It’s not easy to ensure your business meets all the relevant legal and regulatory compliance requirements. There are just too many of them for an average business manager to take in. It’s difficult enough to spot remote legislation such as Californian Law SB 1386 which requires companies to notify them of incidents affecting Californian citizens (who might be employees or customers). But a recent development now suggests the compliance net might be even wider than this.
Michael Geist, an Internet law professor, explains the problem in a disturbing story on the BBC Web site about the International Music Score Library Project, a Canadian Web site which had built up a collection of musical scores for which the copyright had expired in Canada. After two years of operation the site had become the largest public domain music score library on the Internet. But it was closed down a few weeks ago following a legal demand from an Austrian music publisher to block European users from adding new scores for which copyright had not expired in Europe (which has a longer copyright term than Canada). If this legal demand is correct, it means that the longest copyright term in the World automatically applies to all publishing sites. It has serious implications for online businesses, as it suggests they may have comply with the laws of every country that can access their sites, resulting in a possible showstopper for e-commerce and a bonanza for aging rock stars and intellectual property lawyers.
