No doubt that’s why Bono got bumped off, by those Creative Commons thugs! 
As an aside, the owner of the copyright to “Happy Birthday to You” asserts that in the U.S. the copyright does not expire until 2030. Indeed I rarely, if ever, hear it sung on TV.
I think it is likely that copyrights will keep on being retroactively extended which means they might not ever expire.
“Happy Birthday to You” is a poor example. Basically the company filed for the copyright even though there is ample evidence they had no right to and in fact a lawsuit is going on about this.
So while they vehemently enforce it and make tons of money off it, they shouldn’t even have the copyright to begin with.
I think this is unlikely. The last extension was made to reconcile our expiration dates with those of Europe, so that books in the two largest world markets stayed in sync. (This was not a perfect match because we started in such different places. Still, it made sense to extend protection for best fit.)
There was huge pressure to do so from copyright holders generally. I’m not seeing any of that pressure today. That’s true from the much maligned corporations as well. They seemingly recognize that trademark protection is better than copyright for most things. A trademarked Mickey Mouse is worth billions more to Disney than the coming loss of Steamboat Bill into the public domain.
We’ll see. In 2018, everything that was in copyright from 1923 will move into the public domain. That means that The Cowardly Lion of Oz, Tarzan and the Golden Lion, Bambi, a Life in the Woods, and* Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office* will go into the public domain. Will the evil Big Children’s Books Cartels swing into action and crush the dreams of people who want to make money of their dead bones? Tune in tomorrow.
I predict that the next time Mickey Mouse is ready to expire, Disney will try to make sure it doesn’t happen, by extending all copyrights.
The guy who started (with others) Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig was on a crusade to stop this. My sense is that he’s trying to come up with a formula that allows Disney to keep Mickey, but without applying en-masse to all copyrights, shutting down the public domain pretty much forever.
The last proposal of his that I saw I didn’t think would fly, requiring all copyrights to be extendable by filing, but that would require a lot of paperwork on the part of Disney et. al. My simpler suggestion would be to allow any copyright holder to periodically file a single extension, that applies to all copyrights held by that party, with a nominal fee (say, $100 for 5 years.) That’s after the current expiration date, which as mentioned above is consistent with other countries.
There is no international copyright law. Instead, there’s a morass of bilateral agreements between nations. Fortunately, though, a lot of work was done starting in the 70’s to harmonize the laws across most countries, so the result is that the laws are largely the same in most of the civilized world. Details do differ though, especially when it comes down to an actual lawsuit.
This happened for patents as well as copyrights. The last big holdout in commonizing patents was, IIRC, that US has always used a “first to invent” basis whereas the rest of the world has the much easier to administer (but arguably less fair) “first to file” basis. We gave up on that in 2013.
Any movie studio that negotiated an exclusive agreement to make a movie based on the children’s book may join the evil Big Children’s Books Cartels in their dream-crushing crusade.
I disagree thoroughly.
There has been no major international rule forcing uniform length of copyrights. E.g., Canada just months ago snuck in a new proposal to the budget to extend the period from 50 to 70 years. And I do mean snuck.
And that’s just one of many countries that doesn’t have exactly the same copyright terms as you seem to think.
The US has been, and will continue to be, completely and totally free to set the lengths of copyright protection any way it wants.
Furthermore, there is significant ramping up of lobbying pressure for yet another extension in the US Congress. This will happen regardless of what Europe and anyone else does.
This “keeping up with the rest of the world” concept is complete fiction.
I never said there was.
Obviously. You’re arguing against the imaginary quote that you put in my mouth.
Who is doing this lobbying? Name them. Specifically. Not “big evil corporations” but cites to specific companies lobbying Congress in this year of A.D. 2015.
Except that is what happened in 1976. The U.S. voluntarily chose to change copyright terms to match those of Europe. I didn’t say a word about Canada, a book market smaller than California. I think that their matching the bigger markets is an argument for my understanding of reality and against yours, but whatever.
I know this is a favorite subject for hatred and conspiracy theories. The reality as I understand it is that there is little to no support for extending copyright again. The likelihood of Congress doing so in the next few years is slightly higher than Jade Helm being a covert takeover of Texas - but not a whole lot higher.
And I am (yet again) proven correct.
And one of the arguments presented in the suit (although not the one that ultimately prevailed) was that the work had been published in the 1920s without any copyright notice, just like Night of the Living Dead, which brings the discussion full circle.