How does this work? Asking legitimately. If an American author produces a work in America, with presumably an American copyright, don't USA laws decide when they enter the public domain?
Like, could some country just decide global copyright ends after 1 year after publication in their jurisdiction, and start printing their own copies of Harry Potter or whatever?
Yes, that’s how it works. But most countries are signatories of the Berne Convention which sets a minimum 50-years-after-death copyright length, and have mostly settled on 70-years-after-death.
This includes the US, but it wasn’t retroactively applied, so the old 95-years-after-publishing regime remains in place for works published before 1976. That’s why these twenty works were all published in 1929.
There was a court case about this. Project Gutenberg got sued by a German publishing house for hosting works still copyrighted in Germany.
"Although they were in the public domain in the United States, the German court (Frankfurt am Main Regional Court) recognized the infringement of copyrights still active in Germany, and asserted that the Project Gutenberg website was under German jurisdiction because it hosts content in the German language and is accessible in Germany." [1]
Project Gutenberg lost repeatedly in court but the whole saga ended with a settlement.
"Under the terms of the agreement, Project Gutenberg eBooks by the three authors will be blocked from Germany until their German copyright expires." [1]
So if you have a German IP you can't access the ebooks, but if don't you can read them.
Like, could some country just decide global copyright ends after 1 year after publication in their jurisdiction, and start printing their own copies of Harry Potter or whatever?