Such abuses of the common as what follows is a direct result of thieves refusing to admit that people own the products of their minds and forcing the issues. COMMON sense should prevail in such a matter and the original copyright agreement struck which provided for a person to own their ideas for a time and then put them back in the common is not only a good idea for intellectual capital but should IMHO be worked out around division of properties in general.
REH January 16, 2003 20-Year Extension of Existing Copyrights Is Upheld By LINDA GREENHOUSE ASHINGTON, Jan. 15 - The Supreme Court today upheld the 20-year extension that Congress granted to all existing copyrights in 1998, declaring that while the extension might have been bad policy, it fell clearly within Congress's constitutional authority. The 7-to-2 decision came in the court's most closely watched intellectual property case in years, one with financial implications in the billions of dollars. A major victory for the Hollywood studios and other big corporate copyright holders that had lobbied strenuously for the extension, the ruling had the effect of keeping the original Mickey Mouse as well as other icons of mid-century American culture from slipping into the public domain. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's majority opinion methodically dissected and rejected the arguments that a coalition of Internet publishers and other users of noncopyrighted material had marshaled against the Copyright Term Extension Act. The dissenters were Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen G. Breyer. The named plaintiff in the case was Eric Eldred, who wanted to publish some Robert Frost poems. Other plaintiffs included a church choir director; an orchestral sheet music company; a company that restores old films; and Dover Publications, a publisher of books that have passed into the public domain. Organized by a Stanford Law School professor, Lawrence Lessig, who argued the case before the court in October, the plaintiffs did not attack the duration Congress chose for new copyrights: the life of the creator plus 70 years for individual works and 95 years from publication for copyrights held by corporations. Rather, they argued that retroactive application of the 20-year extension to existing copyrights was a giveaway that violated the sense if not the literal words of the Constitution's grant to Congress of authority to "promote the progress of science" by issuing copyrights for "limited times." Extending existing copyrights would not promote new creativity, the plaintiffs argued, and a duration that is virtually perpetual in effect violates the meaning of "limited times." But Justice Ginsburg said that history refuted the plaintiffs' argument. Going back two centuries, she noted that every time that Congress extended the duration of copyrights, which began with a 14-year renewable term in 1790, it granted the new terms to existing copyrights as well as to new works. This practice reflected a Congressional judgment that all copyright holders should be "governed evenhandedly under the same regime," Justice Ginsburg said. In any event, she said, "the wisdom of Congress's action, however, is not within our province to second- guess" because the Constitution itself gave Congress broad discretion and the court only a very limited role in the area of intellectual property. "As we read the framers' instruction, the copyright clause empowers Congress to determine the intellectual property regimes that, over all, in that body's judgment, will serve the ends of the clause," she said, adding, "We are not at liberty to second-guess Congressional determinations and policy judgments of this order, however debatable or arguably unwise they may be." Paying something of a back-handed compliment to the plaintiffs, Justice Ginsburg said that "beneath the facade of their inventive constitutional interpretation" they were basically arguing that "Congress pursued very bad policy." Justice Breyer spent much of a 29-page dissenting opinion explaining how bad , in his view, the policy was. The extension's "practical effect is not to promote, but to inhibit, the progress of `science' - by which word the framers meant learning or knowledge," he said. And while the Constitution speaks of a grant of copyright to "authors," he continued, the effect of the extension "is to grant the extended term not to authors, but to their heirs, estates or corporate successors." Noting that the majority appeared to find the statute at worst unwise, but not unconstitutional, he said: "Legal distinctions, however, are often matters of degree, and in this case the failings of degree are so serious that they amount to failings of constitutional kind." He added, "I cannot find any constitutionally legitimate, copyright-related way in which the statute will benefit the public." Justice Stevens, in his dissenting opinion, called the extension a windfall for current copyright owners. "Members of the public were entitled to rely on a promised access to copyrighted or patented works at the expiration of the terms specified when the exclusive privileges were granted," he said, while copyright holders have no reason to complain if they do not receive more protection than they were originally promised. Justice Stevens said the decision left Congressional action in the copyright area "for all intents and purposes judicially unreviewable," adding, "That result cannot be squared with the basic tenets of our constitutional structure." In quoting Chief Justice John Marshall's famous words from the Marbury v. Madison decision in 1803 - "it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is" - Justice Stevens may have been tweaking the majority in the series of federalism cases in which he has been a consistent dissenter as the court has invalidated numerous acts of Congress. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and his allies in those decisions have frequently quoted the line from the Marbury decision as justification for the court's active role in policing the federal-state boundary. Professor Lessig himself cited the federalism cases last year as part of his effort to persuade the court to hear his appeal, Eldred v. Ashcroft, No. 01-618, after two lower federal courts here had earlier rejected his attack on the 1998 law. The court should take the same skeptical stance toward Congress's exercise of its copyright authority as it has toward other congressional actions, he argued then. Expressing his disappointment today, Professor Lessig said, "The impossible thing is, How do people on that court believe Congress's power is so constrained sign onto an opinion that says Congress's power is not constrained?" Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, said the ruling was "a victory for consumers everywhere" because "copyright, whose aim it is to provide incentive for the creation and preservation of creative works, is in the public interest." In her majority opinion, Justice Ginsburg insisted that the proper stance for the court toward Congress in this context was a deferential one. The law, formally known as the Copyright Term Extension Act, "reflects judgments of a kind Congress typically makes, judgments we cannot dismiss as outside the legislature's domain," she said. The court noted that the extended term made the United States consistent with the copyright policy of the European Union. The plaintiffs had also challenged the law under the First Amendment as a suppression of free expression, but the majority rejected that argument as well. Copyright law "contains built-in First Amendment accommodations," Justice Ginsburg said, including the concept of "fair use" that permits copyrighted material to be reproduced for scholarship and other purposes. In a web-exclusive column, Linda Greenhouse answers readers' questions on Supreme Court rules and procedure. E-mail Ms. Greenhouse a question at [EMAIL PROTECTED] include your name, address and daytime telephone number; upon request names may be withheld. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
