Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Sounds right.
My root mistake may have been failing to see that if you go from Life + 50 to Life + 70, there have to be twenty years where there is no public domain day for books subject to Life + copyright. Delaying some of those twenty public-domainless years, as the agreement does (in 3 different patterns!) for New Zealand, Malaysia, and Vietnam doesn't mean that those countries got a better or worse deal than than the three currently Life + 50 countries (Canada, Japan, and Brunei) whose readers will face all twenty bad years immediately on ratification.
(EDITED: Rereading, I think that the first sentence of the paragraph immediately above is true. But does the claim in the next sentence follow from the first?)
It would be interesting to know why the various countries wound up with the individualized terms they did.
This gets to whether or not the 6,000 page agreement, taken as a whole, is worth ratifying. Since it took me days to understand just one of the pages (and it's possible I'm still not there), this is daunting. So maybe I have to defer to expert opinion. But, the expert opinion you linked to in #67, with its repeated use of the word "massive" in describing flaws, was too fevered for me to accord it surface credibility. I find this kind of sentence particularly dubious:
Of course, he could be right. But it could also be that the author's quick read of the 6,000 pages was influenced by preconceptions.
Here is pro and con that has a better feel to me:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passc...ore-you-decide
http://www.commondreams.org/views/20...imple-yes-vote |
Of course, the issue is why would you pass a 6000 page treaty that is difficult to understand, especially after it had been negotiated in secret over the space of years? That never turns out well.