Re: Re: Amazon remotely deletes 1984

On Sat, 25 Jul 2009, Erica Frank wrote:

> It's life-plus for published works. Unpublished works are 
> covered by different laws. And I wasn't just talking about 
> length of rights, but copyright protections--they're stronger 
> for unpublished works.

I'm fairly certain that in Canada, this is NOT the case (except 
for some transitional stuff... see later). It's life plus 50 
across the board for . My certainty comes from a situation a few 
years back (2003) when there was an attempt to amend copyright to 
extend protections on unpublished works beyond the protection for 
published works.

Since it was a change in law, it would affect everyone. But the 
perception was that the driver behind it was the owners of Lucy 
Maud Montgomery's unpublished diaries (think "Anne of Green 
Gables"), which had never been published. There apparently had 
been concerns that some of the contents might refer to still 
living persons, and thus the material should be held longer 
before publishing; without this change, the materials would 
enter the public domain on January 1st, 2004.

For those who look up LMM, her date of death, and attempt to do 
the math - at one time, unpublished works had perpetual 
protection until publication. This was modified in 1997, but the 
drop to "life+50" was gradually rolled in by having some already 
dead authors have set "public domain entry dates" in the future, 
rather than have all these unpublished works suddenly dropped 
into the public domain without any chance for publishing.

The primary objection to the proposed change was that the 
government was re-complicating a previously simplified provision, 
apparently with the interests of a single stakeholder in mind, 
but without any consideration of the effects on many others.

http://www.cla.ca/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Copyright_Documents&Template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=4559

... has an excellent summary -- except that it predates 
attempting to actually change the Copyright Act. You can see from 
some of internal tables that some of the transition periods are 
still running. Rules won't be just "life+50" across the 
board until 2049 - but we are least on a clock to get there.

Other refs:

http://www.eldred.cc/eablog/000110.html
http://lists.caj.ca/pipermail/caj-list/2003-May/015942.html
http://www.lessig.org/blog/2003/06/people_having_an_effect.html


: chris smith ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
: nihil tam munitum quod non expugnari pecunia possit - cicero :


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