Court to Review Copyright Law nytimes.com
By AMY HARMON [ who seems seems to be the NYT beat reporter on this issue. As usual, government regulation somehow has miraculously aligned itself with the interests of the regulated on this issue. Funny how that works. excerpt: ]
But detractors say the statute inhibits creativity by making it harder and more expensive for other people to obtain and build upon existing works. The 1998 law, these critics argue, mainly benefits powerful corporate copyright holders like the Walt Disney Company, whose intensive lobbying helped pass the legislation.
The law's challengers say that it disregards the public's side of the balance that the Constitution sought to strike when it authorized Congress to issue copyrights "for limited times" to "promoted the progress of science and useful arts." The initial Copyright Act, in 1790, set a maximum term of only 28 years.
Opponents of the 1998 law say that by issuing a series of 11 extensions over the last 40 years � the latest being by far the longest � Congress has exceeded its powers by, in effect, giving copyright holders a permanent monopoly over the use of their material.
Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor who has spearheaded the case since its inception almost four years ago, says that the rise of the Internet makes the copyright issue all the more urgent, because works that fall into the public domain would for the first time be easily accessible via the Internet for millions of people to enjoy and to incorporate into new digital works of their own.
"Imagine you want to do something with the New Deal, and you get images and songs and stories and put it together on the Internet for everyone to see," Mr. Lessig said last week in a telephone interview from a Washington hotel room, where he was preparing for this Wednesday's oral argument. "Just at a point where technology is making all of this available, the law ought not to get in the way for no good reason." . . . |
