Copyright law

[David Blair]

My guess from what I read is that GATT covers the gaps in Berne?
Ie that countries that did not sign Berne, but did sign the GATT
treaty/join the WTO,
now have normalized copyright coverage. 

Someone in Japan once told me about the curious existence of a Communist
competitor to the Berne Concention called the Warsaw Convention, which
apparently only had a 25 year lifespan... that was what the USSR + China
apparently used to run under.

David

At 09:08 AM 4/30/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>
>>Japan uses the rule of "shorter term" for foreign copyrights... ie it 
>>imposes the above terms on foreign works
>
>I don't know anything specific about Japanese copyright law but Japan is a 
>signatory to the Berne Convention which means that they should grant any 
>non-Japanese work that's properly copyrighted in its country of origin the 
>exact same protection they would to a Japanese work.  This is how Berne is 
>supposed to work but whether in the real world it's been ignored or 
>modified I don't know.  China never signed Berne as far as I can find.
>
>Lang
>
>