The animals and medical procedures were exempt.
Not according to your quote;
2. Each Party shall make patents available for inventions for the following:
1
(a) plants and animals, and
1
(b) diagnostic, therapeutic, and surgical methods for the treatment of humans or animals.
Here making patents available means letting people patent them, not making patented entities freely available (public domain). This is an amendment to the current treaty, which
explicitly allows exemptions for these categories.Section 3 that follows that defined the exemptions available. This could easily be read in various ways (depending on your view of
ordre public), but I'm banking that a narrow view (minimal exemptions) will be argued in most cases.
EDIT:
Oh yeah, I also meant to complain about that 120 years thing, thanks for reminding me. I think only an individual should be able to have a copyright, and for a long period of time only on the arts. For tech I think 5 or 10 years would be enough. Medicine, and possibly research and related fields should have no copyrights.
On not allowing corporate copyrights, what about
work for hire? If every work were copyright to the original creator and no other body then copyright law would become infinitely more complex in many cases. How about an animated film with dozens of artists, voice actors, writers, etc? In a work for hire the studio may hold copyright over the whole film and all elements that make it up. Destroy that doctrine and who holds copyright? Does each artist own their own frames? Each actor their own voice tracks?
As for the extended periods in the arts, what good do they do? The whole point of copyright is to offer incentive to artists. How much incentive is the slim potential for minor profits thirty years from now? As always. I recommend
Breyer's dissent in Eldred v. Ashcroft discussing the copyright extension act at that time. He looked at the actual numbers involved in the extension and the 'incentive' that they were offering;
What copyright-related benefits might justify the statute’s extension of copyright protection? First, no one could reasonably conclude that copyright’s traditional economic rationale applies here. The extension will not act as an economic spur encouraging authors to create new works. See Mazer, 347 U.S., at 219 (The “economic philosophy” of the Copyright Clause is to “advance public welfare” by “encourag[ing] individual effort” through “personal gain”); see also ante, at 212, n.18 (“[C]opyright law serves public ends by providing individuals with an incentive to pursue private ones”). No potential author can reasonably believe that he has more than a tiny chance of writing a classic that will survive commercially long enough for the copyright extension to matter. After all, if, after 55 to 75 years, only 2% of all copyrights retain commercial value, the percentage surviving after 75 years or more (a typical pre-extension copyright term)—must be far smaller. See supra, at 248; CRS Report 7 (estimating that, even after copyright renewal, about 3.8% of copyrighted books go out of print each year). And any remaining monetary incentive is diminished dramatically by the fact that the relevant royalties will not arrive until 75 years or more into the future, when, not the author, but distant heirs, or shareholders in a successor corporation, will receive them. Using assumptions about the time value of money provided us by a group of economists (including five (p255) Nobel prize winners), Brief for George A. Akerlof et al. as Amici Curiae 5–7, it seems fair to say that, for example, a 1% likelihood of earning $100 annually for 20 years, starting 75 years into the future, is worth less than seven cents today.
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