Slashdot Mirror
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
Sylver Dragon writes "Business week has a story about Eldred v. Ashcroft. Seems that Eldred wants to put some of Robert Frost's works on the web, but, sadly, those were copyrighted. What makes this more interesting, is that the works would have become public domain, had congress not extended the length of copyright after an artists death. So now, the Supreme court must decide if congress overstepped the bounds of the constutional provisions for copyright laws, when they made the last extension. With any luck, the Supreme Court will choose the "road less traveled."" The plaintiffs have a webpage with much information.
.. I wish there were some good sites to read about Robert Frost
or if you want to take the road less travelled
Live web cams
I noticed that one of the other plantiffs listed on the webpage is Dover. I have bought quite a few of their books in the past. They are great, mostly reprints of old texts bound in paperback and sold dirt-cheap. Their cheap price but good quality makes them a great additional reference for when you have to go through calculus, physics, etc. The extension of the copyright most likely means they have fewer choices for books they can print. That's too bad.
Brewster Kahle from the Internet Archive has a 'side project' called the BookMobile which leaves San Francisco on Monday to travel across the US to Washington DC.
:
His arrival in DC is scheduled to coincide with the Supreme Court hearings. More details at
http://webdev.archive.org/texts/bookmobile.php
*lart*
The only reason AShcroft is named is because he is the current attorney general in the US. He has had nothing to do with TCEA.
We need a "(-1, Didn't read the story)"
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
In this section, we have collected the legal documents involved in the case. The case began in a federal district court. We appealed the decision of the district court to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. That court's decision is now before the Supreme Court. Click on a link below to read the briefs and decisions at each state.
District Court (Jan 1999-Oct 1999)
Court Of Appeals (May 2000-July 2001)
Supreme Court (Oct 2001-present)
How You Can Help
Contribute to the Eldred Legal Defense Fund
While the lawyers in Eldred v. Ashcroft are donating their time, litigation before the United States Supreme Court is still expensive. Your donation, however large or small, can support our fight to preserve the public domain.
If you would like to contribute, please send a check to:
Attach a logo to your web page
If you'd like to help spread awareness, take one of these sample buttons, save it to your site, and use the sample code provided to link back to this site.
The logos are on this page.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
There is and excellent Wired article, that touches the subject.
It gives you the idea of why they had to go with a "low profile" like Eldred and not some one like Michael Hartthe of the Gutenberg project.
Really an interresting read.
Murphy(c)
Why do the copyrights have to be so long anyway? If a creator of a work dies lets their heirs control what can be done with the item, those heirs will likely be dead before the copyright will be up. At this rate someone could have died durring WWII and their copyright on their works would still be good.
Just a thought.
This is probably the best collection of public domain poetry. Enjoy.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Supreme Court upholds copyright extension vs. Supreme Court rejects copyright extension
Shall we start the odds at 1:1000000?
"All your judgements are belong to us"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is anyone planning to go to the Supreme Court on October 9 to let the Justices know their opinion?
Except that the circuit court disagrees with you. In that case (it was an appeal of an earlier one) the judge did state explicitely that the incrimental expansions, done retroactively, (a) do not inspire the artists to create more (Walt Disney sure doesn't benefit) and (b) when taken together, they *are* indefinite. It is the natural state of things that their copyrights should expire. Copyrights should be expiring every year. In fact, they aren't. Nothing has entered the public domain this way in *decades.*
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
It extended the law by set amount of time, not indefinately, which means that the "limited time" clause is still literally true.
So if they extended it to 1000 years, it would still be constitutional?
discoveries- aka, published words and inventions - not digital representations of movies, music, cartoons,
I know you know better, but confusing copyright and patents is not a good thing to do when discussing this stuff. Scientific facts also cannot be patented, which most things that qualify as "discoveries" would be.
TCEA is a valid law by way of the Constitution, even if it is harmful
Is it? I think it goes against the clear spirit and meaning of the constitution. That's what the supreme court is there for anyway, to interpert the meaning of the constitution.
A much better way to make this unjust law go away is through Congress
That would be nice, but it is mostly the same congress that passed it, why would they change their mind now?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Every google search I've tried has come up with websites that either are put up either by the plantif or someone who filed an amicus brief in favor of the plantiff. Can anyone find something in support of Asscr^H^H^H^H^H^H err, Ashcroft?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Care to read it?
Is it provable in a court of law that extending the duration of copyright by this set amount of time promotes the progress of science and useful arts, or are promoted just as much by the previous duration?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I think the argument would be that retroactive extension of copyright does not satisfy the phrase "to promote", because of the rather obvious temporal properties of causality. You cannot promote the occurrence of something that occurred in the past.
There is also the matter that repeated retroactive extensions, each one happening shortly before Mickey Mouse expires, do not really satisfy the phrase "limited Times".
The Constitution does not say "To do whatever they like, by securing to Authors and Inventors and the Corporations that employ them the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" -- it does not grant Congress the right to regulate copyright as they see fit, but instead gives specific indication of the circumstances under which this legislative restraint on speech and trade is to be allowed.
As Lessig, Sullivan, et al.'s brief notes, the argument is not that Congress doesn't have the right to regulate copyright, but that the clause imposes limits:
There's no doubt that copyright fosters invention and discovery. We're not talking about abolishing copyright itself. We're just saying that handing out a longer copyright for a piece of progress that's already completed can't possibly foster invention or discovery, especially when most of these windfalls are going to corporations representing the works of dead guys.
-- Dreamword
(Becoming a common law fan more and more each day)
Copyright is meant to promote creative works by allowing creators to benefit from them. You can't benefit from something when you are dead.
I disagree, yes anyone can form a corporation but that only provides one with the standard protections of all corporations, specifically protection against personal liability, but this thread isn't about that kind of protection.
What most people object to is the extra attention given large corporations, attention unavailable to any corporate entity or person who doesn't have lots of cash to give to politicians and high-power Washington lobbies. That's the form of plutocracy we have in the U.S., and it's very real.
Both are written in "plain english" that any of the slashdot readers should be able to understand.
I'm not going to discuss them, the article on wired does that, partially...
For those interested, the links are:
Reply Brief for the Petitioners and
Government Response Brief
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Moreover, the CTEA's backers say, the question of whether the law is good policy is entirely different from whether its action is constitutional. When has it ever been illegal for Congress to pass bad laws?
Gotta love logic like that- you can't take this to court since it deals with Congress's ability to pass bad laws!III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
No doubt, the public policy of well-monied interests getting special treatment granted to them by Congress every so many years at the expense of the public domain is of dubious value to society. No doubt, the "social contract" between authors and the public that is Copyright hardly requires such overreaching. To the contrary, the Sony Bono bill was bad law, bad policy and generally bad bad bad.
That isn't the question in Eldred v. Ashcroft. Here, the question is whether it is unconstitutional. I say this, because I would like my colleagues on Slashdot to realize the high likelihood that the Supreme Court may not opt to overturn this law, and can do so with the highest appreciation for all of these concerns. Deference of the judiciary to the Congress to make decisions, even bad decisions, is the rule, and it is highly likely that the rule will be followed in any given case.
But here, as the various briefs filed on both sides might indicate, the issues are far from trivial. I would commend to my colleages a careful reading of ALL the briefs, and all the issues before concluding that the Supreme Court has an easy call to "do the right thing." Legally, it is far from obvious that Eldred has the best of the argument.
In short, the vitreol may more properly be directed to the Congress that chose to pass the law than to the Court that may merely conclude that it is not its province to reverse a lousy decision made by the Legislative and Executive branches.
While I support the Eldred/Lessig position, this Business Week article doesn't really tell us anything new or interesting about this case that hasn't been seen here before.
In fact, it's overblown. This case is hardly "a case to define the digital age" as the article has it. This is an argument about whether Congress can extend legacy copyright from 50 to 70 years after the death of the holder. So if the government wins, what changes? Nothing. The European Union changed its copyright term to 70 years throughout the EU back in the mid-1990s, and I don't see that it's made much difference. If corporations are going to lose "billions in lost revenue" then they will 20 years down the road instead.
The copyright laws apply to all media and performance styles. Digital is but a small part of all the possible media consequences, of course, although it will get more important.
The worrying implication, I suppose one could make, is that if the CTEA is waved through, then the way is open for Congress to keep punting out the copyright envelope out further and further (perhaps to protect Mickey Mouse) - 100 years, 120 years, why not 150 years? Sadly, that's not the direct issue in this case.
The article is also confused about copyright of works themselves and other issues, such as format, editing, translation and so on. The Adobe issue the article mentions isn't about Middlemarch's copyright (which has unambiguously expired) but about proprietary formats - anyone in the world can buy a old copy of Middlemarch, sit down and type it out and post it on their website or print it off. As for Aristotle's Politics - someone has to translate that into English (for example), and edit it, and maybe do footnotes and an introduction. That's different than the underlying copyright of the work itself. But Business Week doesn't clock that.
But what I really fail to see is that somehow, if Eldred et al win, this has implications for the DMCA. These issues are so different that there isn't an obvious connection from one to the other (except that both the CTEA and DMCA suck generally). Copyright issues involving software and so on are much more akin to pharmaceuticals and medicine than books and poems - but that's really another story. I can see there's a global connection - Congress having a constitutional imperative to pass copyright laws that promote "science and useful arts". But that's going to require a case by case, or an act by act, resolution, whether Eldred wins or not. Traditionally, the Supreme Court sends those type of issues back to Congress to decide, and that's probably what will happen here, so don't hold your breath.
The whole point is that new creation is very often based on old creation, viz Cinderella, Snow White, et al. These days, all these copyright extensions do is protect the profit of the corporations.
Heinlein said (as quoted by Yale Law in Top Ten New Copyright Crimes,
This pretty much says it all. What is a copyright extension but "turning back the clock?" I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the Supremes will follow the intent of the framers of the Constitution, rather than pandering to those in Congress who are in the pockets of those who have a vested interest in keeping the laws as they are, or worse.
The Los Angeles Times has a very good article about this whole thing, with particular emphasis on Lessig and on the historical perspective (this debate goes back more than two hundred years); find it here.
Would it?
*Limited* times. With respect to a human lifetime, 1000 years is not limited.
Nothing has fallen out of copyright since almost 50 years before I was born. How is that limited?
Sadly, yes.
Maybe congress should try to push it a little farther. The next law could extend the copyright for (as my old calculus professor would put it) "a large, but finite, amount of time".
IOW, too large to represent with any number system, but technically not actually infinity. Who knows, it could still satisfy the constitutional mandate for a "limit".
The case of HP Lovecraft's fiction seems to confirm that current copyright laws do defeat the aim of promoting new works.
Lovecraft wrote wierd ficton up to his death in 1937. In his fiction, he develops what has become known as the "Cthulhu Mythos", an outlook and setting for cosmic horror. During his lifetime, he actively sought collaboration with others to work with this "mythos", and extend it.
Because of when he wrote much of his fiction, and due to details concerning how his estate handled the copyright of his body of work, much, if not all, of his fiction is today in public domain.
Partly because of how he actively sought other authors of wierd fiction to participate and extend his mythos, and partly because of the fact that his work is still in public domain, there have been very tangible results:
Many years ago, I loaned out all my Lovecraft books, and inevitably, no longer have them. When I recently underwent a hankering to re-read these great stories, I downloaded them into my visor using Plucker. I've also gone out and restocked my library with printed versions of Lovecraft's works.
From this small sampling, I think it's very clear that Lovecraft's openess and the copyright status of his works have truly encouraged people to keep creating and building on his foundation.
There is a staggering number of books which are under copyright, but have long since gone out of print. How much knowledge is unavailable because of this, and how many new works which could have been built or inspired by them were never created?
I shudder to think that it would be quite possible that Lovecraft could today be out of print because of copyright. Had others not built on his work, I doubt as many people who are fans of his work would have had the chance to be exposed to him, and thus preclude demand for his fiction.
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. - Johann Sebastian Bach
I love creative arguments:
" And it would be a grand defeat for corporations, which claim they would forfeit billions in lost revenues."
And if Congress doesn't let me pass this bill requiring each of the earth's 6 billion inhabitants pay me an annual tax of $1, I stand to lose billions!
(a nice portion of which I'll hand over to lawmakers who see things my way...)
How exactly did they suggest Ashcroft is behind this?
The U.S. Constitution prohibits people from suing Congress. So if you want a federal law invalidated, you sue the current Attorney General in his or her official capacity as Attorney General to get an injunction against enforcing the law.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think the meat of their argument is that it's an obviously bad law, and they would have the best chance if they could get it overturned on those grounds. Unfortunately I don't think the semantics of our legal system will allow them to get at the heart of the matter. Instead they have to argue that congress is not constitutionally allowed to make such a law. I'm not familiar enough with the law to predict the outcome of that, but it seems a lot less likely to go in their favor.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
It's not like Reno had much to do with it either, though. Congress passed the bill into law. At the time it was dubbed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, as he and later his widow pushed for it. Bono was actually in favour of unlimited copyright terms, but that is prohibited by the US constitution.
Copyright terms are still "limited", they're just a hell of a lot longer than they were 200 years ago.
A 19-year extension in 1978 (56 to 75 years). A 20-year extension in 1998 (75 to 95 years). If Congress continues to pass a 20-year extension every 20 years, it exploits a loophole in the Constitution to create what amounts to "perpetual copyright on the installment plan," as some legal scholars have put it. You call that "limited"?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Don't get me wrong; I hate the Bono Act as much as anybody else here. But I still can't resist the urge to play devil's advocate:
Gershwin's estate can't do anything for progress
Wrong. The royalties from "Rhapsody in Blue" help pay for the education of those named in Gershwin's last will and testament, so that they can go to music school and eventually continue to produce new musical works.
The retroactive portion of the CTEA really pushes the outside of any reasonable definition of "limited".
According to a mathematician, infinity is still a limit. Positive infinity is the limit of 1/x as x approaches 0 from the positive side.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There's also the point that the exclusive rights are secured *to the authors* for a limited time. Now that does not preclude the author from selling this right to a publisher. But the extension of copyright does not grant anything to the author, who is dead. Perhaps the descendents of the author could sue the publisher, saying that when the author sold his copyright interest he received payment for the 50 years (or whatever) outstanding, but never received any payment for these extra years which Congress is creating. Instead of the 20 years accruing to Disney or whoever, they should be granted to the authors' descendants.
(If copyright extension is to be granted at all, which I'd hope not - giving extra monopolies to descendents of long-dead authors is a sucky idea and not really any better than subsidizing Disney.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Do not introduce the chaos of factual numbers into the discussion!
Yeah, right.
While I agree with your cause, your statement is wrong. Sorry if this is nitpicking, but when it comes to legal semantics, you want to be as precise as possible.
Works can enter the public domain 2 ways -
1) Authors can wave it at anytime before it expires (and this does happen a lot, just check out the baen free library).
2) Works continued to enter the public domain (via expired copyrights) up until the first of a series of copyright extensions in 1961. The statement "Nothing written within 50 years of my being born has had its copyright expire" would be correct, but yours is not.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
So how does granting exclusive rights to dead people help promote science and useful arts?
The Gershwin estate's royalties on "Rhapsody in Blue" pay for the Gershwin kids' music school.
The real reason why Congress passed the Bono Act, if you're willing to ignore bri^W campaign contributions from DisneyCo and Time Warner, is that the European Union had recently harmonized its copyright law based on German law, which gave a life plus 70 year term, and American authors were threatening to become permanent residents of Europe. Congress didn't want a significant artistic brain drain, so it did what any competitive firm would do in such a supply-and-demand situation: it increased how much it was willing to pay (measured in years of monopoly) for works, to compete with what Europe was offering.
That's why I'm not buying Square's Disney-licensed RPG Kingdom Hearts, even if I do get a PS2 before the PS3 comes out.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"Limited time" is terribly vague, but "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," is clear. Extending copyright so that a corporation which did not create a work, can continue to rake in bucks, and prevent artists from producing similar works, does not promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts It stifles those things. Arguing this point may serve the public domain better than arguing over what "limited time" meant.
How ya like dat?
I'm sorry, I was calculating based on life+70 years, but I've seen some other posts assuming life+90. In that case, not only will most citizens never see the freedom of works made before their birth, most citizen's CHILDREN will never see those works either.
Can you imagine walking into a store in your 60s and paying $18 (2002 equivalent, scale for inflation) for some music that was copyrighted before your parents were born? Does that fit your definition of "limited copyright"?
Again, sorry for replying to myself.
There is an amicus brief by 17 economists (including Nobel prizewinners) explaining why that argument is wrong, and also refuting other supposed incentives for new works from copyright extensions. (In fact, they argue that copyright extension forms a disincentive to new works by expanding the monopoly on building-block materials.) An excerpt:
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
Quite being lazy and write your own book.
For books, that may be possible, but for musical works, I'm not so sure. The standard for copying under United States copyright law is substantial similarity, and courts have found that matching four notes of another song's hook is more than enough to make one melody substantially similar to another (Handel v. Silver). To match four notes, given that what key they're played in is irrelevant, you have to match the pitch interval from one note to the next, and the time interval from one note to the next. There are fewer than 50,000 possible melodic hooks (read this page for details).
So how is it possible to write a song without stepping on somebody else's copyright?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sadly, yes.
I think the Supreme Court will agree that the writers of the Constitution meant "limited" in the human sense, not the mathematical sense.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Although he seems to be doing both...
Remember the oregon assisted suicide?
This page left intentionally blank.
Every book is in some way derivative of previous works. Without the public domain, it becomes legally impossible to "write your own book".
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
If I remember correctly, I was taught the copyright laws were there to allow the creator of "some thing" to prevent big faceless corporations from making a mint without passing along some of their good fortune.
It seems to me that copyright laws are becoming a a method of allowing big faceless corporations to screw the public out of as much money as possible.
The government counters that the 1998 Act promotes the arts by protecting their economic value, thereby fostering greater incentives to create.
What a load of fetid dingoes kidneys. I've never met anybody with a creative flair who does it for the money.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
The politicians represent those who get them elected into office. These days, the main thing it takes to get elected is wads and wads of cash. Do the math....
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Lessig actually had a very interesting counter-argument for this point. His argument was that in a legal sense, limited means not only finite but also for a fixed time. If you allow retrospective extensions, the time is no longer limited because it can be extended indefinitely. He argues from a standard legal position, that when a lawyer is given an extension for his case, the time is no longer limited. I'm not sure if that's actually a standard usage, but if it is then it's a very strong counterargument.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
There are problems with this line of reasoning. Copyright law isn't a codification of some obvious "natural right" to have control of your creative works after your death. In fact, it's a rather arbitrary set of laws that was put in place to protect creators from the worst effects of the cheapness of copying information.
Copyright law is vital, because it provides a great deal of incentive to creators, allowing them to profit from their work. But the purpose isn't to ensure creative people a livelihood, but to ensure that the marketplace of ideas is continually being resupplied and enriched.
Public domain is also a vital part of the equation. I believe that all ideas ultimately belong in the public domain, and the only argument is over what sort of delay is most effective in cultivating new ideas. The reason for this is simple: No person, no matter how creative, has ever given more to the marketplace of ideas than he or she received from it. Every work, no matter how original or unique, was inspired or influenced by ideas that did not belong to the author of the work.
For any person or group of people to say that it's right for them to have sole ownership of their own ideas until the sun goes nova is simply unethical. They're benefitting from the seething collection of memes that makes up our culture, while minimizing their own contribution to that culture.
Disney's willingness to use public domain works like "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and the Grimm Brothers' stories, and then lock up the resulting ideas for what increasingly looks to be an unlimited time, is just one of the more obviously hypocritical examples of copyright run amok. Another example would be a play called, "The Wind Done Gone," which was a satire of "Gone With the Wind" as told by Scarlett's black slaves. The estate successfully sued because they'd taken the time to fill out the copyright renewal form every twenty-five years. In other words, an idea was never allowed into the marketplace of ideas, in order to protect the revenue stream to the great grandchildren of a creative person.
Ideas aren't physical property, and to imply--as you seem to be doing--that a creator like Robert Frost has a clear right to his or her ideas for as long as he has living descendants is simply untenable. If we treat ideas as physical property, we will end up in a world where you cannot create anything of significance without paying royalties to thousands of people who were fortunate enough to have a creative ancestor.
Do creators deserve to benefit from their work? Certainly. But for their entire lives, and at the expense of the health of our overall culture? No. Creators can certainly recoup their investment within 20 or 30 years, if their ideas have any value at all. I find it ludicrous that anyone at all is actually motivated by the idea of receiving royalty checks hundreds of years after his or her death, and I find it even more ludicrous that this additional motivation provides more benefit to society than the release of these works to the public domain.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
It's just that this time it's between Disney and Congress.
The fact that we have to expend so much time and effort just to get the legal system to recognize such an obvious injustice points back to the fact that the government is in need of fundamental reform. Get the money out of campaigns and the courts would never have to entertain such a travesty.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Remember that Mickey Mouse is also a trademark of Disney, and that Trademarks do not have the same expiration requirements that copyrights have. Disney could use their trademarks to prevent new works from being made with Mickey Mouse or Goofy's likeness.
The commenter obviously didn't read the story, much less the articles linked to it. The Supreme Court may or may not vote that Congress overstepped its boundaries. This has nothing to do with MS or oil companies. The poster's expression of disdain (same old same old) assumes that the Supreme Court will answer to the same pressures as our elected representatives - it's possible, but it remains to be seen.
How can the parent post be modded as "Informative"?!
It's nothing but a slanted, myopic and imbalanced view of economic policy that quite delibrately ignores all evidence except that which supports the author's point-- that all Democrats are "Marxist". (Do I hear a McCarthy-esque "Communist!" witch-hunt in the offing?)
I'm going to try to keep my disagreement civil, and point out the actual context in which the prior poster cited the Democrats' Marxist planks. Here goes:
1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rent to public purpose.
You cite the War on Drugs as simply a Democratic excuse for the government to appropriate property for the purpose of a more centralized society. Go ahead and do the math for me, and tell me what percentage of land in the US is owned by the public... that's right, I thought so. Furthermore, you may note also that the War on Drugs was most strongly persecuted by a Republican administration (Reagan in the 80s... remember D.A.R.E?) So I hardly think that it can all have been part of some Democratic Marxist master plan.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Again, go check your numbers. The US has one of the lowest tax rates among industrialized countries... witness all the European countries as examples of how much wealth the US government leaves to individual industrialists. Furthermore, in a Marxist system the progressive/graduated income tax is used to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. And don't even give me some crock about welfare... we spend a large portion of our collected income tax on a) making the giant bureaucracy that runs our country work, and b) national defense. Again, your skewed interpretation of the facts betrays little knowledge of where your tax money actually goes.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance
Here, I have to admit you have a valid point. Inheritance rights have eroded somewhat in the form of higher inheritance taxes and such. However, you'll note that one of the planks on which Bush ran was the reduction of the inheritance taxes. Of course, he hasn't been able to push that through Congress because nobody else wants to alienate all of the voting masses who DON'T have an inheritance. Democracy's a bitch, eh?
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels
You cite the 1997 Crime/Terrorist bill as an example of Democratic repression... may I use the USA PATRIOT act as a counter-example? I can hardly think of any such repressionistic law in our nation's history... and it was passed into law by a Republican administration. With regard to property seizure by the Department of Urban Development, well, I bet you certainly enjoy the convenience of having a superhighway to get from City(A) to City(B). Don't kid yourself; without property seizue by the government (beginning way back in the Eisenhower administration, BTW- was he a Democrat? Nope, sorry...) those superhighways wouldn't be there.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Again, you clearly misinterpret the function of one of our most important economic institutions. The Federal Reserve's job is to print our national currency and set the rate at which it is lent to the biggest banks. It is the glue that holds our nation's economy together. Can you imagine if every state printed it's own money? They used to do so, a couple hundred years ago. Would you like to have to change a Virginian dollar for a New York dollar? What would the exchange rate be? What would happen when your Montana money was worth less than you thought it would be in Vegas? Would you try your luck in California? As for the Fed's role as the instrument of monetary policy, look at the effects of runaway inflation on some countries in South America and tell me you're not happy to have Greenspan up in that room agonizing over how to set interest rates. Or maybe you'd rather pay $4,576.82 for a loaf of bread tomorrow?
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the State
Maybe you forgot that the government SUBSIDIZED those railroads? That they wouldn't exist if it weren't for the millions of dollars that the government spent to persuade private companies to install them? I should think they have some right to regulate them, since they initiated their construction in the first place. And perhaps you didn't realize this either, but the telecommunications industry is a monopoly-based one... the only kind of company that can survive is the one that owns ALL the lines and equipment because only then is it cost-effective to route phone calls and data signals across the entire nation. The FCC exists to keep Verizon (or whomever your local telephone provider is) from ass-raping you on your phone bill. Don't start making stuff up about how the FCC own and control all telecommunication in our country; they don't own a damn thing and all they do is provide some regulations so the giant phone and TV companies don't bleed their customers dry and interfere with each other's air frequencies. If it weren't for the FCC, you'd pay $1,000/month for telephone service and television and radio as we know it would not exist because any local jock could simply use the airwaves for whatever he felt like. (You don't have to like the TV/Radio industries, but you can't deny that we all are better off than we would be without them...)
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
Here you rattle off a lengthy list of all sorts of government organizations that apparently, in your mind, regulate and control industries in accordance with a common plan. What common plan would that be? The organizations you mentioned all exist basically to rubber-stamp documents okaying corporations plans for industry. The only substantive article under the purview of most of those departments you mentioned is the ability to require an environmental impact study... maybe you'd rather they simply began logging the woods behind your house and dumping in your well without one? Do you really believe that all of those alphabet-soup type organizations are actually part of some Stalinist Five-Year Plan? Come on... for a while, you were raising interesting points, but that just makes you sound like some lunatic conspiracy theorist type, (are you?) and does nothing at all to illustrate your point, (which was, I believe, that the Democratic party is a bunch of Marxist constitution-shredders, right?)
8. Equal liablity of all to labor. Establishment of Industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Okay, now you've drawn a connection between the national debt and your own individual personal debt. This is a common fallacy... there is none. The national debt has been growing since around 1820, IIRC. Personal debt has only become a problem in the last ten years with the growing availability of credit cards to anyone with a pulse. In fact, the last time our country wasn't in debt, the greatest depression of the pre-Civil War era immediately followed. While some would argue the point, such great economic leaders of our country like Alexander Hamilton believe that a controlled national debt was essential to keep the economy functioning. (You do know that he was one of the founding fathers and the very first Secretary of the Treasury, right?) That was wayyy before Marx, by the way...
And you seem to somehow associate the DESIRE of women to work (remember the whole equality of the sexes movement in the 70s?) with the Marxist Democrats, as well. I hate to break it to you, but those feminists, man, they want to work... they want the right to be drafted... it's an equality thing. If you want to tell them that they can't have total equality with men because it's too "Marxist", well then be my guest... personally, I'd rather not get kicked in the balls by my girlfriend, though. I wish you the best of luck in that one.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
You cite a bunch of random-ass laws and don't say what their effect has been. You're suggesting that these zoning acts have been enacted to redistribute people evenly around the country and this somehow ties in with Democratic Marxism. Except that you might want to note that the Democratic power base is actually mostly located in cities (especially Californian cities & New York, Boston, etc.). Why on earth would they want to break up their biggest electorate and distribute them to rural districts all across the country?
Oh, and that whole nexus of agriculture and manufacturing... that's called the Industrial Revolution, and it, too, started well before Marx did. It's what puts food on your table every night and gives you time to post on Slashdot rather than growing it all yourself. And you can't blame the Democrats for that. (You can blame some guy from England who smuggled over some blueprints for the first textile mill in the 1800s, though, if you want to go back in time to yell at him or kick his ass, maybe.)
10. Free education for all children in government schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. etc.
If you want to complain about the public education system, then complain that it's not educating our children ENOUGH to become good democratic citizens. Don't complain about it's existence and chalk it up to some Marxist conspiracy. Or do you really believe that individual parents are capable of educating their children well enough to become productive citizens in today's economy? Most parents want their children to go FARTHER than they did in life... the next rung of education, a higher position in life, call it what you will but you can't go any farther than your Dad if he's the only one teaching you.
I normally don't post at all, but I felt your comments were so off-base and clearly biased, slanted and unbalanced (and I was so infuriated that they were moderated "Informative"!) that I felt compelled to respond. I hope to read your counterarguments soon. (Don't just be lame and flame me because I disagree with you!)
-d
Please. How much profit can be generated from something 70 years ago? On the scale things today, its next to nothing, if anything at all. And there's no gaurantee that even if they do profit, they'll use that profit to invest in the creation of new works. If the government is to make a point like this, it should be the rule, not the exception. It is the rule that the vast majority of copyright holders will not make either trivial or no profits from this; and its heads or tails as to whether they'll use it to invest in new works.
Historical practices also confirm that we should enslave African Americans and burn witches at the stake. The point? Simply because something was done in the past does not make it proper or constitutional. The USSC ruled that it was constitutional for our government to keep innocent Japanese citizens locked up in camps without due cause; that hardly made it constititutional. In short, this is an is-ought fallacy. This is the way things are/were, so this is the way they should be. Anyone that buys this argument shouldn't have passed law-school.
Lets just look at what it says and obviously means, "Limited Times". Meaning that eventually, the copyright will expire. If congress continues retroactively extending the lengths of copyrights, then copyrights will never expire and works will never enter the public domain, as has been the case for decades; works should be entering the public domain continuously. Also, I highly doubt the founding father's meant "Limited Times" to mean life + 75 years. A long copyright term is effectively indefinate from our perspective; Limited Times does not mean its constitutional for Congress to extend copyrights retroactively to last a millenium. For one thing, thats an infinite copyright term from the perspective of us mortals; for another, even shorter terms like 100 years may be effectively infinite, as we have no gaurantee the US will even exist in 100 years.
Firstly, this incentive is minimum since there is hardly no profit in it at all. From a profit perspective, author's time would be better spent creating new works, as opposed to restorign old one's. In fact, its undesireable that authors devote considerable time to restoring work; think of what Lucas could have done if he hadn't wasted his and our time making his miserable revised Star Wars IV, V, and VI?
Secondly, without the CTEA, many many other people would restore these works and publish them (the works being public domain). People would do it for free, as Project Gutenberg would have done. There is a stronger net motivation for all of us to restore an old work, because we care about artistic merit; than for the typical author, because (s)he's concerned with doing something profitable.
That's so vague and unsubstantiated that responding to it is impossible. However, I doubt the CTEA will have any significant impact on international trade.
Firstly, history shows this is part of a string of a series of infinite expansions; this is but the latest retroactive copyright extension. Why should we trust what congress says? In 70 more years, they'll pass another extension act to "harmonize" with Europe and again make the same absurd claims. In short, we can't take Congress at its word that this isn't one in a series of infinite expansions. Secondly, this harmonization stuff is bullshit. Simply because Europe does things backwards, so should we? If Europe extends copyrights to last a million years, we should do so as well for the sake of "harmonization"? This is obviously another fallacy -- ad-populum. Simply because something is popular (i.e., unreasonably long copyright terms) does not mean it should be adapted. This is like saying "we should steal and lie and cheat because everyone else is doing so and if we don't we'll be taken advantage of"; this is hardly a moral justification, but rather a rationalization. Its essentially saying two wrongs make a right. -1 + -1 somehow equals +1 according to the government; no, it equals -2. Considering the CTEA singly, yes. However, the CTEA must be considered together with all of the other copyright extensions; a work has not entered the public domain in decades. Clearly, Congress will continue extending copyrights retroactively forever, or until Disney stops lobbying them to (w/c is never). Yes, but i doubt that those extensions were retroactive. Furthermore, they would be mortified at the latest trend of retroactive extension after retroactive extension. Jefferson and Madison never wanted there to be an entire decade where no works entered the public domain.
Again, this is another fallacy. I don't know what the name of this one is, but in effect its "I'm right by association". Because famous/admired/etc figure X agrees with me, I must be right.
Essentially, Congress is on a slippery slope to what is effectively infinite copyright terms, from our perspective. They have continually retroactively extended copyrights; the pattern is clear, and its safe to infer that in another 70 years, they'll pass another piece of legislation like the CTEA. Its true that a slippery slope is a fallacy if unsupported. However, in light of obvious trends and other evidence, its not. We see slippery slopes everywhere. Look at computer programming; code has steadily gotten sloppier and sloppier. Look at university tuitions, which have continually been increased year after year, the increases being far in excess of inflation; not so long ago, $10,000 got you into the most expensive colleges; now, its $30,000. Its safe to say that at some point in the future (probably soone than we imagine), it'll be $100,000. Similarly with congress and copyright exetensions. Congress has always found some pathetic faulty reason to retroactively extend copyrights; they will continue to do so unless stopped by the courts.
Aside from that, there is somthing fundamentally wrong and (I argue) unconstitutional about retroactive laws. In the case of criminal laws, its clearly a violation of people's rights; its obviously a violation of people's rights if congress illegalizes cigaratte smoking and then arrests all the people who've ever smoked a cigaratte in their life. In the case of copyright extensions, it is essentially the government renigging on an agreement with the people. Basically, copyright laws are an agreement between the people, the government, and copyright holders that "we the people will pay taxes to support your copyright rights, and will pay for those works according to market price while they're protected; in exchange, in X years, those works will fall into the public domain". What the government's doing is continually changing both the scope of copyright protection, and the duration, retroactively; it would be like me writing up a contract with you saying that you'll pay me $500 to do something, and then -- without your consent -- changing that figure to $1,000.
My argument is essentially that (1) In all cases, retroactive laws are unconstitutional; (2) Copyright protections of Life + 70 years are effectively unlimited from the public's point of view, as no one will life the life of an author plus 70 years.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
And it's a good thing, too. Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to call Tom Daschle and Joe Lieberman to discuss plans for socialist revolution. I hear Lloyd Bentsen has a good blueprint for the violent overthrow of the government. And you should hear Al Gore wax poetic about the withering away of the state!
Don't confuse the issue. The question is not whether I can take Mr. Frost's work and put my name on it ("The Road Not Taken," by Commodore Sloat - yeah right), but whether years after Mr. Frost's death I should have to pay some company who happens to have gotten ahold of the copyrights to be able to read or distribute his work, with his name on it. We're not talking about plagiarism.
Personally I don't see any rationale behind the idea that an author can sell copyright in the first place - if copyright is there to protect authors' ownership (as well as the public good, as outlined in the US Constitution), then Disney or whoever should not have the right to "buy" the copyright in the first place. But that's another issue - though I wonder why it's an issue that is never represented in debates over copyright.
"Why not simply say the department of justice instead of Ashcroft?"
Because one of the jobs of the Attourney General is to defend the laws Congress and the President have passed. He's named specifically because it's the job he was appointed to. If George of the Jungle happened to be Attourney General, the case would be "Eldred v. George of the Jungle."
Sonny Bono gets a Copyright law passed that will extend the term that Scientology can attempt to keep knowledge of their sham from the general public.
Coincidence, how? Bono died in January of '98. It is unlikely, no bizarre, to suggest that he fell on his sword for the faithful.
The CTEA passed in 1998 directly benefits Scientology and is a very bad law.
A truly staggering analysis.
I seriously doubt that's what the original poster was saying, but I love the idea!! L. Ron promises you 72 beautiful copies of Dianetics if you smash yourself into some trees to promote copyright law!
If it would keep Sonny and Cher's music from being played again, I would be for unlimited copyrights too.
also remember that the copyright clock doesn't start counting down until the originator of the work is dead. Copyright law was meant to encourage new works by authors etc. When was the last time Robert Frost whipped out his pen and scribbled out a new poem for us all to enjoy?
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Umm, I believe the courts can decide that something passed by congress is unconstitutional Jack. The courts can pass judgement on any law that comes before them and strike it down if they please.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Psuedo-Limited. As soon as the additions are likely to run out, they will add more.
(o/t) The 1000 year thing - I highly doubt that the empire that is the United States will even be around in another thousand years. All states of greed and corruption will die eventually. Even if it remains the United States it must be in a different form. More like a world government will be there then (hopefully a good one)
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
Just thank god Robert Bork IS NOT there now. Holy crap, what a horrible typo to make.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Why not make Copyright function similar to Trademarks (in that they have a given term, can be renewed indefinately for a price, but once they lapse to Public Domain, there's no going back.
Since the plaintiffs state that they're more concerned with all the other works being held up by Copyright extension, they don't care about Mickey Mouse at all, but at the same time Disney does care about Mickey Mouse, who is still a marketable commodity -- the works that aren't being promoted by their authors anymore (and as such, are violating the reason for Copyright as given in the Constitution) lapse, while those who are still actively using and promoting their work can pay to keep it.
Seems like a win-win situation to me.
NO CARRIER
Look at this brief from the Eldred v. Reno case (start at paragraph 61). In 1961, copyright lasted 28 years and could be renewed for another 28 years (56 years total). So works published in 1905 entered the public domain in 1961. From 1962 to 1976, congress enacted ten copyright extensions. Every one of those extensions applied retroactively. At all times during those 14 years, copyright extended back to 1906. In 1976, copyright lasted 75 years (or the life of the author plus 50 years). So works published in 1906 began appearing in the public domain in 1981.
Actually, setting copyright/patent to 1000 years would run up against the law of perpetuities. There is a common law and statutory rule against arbitrarily setting periods too high.
The standard is a little tougher to prove. The Court must determine, not that they do provide incentive, but, that they could do so.
No, actually the answer you're looking for is "post something that is positive in michael's view" because he's such an asshole. :D
If Ashcroft resigned tomorrow and a new AG was appointed, the case would be renamed to Eldred v. [insert AG name here]. It's just a tradition. When filed, the case was called Eldred v. Reno.
Companies like Disney, Pixar, et al. have the choice to do derivative works or original ones. The original ones are very much more hit and miss than old reliable favorites and there is a natural tendency to go more and more the safe, derivative route. This does not optimally promote the progress of the arts and sciences. By, on a well known schedule, eliminating the monopoly after a period of time it shifts the equation more towards original works and promotes greater progress.
If Disney can't cut it, can't take its huge pile of cash and make a new character to replace its old, now public domain revenue streams, it doesn't deserve to survive. I think the creative people at Disney could do it, why don't you?
Actually, it's worse than that. You could rationally argue that an author might be motivated by benefits to his/her heirs. However, because promises of future money have to be depreciated to arrive at a present value, even extending copyright terms to forever provides virtually no added incentive. (Put in more concrete terms, you could get the same benefit to your heirs by investing a few dollars now, so it's only worth a few dollars at best.)
In short, the only economic effect of extending copyright terms is a windfall to present copyright holders. See the amicus brief I linked to above for a full analysis.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
If the SC rules that an arbitrary limit of X years meets the Constitutional mandate, then it is overstepping its bounds and actually legislating, something which Congress is supposed to do.
Supposed to, but when Congress doesn't do what it is supposed to, the other branches have to assert checks and balances. In this case, the Supreme Court interprets whether Congress broke the law by passing an act in violation of the Constitution. If this has a side effect of dictating what the law should have been, then it's not the only side effect: look at all the executive ministries (FDA, FCC, etc.) whose legis^W regulations have the force of law.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yeah, just keep telling yourself that, it's easier that way.
What's likely to happen then? Do you guys really think the copyright cartel will take that sitting down?
I think what will happen is that the copyright cartel will bribe Congress into passing another CTEA with an even longer extension (enough to make up the difference in time between the last CTEA and now, at the very least). And then that will go through the legal process and eventually be struck down. And then Congress passes another one.
And another one.
And another one.
Until eventually the SC does not strike it down.
But any way you look at it, if Congress has enough incentive, they can keep passing the same law(s) that the SC keeps striking down, and those laws will have force until they reach the SC.
So what, exactly, prevents Congress from doing what I describe above?
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Try Copyright.
The purpose of Article 1 Section 8 is clearly to promote progress. The method chosen to encourage progress is to secure rights to authors and inventors. At issue here is whether or not the particulars of this method, as currently legislated, actually support the original purpose.
The theory of copyright is an economic one. The basic premise is that authors are encouraged to create by receiving monetary incentives in the form of an artifical, government-sponsored monopoly on their created works. Unfortunately, the economic value of said monopoly diminishes with time, and as a result there comes a time when the value of the public welfare is greater than the interest of the author. This is certainly true once the author is dead, hence in my opinion, copyright should never extend past the lifetime of the author.
TCEA needs to be repealed, but the Supreme Court is a very very bad place to do it. TCEA is a valid law by way of the Constitution, even if it is harmful.
The United States government operates on a principle of checks-and-balances. The purpose of the Legislative branch is to create the law (Article 1 Section 1), and the purpose of the Judicial branch is to interpret and validate the law (Article 3 Section 1). The purpose of the Supreme Court is to validate the constitutionality of laws passed by the Congress, hence is the proper (and only) venue in which to decide this issue.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
1) Authors can wave it at anytime before it expires (and this does happen a lot, just check out the baen free library.
Works in the Baen Free Library are most certainly NOT in the public domain! The copyrights on those books are still owned by their AUTHORS, who have LOANED the works to the library for purposes of distribution to all.
This loan can be revoked at will, and in fact, the libary asks its authors to not have more than five or six works loaned to the library at any one time.
Were those works truly in the public domain, anyone could publish, say, On Basilisk Station in paper form, competing with Baen's version.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
It's a general Constitutional principal. The federal gov't is explicitly forbidden to do anything that the Constitution does not explicity say that it can do.
-- -- The Dragon De Monsyne
The constitution says why there should be copyrights. But where does it say why it should be limited?
At first glance, the Constitution says that any copyright term should "promote the Progress of Science (i.e. literature) and useful Arts (i.e. technology)"; thus, the most appropriate limits would be the ones that best "promote the Progress". However, Ashcroft's position is that the text "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" is a non-binding preamble and that "limited Times" can represent any finite time, even one billion years.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The Congress shall have Power
.
.
.
I always interpreted it as the power to grant copyrights and patents, while promoting progress was a restriction on that right. This is backwards. Copyrights and patents are merely the means by which congress may exercise its power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
The distinction has major ramifications for the DMCA. Copyright is not a power for congress to tweak with digital rights management. Copyright is the means and limit of congress' power.
Regulating circumvention devices must be an exercise of congress' power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". The clause then goes on to restrict how congress may apply this power, "by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". A circumvention device is certainly not the author's "writing", and it is not the inventor's "discovery".
I know the same argument was made in the DeCSS case (an argument that the court ignored), but the distinction of what power congress is exercising really clarifies things.
Just as a point of clarification, typically authors sell publishing rights to a publisher. They don't actually sell or transfer the copyright. Likewise, they can sell adaptation rights to a movie studio, in which case the studio would control the copyright on any film based on the original work, but would not control the author's original copyright on his own work.
I don't agree that copyright "is there to protect authors' ownership." The Constitution says nothing about authors "owning" their work. Copyright is explicitly described as a privilege, and a limited one at that, not a grant of ownership. It is a mechanism whereby authors or other creators can profit from their endeavors, in the manner described above. If their creations were truly the property of the creators, then there would be no need for copyright protection at all -- authors and their heirs would own their books forever, period, just like as anyone who builds a piece of furniture owns it and passes it along from generation to generation. This is the irony of the Sonny Bono CTEA and, really, of Sonny's position on the matter. Sonny thought copyrights should be treated as real property; in that sense, Sonny didn't believe in copyright at all. The whole purpose of copyright was to distinguish intellectual and creative work from real property, while still providing a profit incentive to creators. By coming perilously close to treating copyright as real property, in effect CTEA invalidates what copyright was created to accomplish.
--Michael
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
mod this guy up, great comment there.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Funny, how is your interpretation literal?
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
So, this obviously means we can give the authors of works sole custody of their intellectual property for a "limited" period of time. That being said, how is it possible to give an individual that no longer exists a copyright? Better yet, what would we have done if Walt Disney had specified in his will that everything having to do with Mickey Mouse be buried with him, so that it would effectively never enter the public domain. Certainly this would not promote the progress of art or science. The issue here is that Congress believes the words "limited time" are based on the timeline of the universe. I don't think the framers of the constitution meant this "limited time" to be relative to the duration of earth.
Based on the congretional interpretation of this clause, you would think it might read something more like:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors, Inventors, [and their heirs and estates] the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
The Supreme Court might not have to define what a limited time is, just that the continued extending of copyrights flies in the face of it. The Court can not decide that copyrights can not last more than X years because it is not in their power to decide that; Congress holds that power. The Court can decide that the pattern of extending the duration of copyrights violates them having a "limited time" OR that Congress does not have the power to extend existing copyrights, each of these having a favorable outcome to the plaitiffs.
Congress' pattern of extending copyrights + DMCA + DRM = perpetual copyright. That is the real problem here. Let's say that a work is published and its access is secured by some access control device under the DMCA. The publisher can effectively "lock out" access to that work FOREVER.
That is definitely the most insane thing about copyrights. How does giving control of the copyright to the dead producer's heirs inspire them to create? They didn't do a thing except tag along for a lucrative ride. And what happens if a copyright is held by a corporation, which is essentially immortal?
Dyolf Knip
Yeah, I know -- and I think that's a good thing. If the public can't agree on which of the top two candidates it wants, but the public does agree that the #3 candidate is a good compromise (2nd choice), then having the #3 candidate elected is the best result.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
IIRC a corporation's copyrights would have expired in 95 years (if Congress weren't going to extend them again).
Well, I think you've hit upon the crux of the matter but you didn't spell it out explicitly. The real problem is whatever quid pro quo Disney et. al. got from Congress. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court can't address that issue. All they can do is determine whether or not Congress acted within their authority. Arguments that they didn't can be made, but they are not as strong as the "Congress was bought" argument which might be useful in a less formal setting, such as a civil court or even a lower criminal court (especially one with a jury of ordinary citizens).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So what, exactly, prevents Congress from doing what I describe above?
Public domain. If the law is struck down, then at least some material (that which would have lapsed into public domain under the previous law) will, in fact, become public domain. And once that happens, it will be perfectly legal to make as many copies as you want--and Congress and the copyright cartel can't touch you. Even if laws were passed such as you suggest, they couldn't apply to material that had already entered the public domain; that would be ex post facto, because it was public domain when it was copied in the first place.
That wouldn't, of course, prevent another CTEA from being passed that applied to works still under copyright at that point, but that doesn't mean it would necessarily pass judicial scrutiny. I could also see Congress attempt to ban the future copying of works whose copyright had lapsed due to the court decision, but I strongly suspect such a law would be thrown out as soon as it was challenged. In any case, the courts aren't stupid, and they wouldn't take kindly to Congress trying to get around them; I could see a decision after two or three times around that "copyright extensions for any reason are invalid".
I think the Supreme Court will agree that the writers of the Constitution meant "limited" in the human sense, not the mathematical sense.
IANAL, but it's quite possible the SC will see "limited" here in a sense akin to "speedy trial" - that the reference is to a more common understanding of "limited" (e.g., life plus fifty) rather than a more mathematical sense of "finite and bounded."
More likely, though, it is the fact that the law keeps being extended retroactively before copyrights can expire that violates the sense of "limited."
The option to "vote the party lineup" sounds like a bad one, since it encourages people to use the (gerrymandered) party lists, rather than think for themselves.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.