Chris Travers scripsit: > Is it just me or does Golan more or less read out of the Constitution > any functional requirements regarding copyright law and read the > copyright/patent clause basically as delegating unlimited power to > Congress in this regard?
Perhaps not *just* you, but certainly not me. It pretty much follows on Eldred, and whereas I think Eldred was wrongly decided because of its nose-in-the-tent effect, that's not happening here. Why should an Malaysian author receive no protection for his pre-1989 works in the U.S. because his government couldn't be bothered to sign an international copyright agreement? Copyright terms are insanely long and getting longer, but that does not mean they should be applied inequitably. These works only fell into the public domain for essentially technical reasons such as this. > I mean can Congress now start allowing telephone directories to be > copyrighted, since we no longer care about promoting the progress of > anything? The U.K. has the same "utilitarian" view of copyright we do, and yet phone directories are copyrightable there, because they have accepted the sweat-of-the-brow doctrine that our courts rejected. There is still plenty of scope for national law at the boundaries of copyright, even with near-universal Berne applicability. Note to David: You're right, but Larry and I were speaking of U.S. law only. -- You know, you haven't stopped talking John Cowan since I came here. You must have been http://www.ccil.org/~cowan vaccinated with a phonograph needle. co...@ccil.org --Rufus T. Firefly _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
