[pd-discuss] PD help-French law

Thu Mar 10 09:47:05 UTC 2011

Exactly. 

French law (Code de la propriété intellectuelle) contains three provisions extending the term of protection for works published during WWI and WWII as well as for works whose authors "died for France" during the WWs. These articles were not repealed by the Parliament when it implemented the Term Directive into French law. However, two decisions of the Court of Cassation (27.02.2007) have excluded the extension of terms of protection under the condition that the new term of protection does not shorten longer terms of protection that would have started before 1 July 1995. It seems according to this ruling that musical works, which were benefitting from a longer term of protection (70 years p.m.a. instead of 50 years p.m.a) before 1 July 1995 should still benefit from extensions due to wars.

Is it the reference you are looking for?

If you need more details, I can provide a short memo that I wrote on this (with different hypotheses) as well as the decisions of the Court of Cassation.

Kind regards,
Catherine Jasserand

IViR

-----Original Message-----
From: pd-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:pd-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Peter B. Hirtle
Sent: woensdag 9 maart 2011 23:02
To: Public Domain discuss list
Subject: Re: [pd-discuss] PD help

Wasn't there a recent French court case that said that the European harmonization directive superseded the French extensions for authors who were "mort pour la France"?

Can someone who knows duration in France speak to this?

Peter Hirtle

-----Original Message-----
From: pd-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:pd-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Gray
Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2011 5:56 PM
To: Public Domain discuss list
Subject: Re: [pd-discuss] PD help

On 8 March 2011 22:29, Alberto Cerda <alberto at derechosdigitales.org> wrote:
> Mmmm.... I think the Mexican copyright law provides protection to 
> copyright holder for the author's life plus 100 years. To my 
> knowledge, that is the longest term, but, unfortunately, I do not know since when that terms apply.

There's an interesting detail in French law which provides that any author killed in wartime is given a thirty-year copyright extension, at least since 1914 or so. (It is apparently a bit variable in detail, thanks to EU harmonization, but there's definitely some potential for
life+up-to-100 cases).

http://www.celog.fr/cpi/lv1_tt2.htm (Art. L.123-10)

I'm not aware of any other country which has a similar provision, but it's quite possible there are some.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

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