Larry Lessig: the silent 5. ‘Is there a principle here? Is there a way to read these opinions as consistent with a principle? […] Think the poster on the X-Files — “I want to believe” — but with the Supreme Court, not UFOs, in the background.’
This reminds me of some thoughts I had on the harmonization argument. I understood the argument to be “Country X has longer copyrights than we do. Authors want longer copyrights. If our copyright isn’t as along as X’s then all the authors will move to X.” But this doesn’t make sense at all! Copyright length depends on the country of the reader not the author.
A much more sane harmonization argument would be “Country Y has shorter copyrights than we do. Readers want shorter copyrights. If our copyright isn’t as short as Y’s then all the readers will move to Y.” This would cause copyright lengths to keep getting shorter, not longer.
On that note, anyone know a nice country with a short copyright term?