overview background Australian law overseas law bodies advocacy tools texts patents names & links ECMS fair use Indigenous North-South online music plagiarism moral rights duration

duration This page is under development.       how long does it last? IP, like love, doesn't last forever. Arguments that it's a monopoly skate over the fact that it's a short-term 'monopoly' and one with significant exceptions (eg for fair use), although perceptions of significance depend on where you're located in the food chain.       extension Among the recent raft of papers and books on the duration of copyright and other intellectual property - debate about the whether Australia should follow the EU in protecting copyright for the author's life plus 70 years (rather than the current 50 years) or reduce the much shorter period of protection for patents - we've singled out Copyright Protection: Duration, Term Extension, The European Union & The Making Of Copyright Policy (San Francisco, Austin & Winfield 98) by Robert Bard & Lewis Kurlantzick. Dennis Karjala of Arizona State University maintains a site opposing the extension of protection in the US. It is perhaps most valuable for its access to the US Senate Committee report on the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1996, also known as the Sonny Bono Act, and critique by film historian Douglas Gomery. There's more bite in Arnold Lutzker's paper on What the Digital Millennium Copyright Act & the Copyright Term Extension Act Mean For The Library Community. Various anti-extension advocacy groups exist in the US and elsewhere, ranging from the EFF through to specialists such as the rather silly "No Cense" Copyright Reform Campaign. We've illustrated some of the variations in the duration of protection, and the global move to 'life plus 70 years', in a supplementary profile.