Mexico to Abolish the Public Domain?

Anonymous Mexican Coward writes "The mexican congress is considering a revision of the copyright law. Among other changes the law will extend the term of copyright from life-plus-70 to life-plus-100, and at the end of that term, the mexican government has the right to charge royalties for works in the "public domain." Go Mexico! Check it out"

Comments

cant wait

[Edmund Blackadder]

cant wait till the RIAA starts making the argument "it is completely unacceptable that mexican authors have more protection than american authors".

They made the same argument about europe when they put in the latest copyright extention act.

Who set this precident first?

[SuperBug]

Seems to me there are a few things at play regarding this. It could be a test of public opinion, as another reader suggests. It's done, rather shamelessly, here in the US *all the time*. Other thing it could be as well, that since the US and Mexico are trying to be a bit closer together, who knows what deals are being made with them regarding copyright. Look what we're trying to do to ourselves. If certain parties who intend to serve self intrests are global, or at least multi-national, wouldn't they try to influence governments in each region they had a stake in?

So back to my question above, who set the precident first of life-term + some number of years for copyrighting works? Seems to me the US is to blame for this, even though it will really, really, really, hurt our youth and generations to come. It's poison in the resevoir. Beware Mexico.

Re:Situational Irony

[1u3hr]

Just out of curiosity, is Micro$oft required to release the source of MS-DOS 1.0 when/if the copyright expires, or does just the binary form become public domain? The source is copyright too, no?

When copyright expires (70 years after publishing, under curent law), they don't have to do anything. It would however be in the public domain and if someone had a copy they could then publish it freely. But we all know that copyright will be extended indefinitely using the "Mad Hatter's tea Party" method:

The Mad Hatter said, "Jam is served every other day."
Alice protested, "But there was no jam yesterday either!" "That's right," said the Mad Hatter. "The rule is: always jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, never jam today...because today is not every other day!"

Re:Breaking news!

[letxa2000]

It's kind of irrelevant in Mexico. They can't even enforce the existing copyright laws and most people buy their CDs for $2 from pirates at the local flea market... If they don't just download the music from the Internet.

All in all, it's a bad thing but in practice in Mexico it makes no difference at all.

-- American living in Mexico for last 7 years.

bogus

[alizard]

I've been Googling. "Copyright Law of 1996" is the correct designation for the current Mexican copyright law. Feed it to Google and one gets 82 hits.

The hits disappear as soon as one adds amendment, proposed, proposal to the search terms.

Those should have turned up hits even in Spanish, I think. While my Spanish sucks rocks, that's one of the languages for which machine translation sort of works.

As far as I'm concerned, given that someone else checked Mexican government sites and didn't find it, the burden of proof that this isn't a troll is on the original author.

It would be a suicidally stupid thing for a national government to do. Imagine a 6 year old having to do an intellectual property search on the Net every time she was assigned to write a story for school and then try to find the intellectual property owners... if they can be found after 100 years.

While it's hard to quantify or model the economic loss due to the inability to use public domain work as a basis for further creativity, if I wrote fiction for a living, I'd be packing if this passed where I lived. Or if I were a parent.

However, we have no credible evidence of such. What we have is a blog posting that doesn't cite a verifiable URL from a government source. This is a credibility killer given that the subject is a proposed act of public law.

The article shouldn't have been accepted without one from either the author of the original article or the poster.

The privatize/nationalize cycle

[MickLinux]

This is the real problem that I have with neoliberal capitalism. It isn't liberal, it isn't capitalism, and if I read history correctly, it isn't neo.

It's part of the privatize/nationalize cycle that wealthy and powerful people use to steal from not-so-wealthy and not-so-powerful people.

There is NO WAY that this form of dominance benefits those around the world. It's called stealing, and it's as old as the hills.

Re:A world without public domain...

[Pharmboy]

This is based upon the Socialist concept of government: The Govt. owns everything, including your money, your property and ideas. If you are good, we will let you use them and profit from them.

The idea that I could not give the world something, donated to the public domain, without the government claiming ownership just shows you how fucked up socialism is. This is like the current problem in the US where congress acts like they are 'giving' us something when they offer tax cuts, instead of the reality, which is just TAKING less.

This is EXACTLY the dangerous crap I get tired of preaching about. Anytime the government acts in a way that puts it ABOVE the people, you are setting yourself up for tyranny. It shocks me that more people do not see this as a dangerous philosophy.

This is one reason I am so PRO 2nd amendment. A fully armed people has less to worry about when it comes to a dominating government. Unfortunately, Mexico has a history of corruption at the government level. Too bad, since it has more natural resources than the US, and COULD be one of the richest nations on earth. This idea is one example of why they are NOT, and not likely to be in the near future.