Bernie Cosell wrote:
Second, as a general rule, the Supreme Court very rarely intrudes on Congress's discretion to "interpret" things, and so it was always unlikely that SCOTUS would get involved in the hairsplitting of "100 yrs is OK, but 110 is not, and life +70 is too long, but maybe life +50 isn't" -- they would view that, quite properly, IMO, as a political question best resolved by Congress rather than a judicial matter cast in concrete by a court decision.
But let's be mathematicians for a moment. Eventually something must deal with the fact that the constitutionsays copyright terms cannot be infinite but can, de facto, be unbounded. So while each extension of the copyright term is itself constitutional, congress could hypothetically extend it for 20 years every 20 years, and that has the same effect as a single clearly unconstitutional action. How can this get resolved? Surely it is the domain of the supreme court -- or maybe of the direct limit of all supreme courts :-)... --Michael Kleber kleber@brandeis.edu