Copyright Law Challenged-Jimi Hendrix Invoked

WASHINGTON—Supreme Court justices riffed on artists from Shostakovich to Jimi Hendrix in arguments Wednesday about whether Congress can grant copyrights to works by foreign authors never before protected in the U.S. . Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, defending the law, said it brought the U.S. into a convention that can protect American intellectual property abroad and amounted to "the price of admission to the international system." Several justices, however, doubted that taking books and music by long-dead authors out of the public domain could promote the "progress" the Constitution sought to spur through copyright. .

It's a real pity they couldn't manage to express that same skepticism the laswt time copyright was extended retroactively to make sure Steamboat Willie never makes it into the public domain. I have zero respect for copyright on anything more than 30 years old.

Steamboat Willies is now the studio logo for Walt Disney Animation Studios.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y_Vh6zH8q8

I have zero respect for copyright on anything more than 30 years old.

My objection to endless copyright extension isn't that it allows authors and their heirs to profit from their works for decades, but rather that it prevents public use of even those works whose authors no longer have any interest in them. If I had my druthers, there would be a fairly short automatic copyright term, which could be extended to a few decades by either labeling a work conspicuously with the copyright date, copyright holder, and a unique identification number, or by paying a fee and registering for an exception from the labeling requirement (the latter would primarily be used by publishers who inadvertently printed material with a deficient copyright notice). Copyright terms could be renewed beyond the initial few decades, but the cost of such renewal would increase with time (such that companies would only be inclined to renew copyrights on those works that were still generating revenue). If Disney wants to keep Steamboat Willie under copyright, fine with me--just don't block use and distribution of works which have long since been abandoned by their creators.

Suppose today's copyright rules are still in effect on Jan 1, 2100, and one finds in a box an interesting poem marked "Copyright James Smith 1980"; on-line searches for the work reveal nothing, and there's no particular way of identifying which of the millions of James Smiths who have been alive since 1980 might have written it. The work would be 120 years old in 2100, but under today's rules the work would be unpublishable even though it would likely be out of copyright. Absent some way of determining that the particular James Smith who wrote it died on or before Dec. 31, 2030, the work would for all practical purposes not enter the public domain until 70 years after the death of the last surviving James Smith who happened to be alive in 1980.

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