[Fsfe-ie] McCreevy wants 95 year copyright

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/02/14/business/EU-FIN-EU-Music-Royalties.php

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.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan (+32 477 36 44 19) \ Support Free Software and GNU/Linux
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