this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Just would like to qualify this with "in the US". Copyright law -- and IP law in general -- has varied around the world, and certainly back in (checks) 1790, when the original US copyright term was set, the world had not settled on a common duration. Today, the Berne Convention has done a lot to move things towards a common set of rules around the world, but that wasn't the case when the 14+14 term was around.
I'm American, but that does have significant impact, especially today and online, where to some degree places around the world are about-equally-accessible to each other.
If you see Europeans talking about "moral rights", for example, that's something that plays a more-significant role in copyright law in Europe than in the US.
In the US, typefaces cannot be copyrighted, unlike in some other countries, but software representations of typefaces can.
Fair use is a US doctrine; while some countries have some level of analog, it isn't always available and may have different constraints and be considerably more-limited than in the US.
I was referring to the Statute of Anne, which was passed by the British parliament in 1710, which was 66 years before America declared independence. That's the actual "original copyright law".
The US copied it almost verbatim for their first copyright law, the Copyright Act of 1790, but that was 80 years later. The only change they made was to add maps and charts as things that could be copyrighted.