On 11/10/2010 11:27 AM, Andrea Zanni wrote: > 2010/11/10 Milos Rancic<mill...@gmail.com> >> We are discussing now at WM RS list about treating copyright terms for >> Serbian authors. >> >> Terms are: >> * Previous situation was 50 years after author's death. >> * The new copyright term in Serbia came in 2004, introducing 70 years >> after author's death. >> * That means that works which authors died in 1953 or before is >> something like CC-BY (as in any continental jurisdiction). > Sorry for nitpicking, but I don't understand the 1953. > If you have 50 years, it should be 1960 (or 1959, if it is 50+1) > As well, if you have 70 years, it should be 1940 (or 1939, if it is 70+1, > and this is the case of most european countries I think). > Probably there's something related to the year of the new law coming in > (2004), but I do not understand. Presumably the copyright extension only applied to works still subject to copyright when it took effect. Therefore, authors who died in 1953 would have had their Serbian copyrights expire before 2004, based on a "life-plus-50-years" term, and the works of authors who died in 1954 would remain under copyright because the "life-plus-70-years" term took effect in 2004 before their Serbian copyrights expired. So basically no additional copyrights will expire for another 14 years.
Copyright extension has generally worked to create a massive dead period during which no works are added to the public domain. It's for similar reasons, albeit with a more complicated transition in its copyright regime, that the public domain in the US has been stuck at works created before 1923 for ages now. --Michael Snow _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
