I think this is a case where we should have some give and take.
Give him the extra 45 years copyright he's asking for in art/music/litriture, etc, and reduce the copyright on computer code by 45 years to 5 years.
I believe Iraq used to have a very enlightened copyright law. Their copyrights expired after 20 years IIRC.
Rory
On 2/15/08, Ciaran O'Riordan ciaran@fsfe.org wrote:
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/02/14/business/EU-FIN-EU-Music-Royalties...
As European Commissioner for Internal Market, McCreevy wants to extend copyright from 50 years to 95 years. His reason? People are now living longer.
You couldn't make it up. He says he wants to ensure that teen artists can rely on their work providing them a pension.
Trying to cast this as supporting the little guy, he says that it will support session musicians who played backing music.
He also talks about increasing the taxes on blank media. This is something I think we could agree to. There's lots of room for arguing about the numbers and how to distribute the collected taxes, but as systems go, this one doesn't harm people's rights to help themselves or to help others.
This is probably related to the EC's public consultation on "Creative Content Online", which has a deadline of Feb 29th: http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/other_actions/content_online/index_en.htm
I'm going to look into that early next week and will discuss it here. It might be something worth drafting an IFSO response to.
-- CiarĂ¡n O'Riordan (+32 477 36 44 19) \ Support Free Software and GNU/Linux http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \ Join FSFE's Fellowship: http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \ http://www.fsfe.org _______________________________________________ fsfe-ie@fsfeurope.org mailing list List information: http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/fsfe-ie Public archive: https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-ie