I agree, and it looks like the plaintiff's case was not built very well. Judge herself recognizes that there is possibility of works being under copyright with no necessity, however she sees this disadvantage as a minor one:
It is true that today's ephemera represent tomorrow's social history,
and that works of scholarly value, which are now falling into the public domain
after 28 years, would be protected much longer under the bill. Balanced
against this are the burdens and expenses of renewals, the near impossibility
of distinguishing between types of works in fixing a statutory term, and the
extremely strong case in favor of a life-plus-50 system. Moreover, it is
important to realize that the bill would not restrain scholars from using any
work as source material or from making "fair use" of it; the restrictions would
extend only to the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of copies of the
work, its public performance, or some other use that would actually infringe
the copyright owner's exclusive rights. The advantages of a basic term of
copyright enduring for the life of the author and for 50 years after the author's
death outweigh any possible disadvantages.
I agree. I've used both methods to read the same XML file and I wish Java had an equivalent of.NET XmlReader, it makes parsing simple XML easier since the code is less fragmented.
Slashdot Mirror
It is true that today's ephemera represent tomorrow's social history, and that works of scholarly value, which are now falling into the public domain after 28 years, would be protected much longer under the bill. Balanced against this are the burdens and expenses of renewals, the near impossibility of distinguishing between types of works in fixing a statutory term, and the extremely strong case in favor of a life-plus-50 system. Moreover, it is important to realize that the bill would not restrain scholars from using any work as source material or from making "fair use" of it; the restrictions would extend only to the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of copies of the work, its public performance, or some other use that would actually infringe the copyright owner's exclusive rights. The advantages of a basic term of copyright enduring for the life of the author and for 50 years after the author's death outweigh any possible disadvantages.
I agree. I've used both methods to read the same XML file and I wish Java had an equivalent of .NET XmlReader, it makes parsing simple XML easier since the code is less fragmented.