Canada Caves on Copyright in TPP: Commits to Longer Term
Quote:
New Zealand was able to negotiate a delayed implementation of the copyright term provision, with a shorter extension for the first 8 years. It also obtained a clear provision that does not make the change retroactive – anything in the public domain stays there. Malaysia also obtained a delay in the copyright term extension requirement.
Canada, on the other hand, simply caved.
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I'm not sure if linking here to Wikileaks is allowed, so I won't do it. But carefully reading the leaked, more or less final, text, my interpretation is not exactly the same as Michael Geist. And it is not exactly the same as the anonymous authors of the official New Zealand summaries. This is making we think that my readings may be wrong. Maybe you really need to be a lawyer to read this this stuff. But, for what is is worth, my reading is that there will be two years (not clear which ones) in which the works of authors who died in those years will go out of the New Zealand public domain. This is my interpretation of New Zealand getting Life + 60 for eight years, then going to Life + 70.
As for Canada's missing transition period, this seems so strange that I wonder if that paragraph didn't get Wikileaked.
I'd like to be for the TPP for reasons that don't have much to do with the subject area of Mobileread. But the negotiators -- especially the US negotiators -- don't seem to have worked at making it easy for someone like me. I don't think they understood how important it was to throw in provisions that would reduce the inevitable netizen opposition. Lowering trade barrriers didn't require messing with copyright terms.