Mickey Mouse and Batman will soon be public domain

Re:Mickey Mouse and Batman will soon be public domain by est31 on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @04:15PM (#18802421)

It's worth to point out that there is a great focus on Disney lobbying and Mickey mouse and so on, and of course these were major factors in getting the Sonny Bono passed, but originally one of the motivations was to harmonize the US copyright terms to the european ones which were already 70 years back when that law got passed. It's not the US where this term increase originated but europe.

Now in 2018 we are in a similar situation: again, europeans are passing new legislation that gives teeth to copyright by introducing censorship machines.

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Re:Mickey Mouse and Batman will soon be public domain by shmerl on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @04:53PM (#18802630)

All this "harmonization" is simply a corrupt trick, driven by the same Disney and Co.

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Re:Mickey Mouse and Batman will soon be public domain by chimeracoder on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @07:56PM (#18803437)

> All this "harmonization" is simply a corrupt trick, driven by the same Disney and Co.

Disney might be a force behind it, but it's literally true that Europe has been the leader in extending copyright terms, both the original extension last century, and then the most recent push as well.

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Re:Mickey Mouse and Batman will soon be public domain by fattire on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @12:23AM (#18804355)

The "harmonization" thing is a racket. In short, the corps pass the most restrictive copyright laws they can in whatever country they can pass it. Then they "harmonize" the other countries to that most restrictive policy, usually in the form of trade agreements which becomes domestic law everywhere. Rinse and repeat.

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Re:Mickey Mouse and Batman will soon be public domain by chimeracoder on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @01:03AM (#18804485)

> The "harmonization" thing is a racket. In short, the corps pass the most restrictive copyright laws they can in whatever country they can pass it. Then they "harmonize" the other countries to that most restrictive policy, usually in the form of trade agreements which becomes domestic law everywhere. Rinse and repeat.

Okay, based on the history and timeline of copyright law, that means you're saying that the corporations pass the most restrictive copyright laws that they can in Europe, and then US law is lengthened to harmonize with Europe through trade agreements (except most recently, where the US declined to participate in the trade agreement with Europe which would have adopted an even stricter copyright law).

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Re:Mickey Mouse and Batman will soon be public domain by fattire on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @01:24AM (#18804553)

And the TPP was another attempt to do this w/asian countries. Harmonization only goes in one direction, with the countries w/shorter copyright terms always bending to match the most lengthy country's terms.

https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp

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Re:Mickey Mouse and Batman will soon be public domain by incompatible on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @05:51PM (#18802923)

There are many works that are public domain in death+70 countries, but still copyrighted in the USA, thanks to its 95 year rule and URAA.

E.g., all works by authors who died in 1948 would now be public domain, but the US often requires that they were published before 1924.

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