Films and Photographs
The directive also harmonizes the copyright treatment of films ("cinematographic and other audiovisual works") and photographs throughout the European Union. Films are protected for 70 years from the death of the last of the following people to die : the principal director, the author of the screenplay, the author of the dialogue and the composer of music specifically created for use in the cinematographic or audiovisual work. This applies regardless of the provisions of national law regarding the authorship of the film, ensuring a common duration of copyright between Member States. The principal director of the film is always considered as an author of the film, although national legislations may provide for other co-authors .
Before the directive, different Member States had applied widely different criteria of originality and creativity to the copyright protection of photographs. These were harmonized by article 6, which states that the only permissible criterion for full protection (70 years pma) is that the photograph is "original in the sense that the author's own intellectual creation". Member States may protect photographs which do not meet this criterion by sui generis related rights.
Read more about this topic: Copyright Duration Directive
Famous quotes containing the words films and/or photographs:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)