🚀 go-pugleaf

On 9 Aug 2000 11:05:03 GMT, Lee Hollaar <hollaar@faith.cs.utah.edu> wrote:
>>Yeah, well, the biggest misunderstanding of all is that
>>extending copyright duration retroactively is somehow
>>beneficial.  Let's start with the big misunderstandings and then
>>work our way down to the trivial and obscure ones.
>
>Well, you can always start with Congress' explaination, found in
>House Report 105-452 which accompanied the bill --
>
>    The United States has international obligations to protect copyrights as
>    well.  The Berne Convention, originally drafted in 1886, is the
>    international treaty which mandates basic copyright protection rules for
>    its member countries.

This is at best ingenuous. Firstly the USA is rather selective about fulfilling
its treaty obligations -- for example it still owes the UN billions of dollars.
Secondly, the Berne Convention doesn't oblige the USA to increase copyright
duration.

>    In 1995, the European Union extended the copyright term for all of its
>    member states from life of the author plus fifty years to life of the
>    author plus seventy years.  As the world leader in the export of
>    intellectual property, this has profound effects for the United States
>    if it does not extend copyright term as well.
>
>    European Union countries, which are huge markets for U.S. intellectual
>    property, would not have to provide twenty years of copyright protection
>    to U.S. works and the U.S. would lose millions of dollars in export
>    revenues.  Extending copyright term to life of the author plus seventy
>    years means that U.S. works will generally be protected for the same
>    amount of time as works created by European Union authors. Therefore, the
>    United States will ensure that profits generated from the sale of
>    U.S. intellectual property abroad will come back to the United States.

If true, this is a valid reason. (It also means that the people running the
EU are not doing their jobs properly, but that's another issue).

>    Extending copyright protection will be an incentive for U.S. authors to
>    continue using their creativity to produce works,

This is only true for new works.

>    and provide copyright
>    owners generally with the incentive to restore older works and further
>    disseminate them to the public.

This is silly, as can be proven by the fact that out-of-copyright works for
which there is any significant interest aree also available to the public.
And in the age of the Internet, people don't need a publishing industry to
intermediate between them and old creative works; they can publish them
themselves.

>    Authors will be able to pass along to
>    their children and grandchildren the financial benefits of their works.

Irrelevant to the good of the country; the children/grandchildren gain, but
only by the amount that other people pay them, so there is no net gain, and
society as a whole loses, by the frictional costs relating to payment
mechanisms of for-cost distribution.

The morality of this law is identical to the morality of the law enacted after
the Bourbon restoration in France, that forced peasants to give money to
the newly restored aristocracy.

Why should one person, by an accident of birth, be entitled to more rights
and priviledges than another person? Does the US Declaration of Independence
say "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created 
unequal, and as a consequence should be given unequal rights"?

-- 
*****[ Phil Hunt ]*****
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