SC - Quirk in German Copyright Law

[Morgan Cain]

>>> Subject: Re: SC - Copyright from the Copyright Lawyer
>>>
>>> Thanks a lot for the information. I have two additional
>>> questions, re use of printed editions and international
>>> online publication:
>>>
>>> (1) Status of printed editions
>>> According to German law, the _text_ of printed _editions_
>>> of old texts is protected for 25 years from date of
>>> publication even if the text is medieval or early modern
>>> (§70 or 71 of our Urheberrecht, I think; the notes etc.
>>> are protected for a longer time). Is there such a proviso
>>> in your law, too?

No.  I note that this may be a result of an EU Directive, reported in my handout (may be in the TI article also, but I don't have that before me) in this manner:

   .... [the] Council of the European Communities issued the
   Term of Copyright Protection Directive, Council Directive
   93/98/EEC, effective 1 July 1995, which in Article 4 allows
   any person to obtain the copyright on a previously
   unpublished work after the expiry of what would be the
   copyright term by being the first to publish that work.
   “The term of protection of such rights shall be 25 years
   from the time when the work was first lawfully published
   or lawfully communicated to the public.”  This has been
   interpreted by some persons to say that items which had
   fallen into the public domain can now be protected by a
   copyright, and this is not true; anything which was publicly
   available (“published”) and then fell into the public domain
   due to age, remains in the public domain.

I think this may be what appears in the German law.  As I understand it, only items that have never before been published are covered under the Directive.  I suppose the concern is for items that would still be within the twenty-five year period (in other words, published after 1975), but I cannot determine whether this is retroactive in application.


>>> (2) International matters
>>> Online-publication on the web is an international matter.
>>> But whose laws apply?

This question has been keeping courts quite busy.  It almost depends upon the jurisdiction, which one is held to apply.  In some countries (including Germany), any website accessible in that country is supposed to comply with the country's law.  In other countries (such as the USA), the law of the country in which the website "resides" will be applied.

>>> Whose laws apply? Must I first study all the world's
>>> copyright laws? Is there a way to _make sure_ that some
>>> online publication is not against some law somewhere in
>>> the world?

To answer the last one first -- no.

To answer the others, there are some international treaties about copyright -- the Berne convention, the Universal Copyright Convention -- that would apply whether the material is published on a website or on paper.  These recognize the importance of copyright, the ease of piracy, and essentially state that a copyright issued in one country will be honoured in another, as long as both have signed the treaty.

                        ---= Morgan
========================================
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