Supreme Court Accepts Eldred Case

Patrick Fitzgerald writes: "The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to intervene in a fight over copyrights, deciding whether Congress has sided too heavily with writers and other inventors. The outcome will determine when hundreds of thousands of books, songs and movies will be freely available on the Internet or in digital libraries." Openlaw's Eldred v. Ashcroft page has more information about the case, which seeks to challenge the most recent retroactive extension of copyright terms.

Comments

Great Name

[zpengo]

The 1998 copyright changes, known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, bring U.S. rules in line with those in the European Union.

With a name like "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act", it's got to be bad news...

Re:What can I do to help?

[david duncan scott]

Contributions to the National Arbor Day Foundation?

Yeah.

[Greyfox]

The Democrats have the corporate dick up their ass as much as the Republicans do. Enron's donations were something along the lines of 52% to Republicans and 48% to Democrats. If you hit opensecrets.org, you'll see that most companies similarly hedge their bets. They don't care who's in office as long as the person there is passing laws favorable to them.

The solution, of course, is for all Slashdotters to move to Montana and take over the political scene there...

Modest Propsal

[stinkydog]

What is to keep a MegaCorp from stockpiling authors to keep their copyrights intact. I envision an X-Files room under corpHQ with rows of authors, poets and musicians in cryotubes with hearts beating once a minute. "See, they are still alive!"

SD

Re:Modest Propsal

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I envision an X-Files room under corpHQ with rows of authors, poets and musicians in cryotubes with hearts beating once a minute.

Hey, provided they properly do the research to achieve this and properly patent the technology (so that it becomes public domain in 20 years!) I could cope with this. Something like this would be quite handy to the medical community, I suspect.

On the other hand, the sorts of corporations we're talking about here would probably just freeze the bodies solid, and then warn everyone that the "thawing them out again" technology is still under development, so you can't try to thaw them to see if they're still alive because the process can kill them (and if you try, you get flung in jail for manslaughter, AND get sued by the corporations for loss of potential income they claim the author/artist would have earned them...)

I'd better stop, I'm scaring myself... :-)