On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 9:22 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
I don't see anything in the TPP requiring retroactive application of copyright terms. We'll have to wait and see how the various countries choose to apply the new terms. Applying terms retroactively is uncommon, but possible. We also have no idea when these countries are actually going to apply the new terms.
I don't think it's uncommon, the US is the odd one out on this (or almost out, since in the end it did apply Berne terms retroactively). For example the EU Copyright Directive prescribes a death + 70 copyright term so countries joining the EU restore copyright to all works for which they had shorter protection. International copyright treaties tend to be retroactive by default; "works shall be protected for X years after the death of the author" applies to all works, whether they are in the public domain currently or not.
From the regulator's point of view this is reasonable; the point of these
treaties is harmonization of the law, and harmonizing the protection term of one group of works but leaving another group protected in some countries and unprotected in others doesn't really make sense. The alternative would be a rule of the shorter term, but the US does not have that, and they are the driving force behind TPP, so...