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n2doc

(47,953 posts)
Tue Oct 6, 2015, 02:52 PM Oct 2015

NZ government leaks on TPP: copyright terms will go to life plus 70 years

An official New Zealand government bulletin on yesterday's conclusion of the still-secret Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement negotiations accidentally confirmed something we all believed was in there all along: an extension of copyright terms to match the USA's bizarre, evidence-free, century-plus terms.

According to the bulletin, the TPP signatories will have to retroactively extend their copyright terms, giving longer copyrights to works that were created before the agreement was struck, and taking works out of the public domain and putting them back into copyright's restrictions.

This is likely to bite even the USA in the ass, as there are many works that are in the public domain because they were not registered with the Copyright Office (prior to the abolition of the registration requirement in 1976) or didn't have their copyrights renewed.

New works that were derived from these public domain works will become, at the stroke of a pen, illegal. That means that living, working artists will have their new works banned so that dead artists' descendants can try their hand at the extremely unlikely business of breathing economic life into titles that were created generations ago. Even where no descendants are in evidence to exploit the works (as is the case with more than 90% of copyrighted works today, which have no discernible rightsholders), new works based on those (currently public domain) orphan works will become illegal.

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NZ government leaks on TPP: copyright terms will go to life plus 70 years (Original Post) n2doc Oct 2015 OP
This is insane. Ilsa Oct 2015 #1
No votes or support for anyone who shilled for or votes for the "trade agreements". djean111 Oct 2015 #2
Every revision to copyright law in the last 50 years hifiguy Oct 2015 #3
 

djean111

(14,255 posts)
2. No votes or support for anyone who shilled for or votes for the "trade agreements".
Tue Oct 6, 2015, 02:59 PM
Oct 2015

That includes Fast Track. And hey! Obama just said it is perfectly fine to not vote for someone over a single issue, right? Obama does not get to pick my issue.

 

hifiguy

(33,688 posts)
3. Every revision to copyright law in the last 50 years
Tue Oct 6, 2015, 03:34 PM
Oct 2015

should be called the "Protect Mickey Mouse in Perpetuity Act." Disney has been the driving force behind all of them.

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