[Foundation-l] [foundation-l] EU wants to increase musicians' and singers' copyright to 95 years

[geni]

On 14/02/2008, Benjamin Smith <benji.wiki at 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