Bill Patry reports on an interesting, if somewhat esoteric dispute taking place in Spain: The Patry Copyright Blog: Calatrava, Bridges, and Moral Rights. Visit his blog and click on the link to Calatrava's bridge -- incredible art by almost anyone's definition (although I'm convinced that there is nothing that can't be defined by someone as art these days, thus the utility of the definition is nil, but that's a discussion that *never* goes anywhere). Anyway, the interesting thing about the Bilbao dispute is that architectural works, and a bridge is an architectural work (and may also be art...), are protected in Portugal like sculptures and paintings. Artists and designers have moral rights in bridges. Thus, the architect of this bridge, Calatrava, can sue the city of Bilbao for what it does to the bridge, even in the name of pedestrian safety or convenience. His rights extend to preserving his vision of the bridge, or so he claims.
U.S. law also protects architectural works, but as Patry notes, bridges were excluded from the scope of the U.S. provision (along with photographs taken from publicly accessible viewing locales). So, here we have an example of U.S. law still being narrower than European law.
This issue of the comparative scope of various country's laws is of special interest to me because of the University of Texas Libraries' participation in the Google Book Search project as a library partner. We have started on a wonderful project to identify which of the scanned works are in the public domain, in addition to those that Google's public domain algorithm identifies as in the public domain (a very conservative estimate). In the US, we treat foreign works as having the term of copyright that our own works have, for older works that is typically 95 years from the date of publication (yes, yes, it's a lot more complicated than that, but that's not the point of this particular post so I'll spare us all). But the works we put online here in the U.S. are pulled up by people in other countries. If the copyright term is longer there where the work is pulled up, is that a problem?
We are finding that the term is really pretty long in many of the countries where works from our Benson Latin American Collection were published: Brazil's term is life of the author plus 80 years; Mexico is life of the author plus 100 (!!!) years. Ninety-five years from the date of publication seems like an eternity to me, but it pales in comparison to life of the author plus 100. Aside from the interesting questions raised by the jurisdictional issue (which country's laws apply to works placed on the Internet), I find it interesting that we actually have a more modest sweep to our protection than some countries. And I am happy for the authors whose works will be sooner re-introduced to the world as a result. Many of these older works have been completely forgotten about over the century since their publication even though they may speak directly to questions that we raise today.
