From: Victor Rehorst (victor_at_newtontalk.net)
Date: Mon Apr 26 2004 - 09:38:26 PDT
Another thread about copyright... you can search in the archives and find tons
of this stuff.
Jeffrey McMurtrie wrote:
> The copyright is expired as Tony noted (at least here in Canada and the
> USA.) You can find the text of 1984 all over the web.
Not true for the USA. They've reached back in time and extended the copyright
terms for all works produced after 192? to 70 years after the creator's
(author's, whatever's) death. This is also known as the "Mickey Mouse" law,
since Disney was one of the major lobbyists for it. Since Walt Disney is
credited as the creator of many Disney characters, and he died in 1966, they
don't want their creations to pass into the public domain.
"1984" was published in 1948 and Orwell died in 1950. Under copyright law in
Canada the copyright expires at the end of the 50th year after the author's
death. Therefore in Canada all of Orwell's works are in the public domain.
(Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, it's just that reading Acts of
Parliament doesn't bug me).
So I guess this means that I could put "1984" on UNNA, legally. Except that
only two of our servers are in Canada. Two others are in the USA and one is
in Germany. The mirrors all "sync" off of the main server in Canada, so if I
added it it would automatically propagate and I'd be breaking the law. Wheee!
Otherwise I'd have to exclude it from the syncing, which would be a PITA.
-------------
Footnote 1: any country that signed the Berne convention in 1928 (virtually
all of them) must extend the same copyright protection to foreign authors as
they do to their own citizens. A notable exception to this Taiwan, since it
is not-really-a-country but not-really-China, and never signed the Berne
convention, they are not required to protect foreign copyrights.
Footnote 2: In Canada, these terms may change soon as some misguided federal
minister is going to destroy the 5-ish years we have spent doing a public
review of copyright laws and try to push through an act to "protect" us from
"pirates" and such junk.
Footnote 3: Translations of works into other languages are considered to be
original. So I'd love to make Newton books of Kafka, but they'd have to be in
the original German, because the original English translators haven't been
dead for long enough yet. I'll have to wait until 2009 to put the original
Muir translations of Kafka on my Newton (legally).
-- Victor Rehorst - victor_at_newtontalk.net - chuma_at_chuma.org NewtonTalk list administrator - http://www.newtontalk.net Will the last person to leave the platform please turn off the backlight? -- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
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