Tolkien was going to enter the Canadian public domain in 2024 and, yes, that would have legally allowed Canadian companies to produce their own adaptations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, for release and consumption in Canada and other countries with life + 50 copyright only (though, realistically, it's very unlikely that any Canadian studio would try to make a fantasy TV show or feature film with no help from Hollywood and no hope of release in America or China, so at best you would get a few books, the commercial equivalent of fanfic, like the James Bond anthology License Expired).
Last year, though, Canada extended its copyright term to life + 70, effective retroactively for authors who have yet to enter the Canadian public domain (though not, thankfully, for authors who are already there) in order to meet its obligations under the USMCA. This is a textbook example of how the US uses trade deals to demand that other countries go along with America's outrageous and oppressive copyright laws. So now Tolkien will not enter the Canadian public domain until 2044.
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Notes -
Tolkien was going to enter the Canadian public domain in 2024 and, yes, that would have legally allowed Canadian companies to produce their own adaptations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, for release and consumption in Canada and other countries with life + 50 copyright only (though, realistically, it's very unlikely that any Canadian studio would try to make a fantasy TV show or feature film with no help from Hollywood and no hope of release in America or China, so at best you would get a few books, the commercial equivalent of fanfic, like the James Bond anthology License Expired).
Last year, though, Canada extended its copyright term to life + 70, effective retroactively for authors who have yet to enter the Canadian public domain (though not, thankfully, for authors who are already there) in order to meet its obligations under the USMCA. This is a textbook example of how the US uses trade deals to demand that other countries go along with America's outrageous and oppressive copyright laws. So now Tolkien will not enter the Canadian public domain until 2044.
See previous discussion on /r/slatestarcodex.
Cheers, thanks for this info.
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