In the EU, yes. "The rule of the lesser term." It's mandated by the EU's garbage copyright directive, as a pressure tactic to try and get the rest of the world to "harmonize".
The rule of the lesser or shorter term is from the Berne Convension, not from the EU harmonization directive, and I would therefore expect it to be followed by most countries in the world. Another quote from the article I refer to above: "However, under the Berne Convention, the Berne rule of the shorter term may apply to works of foreign origin. This rule allows a Berne country to cut off protection of a foreign Berne work at the end of the shorter of two so-called measuring terms: either that applicable in the country where protection is claimed ... or that applicable in the country of origin." -- Jon Ingram
participants (2)
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Jon Ingram -
Wallace J.McLean