Last October, I camped out in front of the Supreme Court in order to witness the Eldred Argument.
We lost, and now, if copyright law stays the way it is right now, nothing is going to go into the public domain for at least 18 years. (Maybe longer, if the copyright term is extended again.)
However, as of yesterday, there is hope. “Phase Two” if you will, of the Eldred strategy to rebuild the public domain: The Public Domain Enhancement Act.
The Public Domain Enhancement Act is the same thing as the “Eldred Act” that many of you have been asking me about over the last few months. At the time, I couldn’t explain it to anyone. But it turns out it’s pretty simple.
The law would place works in the public domain after 50 years unless a copyright holder sent in a dollar to secure the later 80+ years of protection. That’s it.
You can help out right now by signing this petition.
We’ll figure out how to rebuild the public domain yet!

As usual, Dan doesn’t mince words:

Supreme Court Endorses Copyright

Swipe a CD from a record store and you’ll get arrested. But when Congress authorizes the entertainment industry to steal from you — well, that’s the American way.
We learned as much on Wednesday when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress can repeatedly extend copyright terms, as it did most recently in 1998 when it added 20 years to the terms for new and existing works.
The law, a brazen heist, was called the Copyright Term Extension Act. It was better known as the Sonny Bono act, so named after its chief sponsor even though Disney and other giant media corporations were the money and muscle behind it.
Who got robbed? You did. I did.
Who won? Endlessly greedy media barons will now collect billions from works that should have long since entered the public domain.

Web-friendly Eldred Ruling and Dissenting Opinions

I’ve made the Eldred Oral Argument Transcript available in my usual web-friendly formats.

Aaron has made a transcript of the Eldred argument available:
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/eldredTranscript
I’m late for a meeting just now, but I wanted to get this out there!

Continue reading →

Larry clears things up a bit about how things went last week at the Eldred argument.

I am obviously extremely happy with where we are. The Court is struggling with the right issue; they are motivated to get the right answer; they have a clear and simple way to give the right answer; the government has made it very hard to accept its answer. It is always hard to get the Court to strike a law of Congress, but this law is so universally flawed, and the case against it is so universally strong, that I continue to be confident that the Court could choose to strike the law.
I am obviously also unhappy with those “swings-and-a-miss” that happened in the argument. As I said before the argument, if we win it will be because 4 years of activism by many many people have changed the public’s view about the importance of these issues. But as someone who believes this the rare case where the law, properly and carefully read, yields one right answer, there is no way I will ever be able to escape the thought that if we lose, it is because I am not the advocate that some could have been. It is the particular hell for lawyers that after an argument, we live in the purgatory of constantly reliving the argument. Every night since Wednesday I have awoken in the middle of the night, to spend the rest of the night reanswering Justice Ginsburg, or asking Chief Justice Rehnquist just how he could distingiush Commerce from Copyright. The kind words of so many notwithstanding, I know and have always known I am not Larry Tribe, or Kathleen Sullivan. And if, after getting this so close to the right result, I have lost this by not being them, then I am not quite sure how I will live with that fact.

Continue reading →