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#2I wonder if the period of 2009-2015 will have a bumper crop of content entering the public domain in Europe because so many young people died in the Second World War.
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#3How much does Canada's terms differ from the US?
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#4I wonder if the period of 2009-2015 will have a bumper crop of content entering the public domain in Europe because so many young people died in the Second World War.
Depends on the country: some have explicitly extended the copyrights for people who died in the war. For example, writers who died in active service of the French military have copyright for 100 rather than 70 years postmortem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mort_pour_la_France
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#5There are two competing interests here. First, Disney wants to keep control of Mickey Mouse cartoons, and it doesn't feel unreasonable at all that they should. Second, the rest of the stuff that is of little commercial value but of potential cultural value should be freed from uncertain or uninterested ownership.
The answer feels trivial to me, which means I'm probably missing something. Fixed term for a few decades from the creation of the work, maybe 30 years or 40 years. After that, you need to give a copy of the work to the Library of Congress, pay a nominal fee, and you get a 5 year extension. Take as many of those as you want.
This greatly simplifies everything. If you find a work that is older than the base term, you look it up in the copyright extension database. If it's in there, you can find out who owns the rights to it, and try to license rights. If it isn't in there, it's public domain. If somebody doesn't stay on the ball enough to renew their rights every five years, it probably isn't all that commercially valuable, and moves into the public domain.
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#6It saddens me a good deal that most of us can come up with very compelling arguments that un-restricting these works would benefit society, yet there seems there's very little we could do to make even a splash of change.
In fact, I gander the comments here will soon be filled with of "here's how I would do it" comments, none of which will make a mote of a difference.
What can we do, really?
It seems insane that the reasons given hold any merit beyond a money-grab. And while I may be a bit myopic here, the "motivates content-producers" feels flimsier still than monetary arguments.
Do most creative works really need even ten years of protection? Do you suppose Shakespeare would have made more plays or less if copyright existed in his day?
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#7There are two competing interests here. First, Disney wants to keep control of Mickey Mouse cartoons, and it doesn't feel unreasonable at all that they should. Second, the rest of the stuff that is of little commercial value but of potential cultural value should be freed from uncertain or uninterested ownership. The answer feels trivial to me, which means I'm probably missing something. Fixed term for a few decades…
That's a reasonable compromise, but copyright law for the 20th century was anything but about compromise. It was about ensuring big corporate content producers are given a default of "copyright forever" with no costs or effort on their part.
After all, it is society, not the content producers, that pays the price for having no culture returned to the society that birthed it. Right up until a company like Disney finds there is no more public domain for them to take ideas from. But, like most problems we Americans have, we'll let a future generation worry about that.
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#8To me the whole copyright extension issue is a good argument for justification of piracy. If the copyright industry side can just replace the social agreement (protection of works in exchange for them going public after a reasonable amount of time) with one they like more, why would it be immoral for the content consumers to to the same?
I'm talking about the ethical side, not legalities. The fact that said consumers lack the lobbying power only makes their actions illegal, not immoral.
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#9By 2019 it'll have been 49 years without a single work entering the public domain. And somehow I doubt that we'll even get there, the goalposts will likely get moved again before 2019.
And people wonder why there's such widespread disrespect for copyright.
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#10I wonder if the period of 2009-2015 will have a bumper crop of content entering the public domain in Europe because so many young people died in the Second World War.
Depends on the country: some have explicitly extended the copyrights for people who died in the war. For example, writers who died in active service of the French military have copyright for 100 rather than 70 years postmortem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mort_pour_la_France
This makes a lot of sense. By extending copyright even further after their deaths, it will incent these authors to create more posthumous works!