[Foundation-l] Copyright terms, again

Wed Nov 10 19:55:26 UTC 2010

Thank you Michael, this helps a lot.
I knew my question was silly but I didn't know the reason ;-).

Aubrey

2010/11/10 Michael Snow <wikipedia at frontier.com>

> 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
>
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