Page:The librarian's copyright companion, by James S. Heller, Paul Hellyer, Benjamin J. Keele, 2012.djvu/35

International Issues

Intellectual property knows no geographic boundaries. Governing law may include national law (in our case, U.S. law), foreign law, and treaties. Notwithstanding international agreements, each nation creates its own copyright laws.

Many of the recent changes in United States law were enacted to align our laws more closely to the international arena, especially Europe. Examples include eliminating the requirement of a formal “notice of copyright” for a work to be copyrighted and extending the length of time a work is protected.

The United States is a party to two international copyright conventions. The United States ratified the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC),^[1] which is administered by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in 1954. In 1988 the U.S. joined the Berne Convention,^[2] which is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), also a U.N. agency.

The core of these treaties is “national treatment.” A country that belongs to a treaty agrees to protect works prepared in other countries that signed the treaty, as well as works created by authors from those countries, at the same level it protects works created by its own authors.^[3] In a nutshell, this means that a work created by a foreign author who is a national of a country that signed the UCC or Berne convention is protected under U.S. law to the same extent as are works prepared in the United States.^[4] The same is true for works published in those countries. Furthermore,

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1. Sept. 6, 1952, 6 U.S.T. 2731, 216 U.N.T.S. 132, revised July 24, 1971, 25 U.S.T. 1341, 943 U.N.T.S. 194.
2. Sept. 9, 1886, S. Treaty Doc. No. 99-27, 1161 U.N.T.S. 3.
3. Occasionally this produces somewhat strange results. For example, U.S. law provides that works of our federal government may not be copyrighted. However, Canadian law provides that works of the Canadian government are subject to copyright protection. Because a country must protect foreign works as it protects its own works, this means that works of the U.S. government are protected in Canada, though not in the United States.
4. U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 38A: International Copyright Relations of the United States (Nov. 2010). Many Copyright Office circulars can be found on the Copyright Office homepage at http://www.copyright.gov.