Japanese Protection Term

Bovens reports on a recent demand of Japanese copyright holders’ associations to change the protection term of 50 years to 70 years after death of author.

Their reasons:

The 50 year minimum term in Article 7 of the Berne Convention was meant to assure protection for two generations after the author. With longer lifespans 70 years is closer to two generations than 50.

The EU and America also have 70 years protection. There is no reason to give Japanese authors less.

Having a shorter term also does not seem to be compatible with the idea of building the Japanese nation on intellectual property rights (chizai rikkoku), since it will lead to less income for Japanese copyright holders.

If one wants to counter these arguments, some questions asked by Hilty concerning the Eldred decision come to mind. That is, how to explain the difference in terms between patents (20 years) and copyright (120 years). And why should computer software be protected for longer than 100 years.

I don’t feel strongly about protection terms, but I agree that there seems to be no good reason for giving copyright more than five times the term of patent protection.