At 08:02 PM 12/3/00 -0800, Lizard wrote:
At 07:49 PM 12/3/2000, Danny Yee wrote:
Lizard wrote:
Really? Doesn't the Berne convention override national laws?
Probably, yes. Does that mean national copyright laws only apply to their own citizens/residents? What happens in the case of dual citizenship? And does place of publication come into it?
In most cases, national laws are altered to bring them 'in line' with treaties. (All treaties.) This has been an issue in the US, where the SC has ruled that a treaty cannot violate the constitution...or, rather, that it doesn't matter WHAT Congress agreed to, the Constitution will trump any laws passed to institute it.
I don't know if Australia's joined Berne (I assume yes) or how they've implemented it. Copyright laws, like most laws, only apply in whatever jurisdiction the government that writes them can get away with enforcing them. (For most countries, that's their national boundaries, plus occasionally expatriate citizens; for some, it's quite a bit less :-) Traditional Chinese copyright law only applied to civilization, i.e. Chinese-language books written by Chinese; stuff written by barbarians wasn't provided, so lots of my Taiwanese fellow students in college had much lower-cost versions of US-written textbooks, and that tradition was adapted to software on CD-ROMs at least until recently. In the US, that doesn't really affect copyright - the US Constitution doesn't go into any depth on the details of copyright law, so the US Congress was perfectly free to replace the previous details with Berne convention details. The one arguable exception is that the Const. authorizes grants of patents and copyrights for limited periods of time, and the current definitions of "limited" for copyright keep getting stretched; I think it's now "75 years after you're dead, or pretty much forever if you're a corporation". The general comment I've heard from lawyers is that copyright lengths will keep getting extended indefinitely to prevent Mickey Mouse's image from going off copyright.
That this might somehow change is a favorite paranoia of a loony right. (And, were it likely to occur, it would be a justifiable paranoia...it would allow the legislature to do an end-run around the Bill of Rights. For example, the US as it stands CANNOT ban 'hate speech' from US-hosted servers, even if Europe pressured them into signing a treaty to do so.)
No, but Congress does a pretty good job of passing Unconstitutional laws already :-( The treaty trick that's been going on, at least in the ReaganBushClinton years, is for the administration to haggle other countries into a treaty or lower-status-than-treaty agreement about something obnoxious, like drugs laws or crypto export restrictions, then bully Congress into implementing legislation for it "because we've already negotiated it with our major partners". Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639