[Foundation-l] Copyright terms, again

Wed Nov 10 19:51:22 UTC 2010

On 11/10/2010 11:27 AM, Andrea Zanni wrote:
> 2010/11/10 Milos Rancic<millosh at gmail.com>
>> We are discussing now at WM RS list about treating copyright terms for
>> Serbian authors.
>>
>> Terms are:
>> * Previous situation was 50 years after author's death.
>> * The new copyright term in Serbia came in 2004, introducing 70 years
>> after author's death.
>> * That means that works which authors died in 1953 or before is
>> something like CC-BY (as in any continental jurisdiction).
> Sorry for nitpicking, but I don't understand the 1953.
> If you have 50 years, it should be 1960 (or 1959, if it is 50+1)
> As well, if you have 70 years, it should be 1940 (or 1939, if it is 70+1,
> and this is the case of most european countries I think).
> Probably there's something related to the year of the new law coming in
> (2004), but I do not understand.
Presumably the copyright extension only applied to works still subject 
to copyright when it took effect. Therefore, authors who died in 1953 
would have had their Serbian copyrights expire before 2004, based on a 
"life-plus-50-years" term, and the works of authors who died in 1954 
would remain under copyright because the "life-plus-70-years" term took 
effect in 2004 before their Serbian copyrights expired. So basically no 
additional copyrights will expire for another 14 years.

Copyright extension has generally worked to create a massive dead period 
during which no works are added to the public domain. It's for similar 
reasons, albeit with a more complicated transition in its copyright 
regime, that the public domain in the US has been stuck at works created 
before 1923 for ages now.

--Michael Snow