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posted by LaminatorX on Friday April 24 2015, @02:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the useful-progress dept.

It's election season in the UK, and the Green Party's policy document has been coming under scrutiny recently. In it is a desire to reduce copyright term to 14 years (not life + 14 years, but 14 years from publication).

Unsurprisingly, this has received a bit of a backlash from various parties.

There's no chance the Green Party will form the next government, so this is all academic, but is this a sensible idea? Are people overreacting?

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by fritsd on Friday April 24 2015, @03:32PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Friday April 24 2015, @03:32PM (#174692) Journal

    The Telegraph article is interesting to read, and what's even better is they ask a spokesman for the Green Party to clarify, and this spokesman referred back to a fascinating scientific (well, economic anyway, it's debatable whether economy is a science) article from 2007:

    http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/research-optimal-copyright-term-is-14-years/ [arstechnica.com]

    This referred to an article by the Cambridge economist Rufus Pollock who had *calculated* that the optimum copyright duration for society is in fact 14 years.

    So now here we are 8 years later, and copyright duration in the EU is still "70 years post mortem auctoris", and I wonder: does anyone know if this calculation has ever been refuted / challenged / delegated to the dustbin of history / ridiculed?

    Because *if not*, then the current scientific consensus on optimum copyright length, is in fact still that 14 years from Pollock. And it will stay 14 years, until somebody can convince us with a better model calculation that it should be a different number, or the same number but a different methodology.

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