Wallace McLean has posted his annual celebration of public domain day, listing dozens of authors whose work entered into the public domain in Canada on New Year’s Day. Notable names this year include Nobel Prize winners William Faulkner and Herman Hesse as well as poet e.e. cummings. The list is […]
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The TPP Impact on New Zealand’s Public Domain
Gareth Hughes, a New Zealand Green Party MP, has posted on the impact of extending the term of copyright in New Zealand from life plus 50 years to life plus 70 years as demanded by the Trans Pacific Partnership. Hughes calls attention to many leading NZ works that would be […]
James Joyce and the Public Domain
The New Yorker examines the entry of James Joyce’s works into the public domain in Europe (Joyce entered the public domain in Canada twenty years ago), demonstrating why the issue is about far more than free access to books.
TPP’s Other Copyright Term Extension: Protection of Sound Recordings Would Nearly Double in Duration
Economic evidence indicates that the length of protection for copyright works already far exceeds the incentives required to invest in new works. Boldrin and Levine estimate that the optimal length of copyright is at most seven years. Posner and Landes, eminent legal economists in the field, argue that the extra incentives to create as a result of term extension are likely to be very small beyond a term of 25 years. Furthermore, it is not clear that extending term from 50 years to 70 or 95 years would remedy the unequal treatment of performers and producers from composers, who benefit from life plus 70 years protection. This is because it is not clear that extension of term would benefit musicians and performers very much in practice. The CIPIL report that the Review commissioned states that: “most people seem to assume that any extended term would go to record companies rather than performers: either because the record company already owns the copyright or because the performer will, as a standard term of a recording agreement, have purported to assign any extended term that might be created to the copyright holderâ€.
Despite the evidence, the term of sound recordings was extended in the UK last year. Canada has thus far been spared a lengthy debate over the issue since a similar extension clearly holds little benefit to Canadians with the overwhelming majority of incremental revenues going to U.S. record labels.
Supreme Court of Canada on the Importance of the Public Domain
With the recent attention on the term of copyright in Canada, Meera Nair reminds readers about recent Supreme Court of Canada comments on the importance of the public domain: In 2002, Justice Binne, writing for the majority in Théberge v. Galerie d’Art du Petit Champlain inc., stated: “Excessive control by […]