Home

QUESTION: Copyright and new legislation

Submitted by Anonymooose on Sun, 02/07/2010 - 10:41am
question / pregunta: 

Is there any new legislation about the USA's copyright laws and is anyone trying to change them so they aren't so restrictive and vague? Such as rescinding the Sonny Bono Act? I would like to see the length of copyright shortened - say perhaps to 20 years. That should be long enough for anyone.

Answers

Answer posted by: Cyberlibrarian

If you want a quick overview of the question up to this point, the following website, which is maintained by a law professor, is succint and informative and is consonant with your perspective, i.e. copyright should be shorter.

http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/OpposingCopyrightExtension/

Answer posted by: jbeek

There are several pieces to the puzzle that is the copyright laws of the US. There seems to be more action recently regarding the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which deals with intellectual property in the digital environment, than there is regarding the "Sonny Bono Act," the Copyright Term Extension Act. There was a bill attempting to amend the latter in 2005 which stalled out in committee. See info here:
http://www.aallnet.org/committee/copyright/pages/issues/ctea.html
The EFF has a page on the DMCA: http://www.eff.org/issues/dmca - if you search their site for "Sonny Bono Act" you get a few hits.
The US Copyright Office keeps a page of current legislation here: http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/
In addition to the academic site mentioned in the first answer, you could also check out Stanford's site on copyright: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/index.html
#1Submitted by PDL on Tue, 02/23/2010 - 3:21pm.

Answer: Copyright and new legislation

There is a bill introduced in 2009 titled:
To amend title 17, United States Code, with respect to works connected to certain funding agreements.
Text and other information is available on THOMAS at this link

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d111:1:./temp/~bdi9TG::|/bss/111search.html|

There are other bills for ammendments to Title 17 of the US code which pertains to copyright but deal with issues such as radio and TV transmissions and music and sound recordings. If you want information on those issues, there are other sources.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.