Professor Zittrain on Copyright Extensions

The hill just got a little steeper for those in the UK who hope to extend the current 50 year copyright terms for sound recordings.  While recognizing that the United States copyright term lasts 95 years from the date of the recording, it seems that the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, a Treasury commissioned review, will advise against bumping the protection up for the extra 45 years the recording industry has been requesting.

The Register caught Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Berkman Center co-founder and current Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University to provide context to the motions in the UK.  Professor Zittrain worked to challenge the US copyright extensions in Eldred vs. Ashcroft; while the US laws stuck to 95 years, in looking back to look forward he tells The Register:

...To grant it [copyright] for one time and then retroactively extend it means the time is no longer limited because it can be changed at any moment. Retroactive extensions, i.e. those applying to works already created, provide no additional incentives to create since the work has already been made...[I]t was hard for the justices to appreciate the value and power of the public domain. They thought that works might be better cared for by big firms who exclusively own them than by members of an undefined public who might be volunteering to retype them digitally and then post them on servers...

The rest of Professor Zittrain's insights are at The Register.