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

[John Howkins]

There is no bilateral agreement between the EU and USA to have similar law.
However, both the EU and USA (and most other countries) are members of
international treaties (of which the latest is TRIPS) and they share a
common requirement to obey those treaties' rules.  The USA and EU seek to
implement their treaty commitments to maximise their own interests.
The result of all this is that the EU says they have to maximise upwards to
match the USA and the USA says they have to maximise upwards to match the EU
and both say everyone else (India and Guatemala come to mind) should
maximise upwards to ...etc
John


On 24/12/04 2:33 pm, "Richard Stallman" <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

>    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.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Upd-discuss mailing list
> Upd-discuss@lists.essential.org
> http://lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/upd-discuss