Our Last Stand Against Undemocratic International Agreements That Ratchet up Term Lengths and Devastate the Public Domain Few arguments around copyright are as self-evidently fact-free as the length of its term. Defying economic reasoning, the astonishingly long period of restrictions has only grown over the years, and frequently the newer, longer terms have been retroactively applied to earlier works. The argument against term extension, and retroactive term extension in particular, is so obvious that the Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman reportedly agreed to sign a Supreme Court brief opposing the most recent extension only on the condition that it used the word “no-brainer.” And yet, copyright term extensions seem to work as a one-way ratchet, increasing every few decades in one country or region, and then getting “harmonized” around the world to match the new maximum. In recent years, those extensions can even be tied to the copyright…
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