Question

) 3. Currently, the term of copyright in the US is the creator’s life plus 70 years. Suppose that the term of copyright was shortened to ten years after the date of creation of the copyrighted work. List one social cost and one social benefit of this policy.

Answer 1

The Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States. It is one of several acts extending the terms of copyrights the Copyright Act of 1976, copyright would last for the life of the author plus 50 years, or 75 years for a work of corporate authorship. The 1976 Act also increased the extension term for works copyrighted before 1978 that had not already entered the public domain from 28 years to 47 years, giving a total term of 75 years

Under the international Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886, the signatory countries are required to provide copyright protection for a minimum term of the life of the author plus fifty years. Additionally, they are permitted to provide for a longer term of protection. The Berne Convention did not come into force for the United States until it was ratified on March 1, 1989, but the U.S. had previously provided for the minimum copyright term the convention required in the Copyright Act of 1976.

After the United States' accession to the Berne convention, a number of copyright owners successfully lobbied the U.S. Congress for another extension of the term of copyright, to provide for the same term of protection that exists in Europe. Since the 1993 Directive on harmonising the term of copyright protection, member states of the European Union implemented protection for a term of the author's life plus seventy years.

The act was named in memory of the late Congressman Sonny Bono, who died nine months before the act became law: he had previously been one of twelve sponsors of a similar bill.

House members sympathetic to restaurant and bar owners, who were upset over ASCAP and BMI licensing practices, almost derailed the Act. As a result, the bill was amended to include the Fairness in Music Licensing Act, which exempted smaller establishments from needing a public performance license to play music

Both houses of the United States Congress passed the act as Public Law 105-298 with a voice vote.President Bill Clinton signed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 on October 27, 1998.

As a result of the 1976 and 1998 extensions, a small number of renewed works, within a span of 40 years, entered public domain

The 1998 Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever end is earlier.Copyright protection for works published before January 1, 1978, was increased by 20 years to a total of 95 years from their publication date

As of 2019, copyright has expired for all works published in the United States before 1924. In other words, if the work was published in the U.S. before January 1, 1924, you are free to use it in the U.S. without permission. These rules and dates apply regardless of whether the work was created by an individual author, a group of authors, or an employee (a work made for hire).
Because of legislation passed in 1998, no new works fell into the public domain between 1998 and 2018 due to expiration. In 2019, works published in 1923 expired. In 2020, works published in 1924 will expire, and so on.
For works published after 1977, if the work was written by a single author, the copyright will not expire until 70 years after the author’s death. If a work was written by several authors and published after 1977, it will not expire until 70 years after the last surviving author dies

Copyright protection always expires at the end of the calendar year of the year it’s set to expire. In other words, the last day of copyright protection for any work is December 31. For example, if an author of a work died on June 1, 2000, protection of the works would continue through December 31, 2070.

The term “public domain” refers to creative materials that are not protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright, trademark, or patent laws. The public owns these works, not an individual author or artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission, but no one can ever own it.

An important wrinkle to understand about public domain material is that, while each work belongs to the public, collections of public domain works may be protected by copyright. If, for example, someone has collected public domain images in a book or on a website, the collection as a whole may be protectable even though individual images are not. You are free to copy and use individual images but copying and distributing the complete collection may infringe what is known as the “collective works” copyright. Collections of public domain material will be protected if the person who created it has used creativity in the choices and organization of the public domain material. This usually involves some unique selection process, for example, a poetry scholar compiling a book.

There are four common ways that works arrive in the public domain:

• the copyright has expired
• the copyright owner failed to follow copyright renewal rules
• the copyright owner deliberately places it in the public domain, known as “dedication,” or
• copyright law does not protect this type of work.