From: Chad <innocentkiller(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Court: Congress can't put public domain back into
copyright
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Monday, April 6, 2009, 11:09 AM
On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 11:54 AM,
GerardM <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hoi,
This is of sufficient merit that I do it this way.
Thanks,
GerardM
Aan u verzonden door GerardM via Google Reader: Court:
Congress can't
put public domain back into copyright via Ars
Technica
door
nate(a)arstechnica.com
(Nate Anderson) op
6-4-09
In 1994, Congress jammed a batch of foreign books
and
movies back into
the copyright closet. They had previously fallen
into
the public domain
for a variety of technical reasons (the author
hadn't
renewed the
rights with the US Copyright Office, the authors
of
older works hadn't
included a copyright notice, etc.) and companies
and
individuals had
already started reusing the newly public works.
Did
Congress have the
right to put a stop to this activity by shoving
the
works back into
copyright? On Friday, a federal court said no.
"Traditional contours of copyright"
1994's Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) brought US
intellectual
property law in line with that of other
countries.
Section 514 of URAA
better aligned US copyright law with the
international
Berne
Convention, one of the earliest international
intellectual property
treaties. Though Berne had first been signed back
in
1886, the US
hadn't joined up until a century later, in
1988.
Click here to read the rest of this article
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The URL, for those wanting the rest of the story:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/court-congress-cant-put-pub…
While this is definitely encouraging news, we might want to hold off on changing our
evaluation of URAA restorations. The tenth circuit doesn't include Florida. I
don't know exactly what the next level of appeals would be, but we might want to wait
for a ruling that covers WMF servers before we act on it. I hope these restorations
continue to be struck down in the courts. It will be much simpler to determine copyright
if they go away.
Birgitte SB