:: Copywrong ::

Monday, October 21, 2002

Don't know how many of you have heard of the recent supreme court case regarding the challenge by Eric Eldred that the Copyright Term Extension Act (ostensibly enacted to preserve the IP and copyright rights of hard working Americans everywhere, but in reality pushed through so that Disney could retain exclusive use of anything related to Mickey Mouse) is an unconstitutional overextension of congressional authority, but Lawrence Lessig, the chief litigator for the plaintiffs, has an excellent inside perspective of the case on his blog.

An interesting fact that he points out: copyright legislation was originally instated to encourage creativity by safeguarding the potential profits from an innovative idea via granting proprietary rights to the creator. This turned out to be wildly successful:

"Under the current term of 95 years, under the most conservative assumptions about royalty income and interest rates, the current term gives authors 99.8% of the value of a perpetual term. Put differently, the current "delicate balance" between author and the public is 99.8% to the author, .2% to the public."

With the passage of the CTEA however, the length of exclusive protection has been extended to such a degree that companies are spending the vast majority of their resources perpetuating their existing trademarks and copyrights and very little developing new and innovative creative concepts and ideas. The effect of this is to stifle creativity instead of promote it.

Granted: this is a tangential point, and doesn't have any bearing on the constitutionality of congress' passing of the CTEA. The real crux of the plaintiffs' argument was, and still is, that the constitution not only places express limits on copyright terms, but expressly prohibits the congressional extension of such terms.

Posted by morland @ 12:31 PM

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