Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
After all, that's how Berne got extended from Life + 50 to Life + 70 in the first place.
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Actually, the Berne Convention is still 'only' lifetime+50 years. Otherwise Canada couldn't be party to it.
The lifetime+70 started to gain ground when the EU standardised its copyright lengths in the mid 1980s. The USA joined in a decade later, and is now compelling other countries to also sign up to lifetime+70.
It's a total distortion of copyright as an economic incentive to production. The longer of 50 years and life is /more/ than enough to allow creators to gain from their works.
The interesting thing is that it's not the royalty to the author that keeps prices of in-copyright books high. It's the monopoly of the publisher. Note that for a 7 UKP paperback at most 0.7 UKP goes to the author. And yet "Wordsworth Classics" sell at 2 UKP and still make a profit for the publisher.