Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
...and would be glad it someone could point me to any original Berne Convention debate on why 50 years is the charm.
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I don't know of any reference but I think the 50 years at the Convention likely came about as a compromise among those attending taking into account their own preexisting post death terms.
But how those preexisting terms of the attendees came about I do not know, it may be as your hypothesis. In
A Short History of Copyright, Atkinson and Fitzgerald state:
When Jefferson proposed a copyright term of 19 years (the average period of life remaining to members of the US population in 1790) he pointed out that ‘ the earth belongs in usufruct to the living: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it’. He probably did not consider the possibility of the United States legislature providing for posthumous terms of such length that, for practical purposes, the duration of copyright might as well be stated to be infinite.
Of course, if 50 years is effectively infinity then 75 years is effectively infinity plus some, which is a new take on math and perhaps smacks of "lets just make sure".
