[pp.int.general] Fwd: <nettime> Richard Stallman: How the Swedish Pirate Party Platform Backfires on Free Software

[Eric Priezkalns]

On 29 Jul 2009, at 15:53, Philip Hunt wrote:
>
> And make no mistake, Berne is a bad treaty that needs to be abolished.
> A copyright term of life plus 50 years is far too long.

Forgive the pedantry, but I think you mean that the convention needs  
to be reformed or superseded, not abolished.  The Berne convention was  
not all bad, and brought about some improvements over the pre-existing  
national laws.  For example, it oriented the rights to be more in  
favour of creators, and less focused on the interests of publishers.   
One aspect of this was that creators had rights simply as a result of  
creating, without needing to register their work in order to secure  
those rights.  Abolition implies reverting to a hotchpotch of national  
laws and bilateral treaties, and that may have lots of undesirable  
consequences.  One challenge for this fledgling international movement  
is working out, amongst ourselves, what a Berne mk.2 would look like.

Best regards,

Eric

Eric Priezkalns
Treasurer
Pirate Party UK
+44 7958 467273
treasurer at pirateparty.org.uk




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