Supreme Court Hears Challenge
to Copyright Extension Act
The Supreme Court heard arguments October 9 in a challenge to the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, which lengthened the life-plus-50-years copyright term by 20 years.
Reports on the session indicated that while the justices seemed critical of the law, they voiced skepticism over whether they could do anything about it. Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School argued that repeated extensions of copyright terms violate the Constitution’s clause authorizing Congress to issue copyrights for “limited times,” the New York Times reported October 10. Additionally, he maintained, extending existing copyrights fails to promote creativity as the Constitution calls for.
“I can find a lot of fault with what Congress did here,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told Lessig, but she added that it’s difficult to find the basis in the Constitution for saying legislators don’t have the right to determine the limit even if “it’s longer than one might think desirable.”
Defending the law, Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson said courts should defer to Congress’s authority to enact copyright laws, the CNet online news service reported. “The authority is vested in Congress to make these judgments, rather than courts to make their judgments,” he argued.
The named plaintiff in the case, Internet publisher Eric Eldred, runs a Web site that posts the texts of out-of-print works whose copyrights have expired. He was joined in the challenge by small publishers and other businesses that specialize in formerly copyrighted material.
Library and consumer groups, including the American Library Association, had opposed the 1998 law, although the measure included a limited exception for libraries, archives, and nonprofit educational institutions. The brief filed in the case by the library groups accused Congress of “transforming a limited monopoly into a virtually limitless one.”
Posted October 14, 2002.
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