The directive notes that the original goal of the Berne Convention was to protect works for two generations after the death of the author, and that fifty years was no longer sufficient for this purpose (para.

Where a Member State protected a work for a longer period at the time the directive came into force, the copyright term is not reduced [Art.

The duration of protection of related rights (those of performers, phonogram and film producers and broadcasting organisations) was set at fifty years with the following rules for calculating the starting date (Art. 3).

The new copyright terms applied also to works which were already in existence when it came into force, as was held by the European Court of Justice in the Butterfly case,[5] even if they had previously entered the public domain.

The effect of the approach was shown by the judgment of the European Court of Justice in the Puccini case,[6] which covered facts arising before the directive entered force.

The State of Hesse in Germany had staged the opera La Bohème by Puccini during the 1993/94 season at the Hessische Staatstheater Wiesbaden without the permission of the copyright holder.

These were harmonised 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 [it is] the author's own intellectual creation".