Supreme Court Keeps Copyright Protections (Mine: Sonny Bono Copyright Act ruled Constitutional)

Associated Press ^ | 1/15/03 | GINA HOLLAND

[general_re]

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld longstanding copyrights designed to protect the profits of songs, books and cartoon characters, a huge victory for Disney and other companies.

The 7-2 ruling, while not unexpected, was a blow to Internet publishers and others who wanted to make old books available online and use the likenesses of a Mickey Mouse cartoon and other old creations without paying high royalties.

Hundreds of thousands of books, movies and songs were close to being released into the public domain when Congress extended the copyright by 20 years in 1998.

Justices said the copyright extension, named for the late Rep. Sonny Bono, R-Calif., was not unconstitutional.

The Constitution "gives Congress wide leeway to prescribe `limited times' for copyright protection and allows Congress to secure the same level and duration of protection for all copyright holders, present and future," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (news - web sites) said from the bench.

A contrary ruling would have cost entertainment giants like The Walt Disney Co. and AOL Time Warner Inc. hundreds of millions of dollars. AOL Time Warner had said that would threaten copyrights for such movies as "Casablanca," "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind."

Also at risk of expiration was protection for the version of Mickey Mouse portrayed in Disney's earliest films, such as 1928's "Steamboat Willie."

Congress passed the copyright law after heavy lobbying from companies with lucrative copyrights.

[Jim Noble]

>>But what will Disney give the public in return for this largesse which we have bestowed upon them?<<

Millions of dollars in bribes to their representatives, so they can keep their salaries down?

[Carry_Okie]

The distinctions between intellectual and tangible property are not as sharp as you would believe. If I own tangible property, there are civic restrictions on its use. For example, if I drive my D-8 dozer into your living room, I would be committing a crime. There are restrictions upon what I can do with it, just as there are laws protecting me from others jumping on the dozer to drive it down the interstate.

In short, without the rule of law regarding my right and responsibility to control my tangible property, I don't have effective ownership. The same is true regarding intellectual property.

There isn't a heck of a big difference between sitting at a desk designing a widgit and then getting it built to spec, and sitting at a desk designing a new software algorithm. Both are tools. Unless I have the right, as the creator, to control how they are used, there is no ownership and no private property.

The key distinction here is the duration of the control, in part because it is the police power of the state that maintains it; a power funded by taxpayers. That renders the term a political matter. My preference for works of art and literature is that it be restricted to the life of the owner or 75 years whichever is greater (that helps keep creative people creating until their dying day).

The problem with that idea is what legally constitutes a "person," and here (again) the evil of the 14th Amendment definition of such reveals its malevolent intent. Corporations are immortal "persons," with equal protection under the laws, deriving their existence from the continuity of that control of intellectual property. While some might argue that this is a good thing (makes jobs, etc.), I would say that it violates the entire purpose of intellectual property as a good to the society: It produces a corporation that rests on its laurels while rewarding the likes of Eisner for the creative genius of Disney.

That is an evil.

[Protagoras]

Do you think that any copyrights are legitimate? Your post is unclear to me.

[Roscoe]

"And most importantly, its practical effect is not to promote, but to inhibit, the progress of Science."

Justice Breyer is trying to legislate from the bench again.

[Jim Noble]

>>Until the text of the decision is available<<

Allow me...

[freedomcrusader]

The S.C. found that Congress was not trying to escape the "limited Time" clause by stringing together an unlimited set of "limited Times."

Congress' excuse for the extension was to match the European Union copyright laws, so that American works would have the same protection in Europe as European works (the EU law said that any works produced in a country with less stringent copyright laws were only afforded in Europe the duration of protection allowed under that country's laws).

So, because Congress had an excuse, had a history of extending copyrights and patents (going back to the early 1800s), and no court previously had any problem with it, petitioners were SOL.

[general_re]

Awww, cripes. I didn't see a .pdf version.

Mods - can we pull my post 66? Jim Noble's downloadable version is much better than posting the whole wad in the thread...

[Arthalion]

Or, worse yet, permitted only the Revised Updated Edition ("...the proposed Constitution shews its concern for the Poorer Classes by its provision of the General Welfare clause authorizing Aid to them....")?

LOL! But you do bring up another good point: passing creations into the public domain results in wider distribution of the work, and helps to ensure that it survives the test of time in its unedited form. If copyrights were eternal and someone DID revise the Federalist Papers ("...we believe that history has shewn that democracy can only survive if governed by an aptly named parties, so all elected offices shall be filled by members selected from the Democratic party, and all other political parties should be supressed..."), WE would know that they were altered but our decendants a few hundred years down the line might not. Public domain helps to keep works consistent over time simply by maintaining many free "sources" of the material from which later copies can be made. Inconsistencies between copies can be easily caught, and because there are many potential sources, alterations are easy to catch.

[Right Wing Professor]

There should be no difference in my ability to inherit 100 percent of my parents' intellectual work as 100 percent of my parents' farm.

So, since I can create a farm exactly like your parents', and earn money from it, I should be able to make a copy of their intellectual work, and earn money from that, too.

But by all means hang on to the original :-)

[bvw]

Lawrence Lessig has the opinions up on his blog. the opinions

[Eric in the Ozarks]

You have my argument backwards.

[Right Wing Professor]

You have my argument backwards.

In what way?

[Right Wing Professor]

Justice Breyer is trying to legislate from the bench again.

Agreed. The law is a piece of pure crap, but that's not the same as being unconstitutional. The people elected the stiffs that voted 98-1 or whatever for this thing; the people will live with the consequences. Me, I intend to treat it with the same reverence I give to the speed limit and the income tax code. :-)

[Eric in the Ozarks]

If you can create (buy ?) a farm exactly like my parents' and make money from it, please do so. You would have no impact on me or my folks' farm. If my dad wrote a book and it was selling well and earning money and he willed it to me then you'd have little to say about my continued ability to earn from dad's work--just the same as you'd have nothing to say about what I did on my inherited farm.

[danelectro]

...I would say that it violates the entire purpose of intellectual property as a good to the society: It produces a corporation that rests on its laurels while rewarding the likes of Eisner for the creative genius of Disney.

the corporations that have bought our representatives will never allow their copyright to expire. every time certain works are about to fall into the public domain, copyright gets extended. while there is plenty of merit in the arguments for strong and lengthy copyrights, disney et al have acted in such bad faith that i actively oppose any measure on copyright which benefits them.

and it's only going to get worse. just wait until this session of congress is done and see what changes are made to require digital rights management, restrict our ability to make copies of media we have lawfully purchased etc etc.

[Right Wing Professor]

Right. I just want to be able to copy the book and sell the copies too. Won't affect your copies in the slightest.

[bvw]

"A long string ..."

Justice Stevens:

Respondent seeks support from Congress's historical practice of using its Copyright and Patent Clause authority to extend the terms of individual patents and copyrights. [] Carefully read, however, these private bills do not support respondent's historical gloss, but rather significantly undermine the historical claim....

This extension of patent protection to an expired patent was not an isolated incident. Congress passed private bills either directly extending patents or allowing otherwise untimely applicants to apply for patent extensions for approximately 75 patents between 1790 and 1875. Of these 75 patents, at least 56 had already fallen into the public domain. The fact that this repeated practice was patently unconstitutional completely undermines the majority's reliance on this history as "significant".

My note: The Constitution specifically excludes bills of attainder (a sort of private bill), and has a "general welfare" clause -- I'd personally mark that as disfavoring "private bills", for example by applying strictness in judicial weighing of such bills.

[Nick Danger]

I would argue the opposite; in fact, what has happened here is that the court simply ignored the plain language of the constitution, which limits the ability of Congress to set copyright terms to a "limited time."

To reach the conclusion you did, you must be in possession of some especially enlightened knowledge that permits you to know that extending a copyright an additional 20 years is a violation of the term "limited." There are others on the thread who have been advised by their own inner voices that the proper term is 50 years, or 28, or some other number. So the issue quickly ceases to be what the right number is, but rather how we decide whose inner voices shall prevail.

The Supreme Court has essentially ruled here that whatever their own inner voices tell them is the right number, they do not under the Constitution have the right to impose their own views. The mechanism provided is that the elected represenatives will hash it out during legislative debate, and whatever number comes out of that process is the law, whether anyone thinks that is the right number or not.

You apparently do not think that the legislature arrived at the right number. That's fine, but why should your view prevail? Why not mine, or Michael Eisner's, or Richard Stallman's? You seem to want the court to accept your interpretation as correct, and to enforce it by means of law, and you're hanging your hat on the idea that the word "limited" in the Constitution proscribes a 20-year extension. Had the new copyright saw said "extended in perpetuity," I could see your point. But 20 years is not "forever," and you can't make it mean that just by wanting to.

I think some people here are trying to debate the number instead of the mechanism by which the dispute is settled. They don't like the number that Congress arrived at, so -- like the plaintiffs -- they want the court to decide out of thin air that the legislature got the number wrong. If the court can do that, then the court can decide that a law that says "65 miles per hour" should really say "58.7" or "90" or whatever the Hell they feel like. Why bother with elected legislatures at all if we're going to have rule by philospher kings?

[B Knotts]

Retroactively extending copyright terms negates any plain meaning of "limited time."