On 15 Jan 2003 at 15:45, Henry Baker wrote:
It's not right-wing v. left-wing -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority decision, and she's not normally considered right-wing.
I think that the Supremes were much more worried about things like the balance of trade ...
I agree that it has nothing to do with right-wing vs left-wing, but I also don't think it had anythign to do with balance of trade or other non-judicial issues... I had a different analysiis and had expected this decision on simple, normal legal grounds: there are *VERY*FEW* areas where Congress is given the discretion to do something where the SCOTUS doesn't defer to Congress's ability to *use* that discretion. There were two issues in this case, to my view: one was whether the new limit for copyrights was an allowed interpretation of "for a limited time" and the second is whether it was proper for Congress to extend Copyright limits retroactively. Note that Petitioner (Eldred) *conceded* that the new limit was not an overstepping of Congress's authority. And so the only real question before the court was whether Congress could make that extension retroactive, and that strikes me as a no-brainer [Eldred never had a chance]. The court, quite correctly, IMO, noted the absurdity of Eldred's contention:
... Although conceding that the CTEA's baseline term of life plus 70 years qualifies as a "limited Tim[e]" as applied to future copyrights, petitioners contend that existing copyrights extended to endure for that same term are not "limited." ...
Huh? either the copyright term is a proper "limited time" or it isn't -- trying to argue that it is OK and limited for some copyrighted works but would be excessive and an overstepping of Congress's authority on other works is a CRAZY (imo) argument to be making. So I think that political and conspiracy-theory analyses of this decision are really off the mark. /Bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <--