Argentina Plans To Increase Copyright In Photos From 20 Years To Life Plus 70 Years, Devastating Wikipedia

As Techdirt has pointed out, copyright extensions are bad enough, but retroactive ones are even worse, since the creation of the work has already occurred, so providing additional incentives makes no sense, even accepting the dubious idea that artists think about copyright terms before setting to work. Moreover, copyright extensions are a real kind of copyright theft -- specifically, stealing from the public domain. If you think that is just rhetoric, it's worth looking at what is happening in Argentina.

As a post on the Wikimedia Argentina blog explains (original in Spanish), a proposed law would extend the copyright in photos from 25 years after an image was taken (or 20 years from first publication) to life plus 70 years -- a vast extension that would mean that most photos taken in the 20th century would still be in copyright. That's a big problem for Wikipedia in Argentina, since it is using photographs that have passed into the public domain under existing legislation. If the new law is passed in its current form, large numbers of photos would have to be removed:

Wikipedia would have to erase nearly all the photos of twentieth century history: the mere exposure without consent of the new rightsholders would be a crime. Not only Wikipedia: even the General Archive of the [Argentinian] Nation would become illegal and 40 million Argentines would be left without access to their historical memory.

It's a great but sad example of how copyright can destroy culture on a massive scale. Let's hope that law doesn't pass.

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