[Upd-discuss] Question regarding European Copyright law and U.S. law

[Richard Stallman]

     One issue kept coming up in my research... the extension was
     necessary to put us (the U.S.) in line with Europe's copyright
     laws.

This argument was widely stated, but it is completely fallacious.  The
US does not need to have the same copyright laws as Europe or any
other place.  The publishers invented this fictitious need as an
excuse for the change they wanted.

     Can someone explain what this means? In what way(s) did it put us
     in line? Was it simply the length of the extension?

Yes, exactly.

But this law did not in fact make the US law the same as European law.
It extended the copyright term by 20 years for both author-copyright
works and works made for hire.

Before the law, in one of those two cases (I forget which one) the
European copyright term was 20 years longer than the US copyright term.  In
the other case, Europe and the US had the same copyright term.

Since the law extended US copyright in both of these cases, it made
Europe and the US equal in the case where they were different, and
different in the case where they were equal.  This shows that the
claim of a need for "harmony" was insincere.