A lawsuit to stop recent federal actions against expanding copyright protection has been thrown out of federal court.
U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney said Congress had enough "flexibility" to expand copyright protections without court interference, leaning heavily on a Supreme Court ruling from 2003 saying Congress had the power to extend copyright terms.
Internet pioneer Brewster Kahle and the Internet archivists he worked with in bringing the suit argued such copyright term extensions "radically transformed" copyright law, even when a work's creator didn't ask for such extensions.
They also said after the ruling that Chesney hadn't considered what they think is the major point: changes in laws, rather than reregistering copyrights, Kahle told reporters.
The group hoped the federal court would hold that many of the recent copyright extension moves were illegal, a holding that could have left a large volume of literature, film, and music from the 1960s and 1970s in the public domain. Kahle and his allies plan to appeal the Chesney ruling, adding they expected the real fight to be in the appeals courts.
