Fair Use and Statutory Reform in the Wake of Eldred
2004; UC Berkeley School of Law; Volume: 92; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3481352
ISSN1942-6542
AutoresWilliam Patry, Richard A. Posner,
Tópico(s)Intellectual Property Law
Resumo4 Works published before January 1, 1978, thus have a maximum possible 5 term of 95 years from the date of first publication, with the result that works first published between 1923 and 1977, which prior to the enactment of the CTEA would have begun to fall into the public domain in 1998, will now remain under copyright until the end of 2018 at the earliest and until 2072 at the latest (longer, if Congress extends the term of copyright again). 6 In the case of copyrighted works that are old and lack the commercial cachet of a Mickey Mouse or Rhapsody in Blue, it may be difficult to ascertain the owner of the copyright, and, once the owner is ascertained, the time and expense required to negotiate a license from him may be disproportionate to the value of the work to the would-be reproducer of it.The problem would be less serious were it not for the fact that the Copyright Act of 1976' had, as required by the Berne Convention, jettisoned the requirement of renewal after a relatively short fixed term. 8Not only did renewal provide notice of subsisting copyright, but experience with the requirement of renewal had established that works that have no commercial value are unlikely to be renewed, 9 thus increasing the size of the public domain.To dispense with the requirement of renewal and extend the
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