"Harmonisation" at the European level led to a wider discrepancy last time round, with the Danes and French in particular making some extraordinarily progressive steps. It should therefore be disregarded as an effective logical argument for legislation.
I'm intrigued by the SCA's moves at the moment http://www.jisc.ac.uk/contentalliance in particular the In from the Cold project: http://www.slideshare.net/stuartsw4/sca-ipr-toolkit-presentation There's a grey area here where we at the BBC have to tread carefully- on one edge is the position of objective expertise (which may have a point of view on particular policies), and at the other is the lobbying group (which may itself be a-political). Clearly the BBC ought to steer clear of the latter position, but as rights holders, audience champions, audience enabler, and a major rights buyer it would feel something of an abrogation of responsibility for us not to make a major contribution to this debate. >From an archive management point of view, my personal (and i must stress this is purely personal) opinion is that rights term extension does nothing to aid investment in archive preservation, and that if rights are to be enforced it can only be done so under an await claim framework, possibly with a recordable media tariff funding model. From where I stand, an extension of the current model would make the preservation of many archives economically unviable, and we would loose them within a decade. ant (have spent the last six years working on digitising and storing the BBC's archive) On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 7:56 PM, Rob Myers <r...@robmyers.org> wrote: > > In fact technically changing all copyright durations to be 1 year > > would also harmonise everything.=20 > > Berne means copyrights have to be at least 50 years. > > > There is no logical reason why you > > can only harmonise upwards and not downwards. > > Governments don't want to strip people of their "property", however > worthless it may be. > > I agree with you in principle though. > > - Rob. > > -- Ant Miller tel: 07709 265961 email: ant.mil...@gmail.com
