Thursday, January 16, 2003
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Supreme Court Upholds Law Adding 20 Years to CopyrightsBy ANDREA L. FOSTER
Washington
The Supreme Court issued a 7-to-2 ruling on Wednesday that upholds a 1998 law adding 20 years to copyright protection. The ruling, in Eldred v. Ashcroft, prompted disappointed scholars and library groups to say they would push Congress to ease copyright restrictions on scholarly works and would support efforts to make works more widely available to the public. Professors in law and economics, as well as a number of groups affiliated with colleges, were disheartened by the decision (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader, available free). They had pressed the court to overturn the law, called the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, in briefs in support of the lead plaintiff in the case, Eric Eldred, an online-book publisher. He had hoped to post on the Web the texts of works whose copyrights would have expired if the extension had not been signed into law (The Chronicle, October 25, 2002). The scholars argued that the law favors corporate copyright holders over consumers who, they say, are prevented from enjoying a vast array of copyright-protected books, movies, and music. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority, said Congress acted within its authority when it lengthened the copyrights on creative works to 70 years from 50 years after the creator's death. The law protects works created for corporations for 95 years, up from 75 years. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to confer copyrights for "limited times." Justice Ginsburg said Congress's most recent extension of copyrights was, indeed, limited. She also said that the law did not violate the First Amendment, as critics had claimed. "We are not at liberty to second-guess congressional determinations and policy judgments of this order, however debatable or arguably unwise they may be," she wrote. Dissenting from Justice Ginsburg's opinion were Justices Stephen G. Breyer and John Paul Stevens. Justice Breyer said the Copyright Term Extension Act appears to benefit corporations that own copyrights at the expense of the public. He said that the law is "virtually perpetual" and that it inhibits the promotion of science. "I cannot find any constitutionally legitimate, copyright-related way in which the statute will benefit the public. Indeed, in respect to existing works, the serious public harm and the virtually nonexistent public benefit could not be more clear," wrote Justice Breyer. In a separate dissent, Justice Stevens wrote that the law erred in retroactively extending copyrights to existing works. He said the court was "failing to protect the public interest in free access to the products of inventive and artistic genius." The Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, which supported the copyright extension, issued statements on Wednesday saying they were pleased with the court's decision. "We have always maintained, and the law has long recognized, that copyright, whose aim it is to provide incentive for the creation and preservation of creative works, is in the public interest," said Jack Valenti, president and chief executive officer of the motion-picture group. With their court fight against the Copyright Term Extension Act behind them, scholars turned their attention to Congress and to groups that are working to have creative works widely disseminated. "These battles have to occur in the public sphere, and the public has to convince Congress that it has to pay attention to the needs of people who don't work for Disney or Time Warner," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University who helped draft a brief against the copyright extension on behalf of freelance writers. Although it's unlikely that Congress would vote to rescind the Copyright Term Extension Act, he said, critics of the law can lend their support to legislation that seeks to ease copyright restrictions. In particular, Mr. Vaidhyanathan cited a bill sponsored by Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, that would revise a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow people, in many cases, to bypass technologies protecting copyrighted works. "The Constitution doesn't mean very much today," said Mr. Eldred, a former computer administrator who was the lead plaintiff in the case. From his home in Derry, N.H., he runs a Web site that makes great literature available free (http://www.eldritchpress.org). Mr. Eldred urged opponents of the Copyright Term Extension Act to support Creative Commons, a nonprofit group. It encourages people to license their works under a scheme that allows them to retain some, but not all, rights to the material. Mr. Eldred serves on the group's board. Likewise, the Association of Research Libraries and the American Library Association, which filed a brief in support of Mr. Eldred, said the court's decision would cause them to focus their energies on groups like Creative Commons and on institutional repositories that make scholarly works available on the Web. "One of the things that might have a more positive short-term outcome would be if we can figure out better ways to encourage people to put their works in the public domain, make it less onerous to track down copyrights," said Miriam Nisbet, legislative counsel for the American Library Association. Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University who argued for Mr. Eldred before the Supreme Court, said in a posting on his Web site on Wednesday that he hopes the court's decision has a silver lining. "If there is any good that might come from my loss," he wrote, "let it be the anger and passion that now gets to swell against the unchecked power that the Supreme Court has said Congress has."
Background articles from The Chronicle:
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 White House will ask Supreme Court to strike down U. of Michigan's affirmative-action policy Universities of Michigan and Texas will require applicants to take a writing exam Harvard increases financial aid for graduate students preparing for public-service careers Higher-education officials call for more spending on need-based financial aid Vials of bubonic plague are reported missing, then found, at Texas Tech U. Supreme Court upholds law adding 20 years to copyrights Best-selling software at college bookstores in December |
Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education