Buying Mein Kampf via the Net

[Bill Stewart]

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 at pobox.com
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