IMSLP Forums

In France there are special laws, adding nearly 15 years of author's rights to the common Bern and EU life+70 term (It is unclear if it applies to French composers only or to all).
This makes that many composers that IMSLP considers PD for everybody in the world, are still copyrighted in France. (Examples: Fauré, Satie etc... Ravel, who next year will be PD for many, will stay protected in France until 2023!)

Thus, would it make sense to create special NonPD-FR templates to make French users well informed of this point?

Pierre

To be honest, almost every country has some sort of "blip" (anomaly) in their copyright laws (as we can see in the "Berne Rule of the Shorter Term" section on the "Public Domain" page), so it would probably not be a good idea to go into too much detail about the copyright law of one country. Exceptions are Canada and the US, because IMSLP has servers in both countries. Though to be honest US copyright law is one of the most patched copyright law in the world.

The current tagging system is made to basically generalize the two most common copyright systems in the world: life+50 and life+70. Unfortunately due to the variety in the copyright laws around the world, it is impossible to have accurate tags for every country

In the end I can only ask IMSLP users to be more familiar with the copyright laws of their country. I mean, after all, citizens are theoretically supposed to know the laws of their country... regardless of how this theory translates into actual reality.