It may have been called the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, but one of the biggest beneficiaries of Congress' 1998 extension to the federal copyright law was widely seen as the Walt Disney Co. - and now the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively ruled, 7-2, that where the Constitution says that copyrights may be granted for "limited times," the Founders actually meant "unlimited."rnrn
The law at issue extended individual copyrights on creative works to 70 years after the creator's death and copyrights held by corporations to 95 years. During a hearing last fall before the high court, Petitioners' attorney Lawrence Lessig argued that the "blanket extension" of existing terms "exceeds Congress's power under the Copyright Clause and it violates the First Amendment."rnrn
The case was originally brought by Eric Eldred and several co-plaintiffs who wanted to be able to place classic movies, novels and symphonies which had fallen into the public domain, or were about to do so, on the Internet without fear of legal action by the former copyright holders. The 1998 law, however, allowed the former rights owners to re-copyright their material for roughly an additional 20 years, effectively stopping the plaintiffs' fledgling businesses in their tracks.rnrn
However, had the law been struck down, such works as the original Mickey Mouse cartoons, jazz recordings from the '20s and '30s and even the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald would be fair game for reissuance by third parties - a fact that, from the tenor of their questions during argument, greatly concerned the high court justices - and possibly not simply because there were billions of dollars of royalties at stake.rnrn
According to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote the majority opinion for the Court, the new law brought American copyright law into conformity with the European Union, and granted American authors the same copyright protections enjoyed by their European counterparts.rnrn
But, argued Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the high court's two dissenters to the opinion, "The qualitative costs to education, learning and research will multiply as our children become ever more dependent for the content of their knowledge upon computer-accessible databases, thereby condemning that which is not so accessible - say, the cultural content of early 20th-century history - to a kind of intellectual purgatory from which it will not easily emerge."rnrn
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