What Congress did was entirely constutional. Extending Copyrights helps to secure and promote both arts and Science.
If you want free books and movies, check them out from the library.
You can also get these book and movies for next to nothing at thrift shops and used book stores.
Only liberals want everything for free.
Did you even read my comment, or have you actually tracked down any of Shakespeare’s decendents to make sure they got paid for that copy of King Lear you read in high school?
Copyrights and trademarks are not secured by fees coming anywhere near the costs of enforcing them.
Fees need to be every seven years and adjusted for inflation.
I am sure you agree that the intellectual property holders need to actually pay for what they get. Regular fee assessment pretty much solves the orphan works problem as well.
Free is not the point.
It is to prevent the cluster we now have where everything is so copyrighted that you cant write a short story and publish it without some idiot citing something they wrote back in the 70s as grounds to sue you.
Like what art or science is being promoted by a work from the 50s still being protected?
Agreed.
Why didn’t they also extend patents. A patent is 1000x harder to get than a copy write and only lasts 17 years no matter what.
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone wanting to learn guitar could choose form some song written after the civil war?
You can’t set up your estate in a way that is guaranteed to provide for your heirs for 70 years after your death, why does the author of “happy birthday” get to but you don’t?
A four legged cow
A big old sow
My mind is cheese
pass the ketchup please
(c)
I just copy writed that and published it. No one can use it for 70 years after my death. Seems fair doesn’t it?
In a more personal example. We were visiting my wife’s family a while back. going through pictures we found one of a great aunt she had never heard of (even her dad, who would have been a nephew didn’t know of this woman). We took the picture to Walmart to make a copy.
They wouldn’t let us buy a copy because it was a studio photo and didn’t appear to be at least 75 years old.
The aunt is long dead, the photographer- dead.
Remind me who is benefiting from this law and who is it hurting?
The heck you say. Extending copyrights provides monopoly rents, at best to literary estates, and at worst to publishers who bought the rights from the actual artist or scientist. I'll warrant there is not a single work of art, music or literature or scientific discovery that has prompted by the thought of life-plus-70 copyright and the monopoly rents that can be generated, but the thought figures prominently in scientific publishers' locking up of scientific papers behind paywalls. The problem with extended copyright is not its effect on consumers, but its effect on producers -- the suppression of derivative works.
According to your position, the world would have been so much better off if Rachmaninoff had had to pay royalties to Chopin's publisher when he composed his Variations on a Theme of Chopin a mere 53 years after Chopin's death. He probably wouldn't have bothered. Do you really propose that Warner/Chappell's copyright on "Happy Birthday to You" (which served such culturally valuable purposes as preventing Star Trek: the Next Generation from using a Klingon translation of the song) and can, at least in theory, be used to file DMCA take-down notices against YouTube footage of children's birthday parties, actually serves the constitutional purpose of copyrights?