TPP's Copyright Trap | Electronic Frontier Foundation

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-11-15

Summary:

"One of the defining battles in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations is whether its signatory countries will standardize copyright terms lengths to a minimum term of the life of the author plus 70 years. This would effectively set the maximum duration of copyright holders' monopoly rights to over 140 years. This is the demand from rightsholder groups such as the RIAA and MPAA who advise the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). A precedent for such a provision has been set in previous Free Trade Agreements with countries like Australia and Singapore. But the world's leading economists agree that such an extraordinary long copyright term makes no sense. It provides no further incentive for creation and provides little additional income to creators or their families—except for a very small, successful minority. The ratcheting upward of copyright terms comes at a time when Internet and other digital technologies have spurred a revitalization of the world's public domain: the treasury of works that has passed out of copyright. Thanks to digital distribution, public domain material is now globally available for almost zero cost for study, enjoyment and re-use. Repeated copyright term extensions means decades of copyrighted material that might otherwise have passed into this universal library are now trapped in deteriorating analog formats. The extension of copyright term is opposed by law professors, tech companies, non-profits, authors' associations and users. The additional 20 years of copyright protection amounts to a misappropriation from the public domain. It inhibits the creation of new works that build upon the past and exacerbates the orphan works problem. Even the U.S. Copyright Office has indicated that the copyright term may be too long, and proposed options for mitigating its deleterious effects ..."

Link:

https://www.eff.org/issues/tpps-copyright-trap

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.copyright oa.licensing oa.orphans oa.tpp oa.treaties oa.law oa.policies oa.libre

Date tagged:

11/15/2015, 09:21

Date published:

11/15/2015, 04:21