There appear to be at least two issues: * Whether the extension actually induces more creativity * Whether the extension exceeds "limited" It is clear that no amount of extending can coerce Walt Disney to create more cartoons -- he's dead, and so are all the other authors and artists whose work is at issue. So this doesn't pass the "smell test". It is also clear that _retroactively_ extending can't coerce people to create more, since they couldn't possibly have known about it at the time. So this doesn't pass the "smell test", either. There used to be a legal notion of "no perpetuities", which led to limitations such as 100 year bonds, etc. In England, I believe that leases run 99 years for the same reason. At 95 years, we're pretty close to bumping up against that limit, so unless people's average lifespans quickly get extended by modern medicine, it may be difficult for Congress to extend this again. Re people's lifetimes--we may already be at the point where an author may never "die". What if we found some living DNA for Walt Disney and cloned him? Perhaps we could coerce a bit more creativity out of him... It's already a cinch that we'll see Ted Williams out on the baseball fields again. At 10:06 AM 1/16/03 -0500, Bernie Cosell wrote:
On 16 Jan 2003 at 9:44, Michael Kleber wrote:
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.
Why is it clearly unconstitutional? Being mathematicians again, since there is a difference between "finite but unbounded" and "not finite" why couldn't the former be constitutional even if the latter is not?
/Bernie\
-- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <--