On 14/02/2008, Benjamin Smith <benji.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This would indeed be a HUGE problem for Wikimedia
projects. I don't know
where our EU commissioner took that strange idea from, but it is totally
nonsense.
Record companies. They were looking for the same thing in the UK
recently. See the indentical arguments:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6913656.stm
I don't think there would be many artists
benefiting from this
; but for us, this would really be bad news. Finding records whose
author has died at least 95 years ago is very, very difficult. But I
guess we're not the only ones who would face this problem : probably
other free culture projects, but also internet sites, etc. could help us
oppose this.
We probably wouldn't consider them free due to the rights held by the
authors of the songs.
This seems to me to be part of a larger problem. As
with the US willing
to abolish rule of the shorter term, governments seem to be
strengthening their copyright rules, making projects such as Wikimedia's
face important problems.
Yes and no. Most countries appear to be settling on life +70 and
Israel's recent update actually liberalised the system.
--
geni