Trade deal sneaks in 20-year copyright extension

Unfortunately, this is not an April Fool's joke; I blogged about it on my politics blog, GDs Political Animal, yesterday. From the post:

"The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement USMCA, touted by US president Donald Trump as a 'great deal for all three countries', is a reorganisation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and will shape trade and IP relations between the three countries for years to come....

 "In relation to copyright, Paul Smith, senior partner at Smiths IP, remarks that under USMCA, the extension of the copyright terms from the life of the author +50 years will become the life of the author +70 years.... "
http://gdspoliticalanimal.blogspot.com/2019/03/canadian-copyright-extension-buried-in.html

As I commented about it on Usenet today: "It's terrible news for Penny's Poetry Blog. I founded the blog ... to publish public domain poetry, with an eye on works that were p.d. in Canada but not in the U.S. or UK - so there'd be unique poetry on the site. (In March, eg, I blogged Robert Frost's 'Desert Places' and Yvor Winters' 'Moonlight Alert.') If the change is retroactive, like the UK copyright extension, all of that work will have to come off the blog.

 "That's unlikely, as a retroactive criminalization would violate Section 11 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But even if it's only done by a 20-year extension on copyrighted works, the way it was done in the U.S., that will still hurt. All the works by authors who died after 1968 - from Ezra Pound to Jack Kerouac - will still be in copyright when I'm 86!...

 "The USMCA comes up for ratification in Congress this spring. So far Parliament hasn't scheduled a debate, the government telling the U.S. it won't until the Trump tariffs on our steel and aluminum come off; and if it's not passed by June, it won't be until after the October election - so there's some time to get something done."

 I would like to make stopping (or at least minimizing the damage of) this copyright extension, my priority over the spring. If anyone has any ideas of how to proceed, or contacts with organizations that also oppose the copyright extension, please forward them to me; either by commenting here or by contacting me at georgedance04@yahoo.ca.

Thank you for your support.

Sincerely
George J. Dance