Glyn Moody: #CopyrightWeek – Don’t Let Upload Filters Undermine the Public Domain – Copybuzz

"When modern copyright was created in 1710 by Great Britain‘s Statute of Anne, something remarkable happened that is often overlooked: as well as codifying copyright as we now know it, it also brought into being its negation. Before the Statute of Anne, publishers held a form of eternal copyright on the books they placed in the Stationers’ Register. By granting authors a time-limited government-enforced monopoly – 14 years by default, with an optional extension to a maximum of 28 years – the new law recognised that there was a moment when copyright ceased to apply; it therefore confirmed that works once published could later exist in a state without any monopoly protection....

Precisely the same is likely to happen for works that draw on the public domain if the EU’s proposed upload filters are imposed on Internet sites. If a work uses public domain materials, it could easily be blocked because of pre-existing claims by companies that have produced their own works using the same sources...."