Justices Hear Arguments in Challenge to Copyrights
By Linda Greenhouse.

The justices appeared to agree that there should be a limit somewhere, but not that they should be the ones to impose it. “I can find a lot of fault with what Congress did here,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told Professor Lessig. But she added that “it’s very difficult to find the basis in the Constitution for saying” lawmakers do not have the right to set the limit even if “it’s longer than one might think desirable…
“Is there any limiting principle out there that would ever kick in?” Justice O’Connor asked. An explicitly perpetual copyright would be unconstitutional, Mr. Olson conceded. He said that even if extending existing copyrights did not induce new creative efforts, Congress was entitled to have other goals in mind, like giving copyright holders a continued financial incentive to keep their works in distribution.
Professor Lessig’s argument was exactly the opposite. The Internet had brought about a “fundamentally important changed circumstance” in the traditional copyright equation, he said, by making the public domain so readily accessible and therefore raising the stakes in keeping copyrighted material flowing into the public domain.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/10/business/10BIZC.html
Justices Hear Arguments in Challenge to Copyrights
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, Oct. 9