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

Penny Blog changing copyright information tags

Effective this month,  The Penny Blog will be changing the copyright information tags displayed on some poems. Until now, we have been using four tags:
1) A Creative Commons tag, for poems that are under copyright but licensed under a Creative Commons license;
2) "[All rights reserved by the author [or the author's estate] - used with permission]" for other poems that are under copyright in Canada;
3) "[All rights reserved by the author's estate - Please do not copy]" for poems that are in the public domain in Canada, but still under copyright somewhere in the world'
4) "[Poem is in the public domain]" for poems that are in the public domain worldwide.

In the interest of providing our readers with more accurate information, we have decided to replace the third tagline with the following 4 tags:
3) "[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]" for poems published in their authors' lifetime, the authors of which died at least 50 years before last December 31 (that is, for this year, on or before December 31, 1962);
4) "[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the European Union]" for poems published in their authors' lifetime, the authors of which died at least 70 years before last December 31 (that is, for this year, on or before December 31, 1942);
5) "[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States]" for poems originally published in 1922 or earlier, the authors of which died at least 50 years before last December 31; and
6) "[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]" for poems originally published in 1922 or earlier, the authors of which died at least 70 years before last December 31.

In addition, the existing public domain tagline (for poems published in their authors' lifetime, the authors of which died at least 100 years before last December 31) will be replaced with the tag:
7) "[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]".

This will allow the majority of our readers to tell whether a poem can be copied or not in their jurisdictions. Readers outside those jurisdictions will also be able to use those notices: in Australia or Russia, for example, in which the copyright term is identical with the European Union.

These tags will be added to poems in the future, based on our own best knowledge. In addition, we will be working backwards to add them to poems previously published on the blog. The new tags have already been added to all poems published in 2013.

Penny and I hope that readers of  The Penny Blog will find these new tags both informative and useful.

Notes on Copyright (3): Two loopholes

The main reason for another post in this series is to announce its termination. Since the last installment, I have found a new venue for my copyright articles, and for other planned poetry-related prose articles: a new wiki, Penny's Poetry Pages. While parts of the wiki are still under construction, we have put together an excellent series of articles on copyright law that you can read here. With that menu and banquet prepared,there is no reason to continue to dole out crumbs of information on the blog.

Nor did I ever want to get into the minutiae of countries' legislation; my best advice is to read the copyright laws of your own country. The rules I previously gave err deliberately on the side of caution. There are works on the blog that carry the "All rights reserved" warning, but which you may legally copy if you wish; if you wish, then I urge you to check the facts and law around the poem's copyright status where you live.

I will, though, conclude by pointing out two major loopholes, which drastically affect copyright status in the states whose acts contain them.

The first is called the "rule of the shorter term." This rule modifies the principle of national treatment, under which states give foreign authors the same protection in law as their own subjects. Basically the rule states that, if state A gives authors a shorter term of copyright protection than state B, state A's authors will enjoy only the same term, in state B, as that enjoyed in A.

For example, in the European Union, it is mandatory that all EU states protect copyright for the author's life plus 70 years. (That is why the United Kingdom extended its copyright in 1995.) At the same time, it is mandatory that all  EU states have a rule of the shorter term. That means that, because in Canada copyright protection runs for only an author's life plus 50 years, in the U.K. (and the rest of the EU) Canadian authors' works are copyrighted for only the author's life plus 50 years. Since all the Canadian works on   The Penny Blog  are in the public domain in Canada, they are all in the public domain in Europe.

The United States do not have a rule of the shorter term, alas. But they do have a significant loophole of their own, which I'll call here the "1922 rule."

In 1978 the U.S. extended copyright protection from 50 to 70 years' after an author's life, by establishing a 20-year "freeze"during which no copyrights would expire. However, the freeze was applied only to books published within the previous 75 years: from 1923 on. As for books published in 1922 or earlier, the 1998 act affirmed that all of them are in the public domain.

That makes a great deal of material available to otherwise excluded bloggers and others. For instance, Robert W. Service died in 1955, meaning that most of his books are copyrighted in the U.S. until 2025. However, the poetry of his that  The Penny Blog  has published -- from 1907's Songs of a Sourdough and 1916's Rhymes of a Red Cross Man - is all in the public domain in the U.S. thanks to the 1922 rule.

Notes on Copyright (2): Creative Commons

Last week I mentioned a couple of exceptions to the general rules of what may or may not be copied from The Betty Blog. This week I'd like to expand on the one that applies most often here: Creative Commons.

Creative Commons (CC) allows one to reproduce an item -- to copy someone else's copyrighted text, photos, sound or software files --  without even having to ask. CC poems, etc., are licensed, with permission to copy automatically granted subject to certain conditions (explained in more detail below).

Creative Commons poems can be recognized by the distinctive logo -- the copyright symbol, but with two C's inside the circle -- or the slogan "some rights reserved" (vs. the standard "all rights reserved") -- that they usually bear:


You may copy such a poem, even if it is by a living poet. The two poets who currently have CC-licensed poems on The Betty Blog are Ray Heinrich and George Dance. They incorporate some of the most common terms of a CC license: a copier (1) must give credit to the creator (both); or (2) may not copy for commercial purposes (Heinrich); (3) may not use the poem in a derivative work (Heinrich) or (4) if using it in that way, must license the derivative work in the same way (Dance). The explicit terms of each individual license are always given with the applicable poem.

Not all my poems bear CC licenses; but I have already licensed a dozen of them (including my translations of Heine and Rimbaud), with more (including my translations of Saint-Denys Garneau) to follow. My reasoning is simple: I want those poems to be copied so they'll reach more readers. My hope is that the more readers who become familiar with my work, the more there will be who'll want to read more of it.

There is quite a lot of CC-licensed material elsewhere on the Web, as well. Perhaps the most famous is the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. All of Wikipedia's text is licensed under CC, and those who write or even edit articles for it must agree to so license their contribution. The same foundation also maintains a free database of photographs and images, Wikimedia Commons, all of which is either public domain or CC-licensed. Anyone may use all or part of any Wikipedia article, or any Wikimedia Commons image, they like.

For instance, rather than give my own explanation of CC here, I could have simply copied in the "Creative Commons" article from Wikipedia. However, because this text is already too long, I'll content myself with giving a link instead for those who wish to learn more about CC. (Update, Feb. June 2011: Due to problems with Wikipedia, I am changing the link. Fortunately, one does not have to rely on only one source; another advantage of Creative Commons:)

http://www.wikinfo.org/index.php/Creative_Commons

A Note on Copyright

I've been asked a few questions about the copyright tags below the poems, the most common being, '[Where/how] Did you get permission to repost that poem?" and "[Where/how] Can I get permission [etc.]?" I hope this note will help make things a bit clearer.

A copyright is a legal privilege (a 'patent' or 'monopoly') that a state grants a work's creator, giving him or her the exclusive right to allow or forbid additional copies of the work. There is no copyright recognized in either natural or common law, and until the 18th century there was none in any country's statutory law, either. (The earliest example of copyright legislation was the Statute of Anne in Britain in 1709, which protected books for a maximum of 21 years.)

Accordingly, the terms and duration of copyright vary for different countries. Through the 20th century, though, there was a large degree of standardization brought about by international treaties. Nowadays all copyrights in printed works (with a known author) last for the author's lifetime plus x number of years ("Life+x"); but there is still considerable disagreement on the value of x.

While some countries' legislation sets the copyright term as low as Life+25 years, that is superseded for those countries that signed the 1886 Berne Convention. That treaty set a minimum copyright term of Life+50, while allowing signatory states to set  longer terms. At one extreme, then, are countries like Canada (where The Betty Blog is published) that adhere to that  Life+50 minimum. Almost all the poems published on The Betty Blog are public domain in Canada and those other countries (meaning their authors died more than 51 years ago). Those poems that are copyrighted in Canada are either by me, or published with the permission of another living author. The latter are indicated by the phrase, "All rights reserved by the author - Used with permission".

At the other extreme are Mexico (which has a term of Life+100) and Cote d'Ivoire (Life+99). If a work is copyrighted in either of those countries (but not in Canada), then it carries the tag line, "All rights reserved by the author's estate - Please do not copy." That does not mean the work is copyrighted in the country where you live, as 2010, depending on the year of an author's demise, could fall anywhere between Life+50 and Life+100 for that author.

If an author died at least 101 years ago, then the work is not at present copyrighted anywhere in the world. Such works are tagged, "Poem is in the public domain" -- meaning that anyone is free to reproduce them.

So: how do you determine if you may legally copy a "Please do not copy" poem? First, check the Poetry and Verse Archive, to find the date that the author died. (If there are no dates beside the author's name, then the author is still alive and the poem is therefore copyrighted; the one exception to that being Tom Bishop, who explicitly assigned all his "wordpiles" to the public domain.) Then, check the copyright term in your country as listed in this table. (Since the term generally runs to Dec. 31, add one year to be safe). If the years since the author died exceed the length of the copyright term, then the poem is in the public domain and you may copy it without permission.

For example: suppose you live in Australia, the U.K., or the U.S. Then the copyright term in your country is Life+70. You may copy poetry by W.B. Yeats (who died in 1939) or anyone who died before him. However, you may not copy poetry by John Gillespie Magee (who died in 1941), or anyone who outlived him, without permission from the current copyright holder.

There are exceptions --eg,  the "posthumously published" rule, the "rule of the shorter term," and "Creative Commons". The last two allow one to copy otherwise copyrighted works; so disregarding them will not put anyone in violation of the law. As for the first: To see if a poem was posthumously published, just compare the date on the poem with the death date given for the author.  So those exceptions can be set aside for now; though I intend to go into them, in particular the last, at another time.