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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
The clear one - the US does not abide by Berne. (If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, paddles like a duck, quacks like a duck...it's a duck!)
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Having slept on it for several days, I'm thinking you are correct. Under current law, my country is, and will remain, totally in violation of Berne, for published books, until January 1, 2049. Then the first group of books pass into US public domain under a Life + formula. These would be the books published, in 1978, by authors who died the same year, and the Life + formula would be Life + 70.
The US wouldn't become totally Berne-compliant until the end of the 50th year after the death of the last author published before 1978. I'm wishing
Dorothy Straight a long healthy life. And there surely are pre-1978 authors even younger.
Someone could say that, by pointing out the limited ways in which US copyright can be shorter, for particular works, than that in Europe, I'm making the arguments of the next
Sonny Bono for him. But the way I look at it, despite his TV act, Sonny was an intelligent fellow, as will be his successors. They'll know this.
When you win that bet (the one about copyright term extension being pushed in the US Congress), I want to be ready with the facts. What goes on here
this year is just practice 
In the past, I posted that the US should go to Life + 50. But now I realize it is against international law because of multiple Free Trade Agreements with
this terrible language:
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Each Party shall provide that where the term of protection of a work (including a photographic work), performance, or phonogram is to be calculated:
(a) on the basis of the life of a natural person, the term shall be not less than the life of the author and 70 years after the author's death
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We thus agreed with Singapore (or forced on Singapore) that if we switch from the 95 year rule applying here until at least 2049, to a Life + something rule, the something has to be at least 70. But, hey, we got this in exchange:
Quote:
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Singapore shall allow the importation of chewing gum with therapeutic value
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The best thing for the US public domain, at least in the realm of the politically possible, is to keep to current law.