Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
While I would not be happy to see anything that was once in the public domain go back into copyright, I can see the usefulness of having an international standard. As it is, it's a major headache for sites like MobileRead that have their own public domain libraries to continually ensure the materials in their libraries don't run afoul of the laws of more than one country.
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We don't have the exact terms of the piece of legislation, though. It could be just another attempt by Disney to stop their eventual loss of copyright over Mickey Mouse.
The other problem is, the Berne Convention seems to have been written to encourage bad-faith patents and copyrights. I've heard talk that someone in Australia managed to secure a patent on the wheel, for example, and might be demanding royalties in the not-too-distant future. If that's the case, then we need to be seriously re-examining what the real purpose of the treaty is.