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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNZ 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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Ilsa
(61,675 posts)I hate this new agreement.
djean111
(14,255 posts)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)should be called the "Protect Mickey Mouse in Perpetuity Act." Disney has been the driving force behind all of them.