Eldred v. Ashcroft

Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). Plaintiffs, led by Internet publisher Eric Eldred, argued that the statute was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court disagreed and allowed the statute to remain in effect.

Contents

• 1 Background

• 2 District court

• 3 Court of Appeals

• 4 Supreme Court opinion

  • 4.1 Dissenting opinions

• 5 Later developments

• 6 See also

• 7 References

• 8 Further reading

• 9 External links

Background

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Eric Eldred, the lead plaintiff

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) extended existing copyright terms by an additional 20 years from the terms set by the Copyright Act of 1976 . The law affected both new and existing works, making it both a prospective extension as well as a retroactive one. Specifically, for works published before January 1, 1978, and still in copyright on October 27, 1998, the term was extended to 95 years. For works authored by individuals on or after January 1, 1978, the copyright term was extended to the life of the author plus 70 years. For works authored by joint authors, the copyright term was extended to the life of the last surviving author plus 70 years. In the case of works-for-hire , anonymous, or pseudonymous works, the term was set at 95 years from the date of first publication, or 120 years from creation.

The practical result of this was to prevent a number of works from entering the public domain in 1998 and following years, as would have occurred under the earlier Copyright Act of 1976 . Materials which the plaintiffs had worked with and were ready to republish were now unavailable due to copyright restrictions that did not exist prior to the passage of CTEA.

The lead petitioner was Internet publisher, Eric Eldred . He was joined by a group of commercial and non-commercial interests who relied on the public domain for their work. These included Dover Publications , a commercial publisher of paperback books ; and Luck's Music Library, Inc. and Edwin F. Kalmus & Co., Inc., publishers of orchestral sheet music. Many amici briefs were contributed by groups including the Free Software Foundation ; Tri-Horn International, a golf publishing and technology company; the American Association of Law Libraries ; the Bureau of National Affairs ; and the College Art Association .

The U.S. government was represented by the Attorney General in an _ex officio _ capacity (originally Janet Reno , later replaced by John Ashcroft ). Several amici briefs supporting CTEA were filed by organizations including the Motion Picture Association of America , the Recording Industry Association of America , ASCAP , and Broadcast Music Incorporated .

District court

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The original complaint was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on January 11, 1999 under the name Eldred v. Reno. The plaintiffs' argument was threefold:

1. That by retroactively extending copyright terms, Congress had violated the requirements of the Constitution 's Copyright Clause , which gives Congress the following power:

   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

   Plaintiffs argued that by reading this formulation so as to allow for any number of retroactive extensions, Congress could in practice guarantee an unlimited period of copyright protection, thus thwarting the intent of the clause.

2. That any copyright law must be subject to scrutiny under the First Amendment , thereby ensuring a balance between freedom of speech and the interests of copyright.

3. That the doctrine of public trust requires the government to show a public benefit to any transfer of public property into private hands, and that the CTEA violates this doctrine by withdrawing material from the public domain.

In response, the government argued that Congress does indeed have the latitude to retroactively extend terms, so long as the individual extensions are also for "limited Times", as required by the Constitution. As an argument for this position, they referred to the Copyright Act of 1790 , the first Federal copyright legislation, which applied Federal protection to existing works. Furthermore, they argued, neither the First Amendment nor the doctrine of public trust is applicable to copyright cases.

On October 28, 1999, Judge June Green issued a brief opinion rejecting all three of the petitioners' arguments. On the first count, she wrote that Congress had the power to extend terms as it wished, as long as the terms themselves were of limited duration. On the second count, she rejected the notion of First Amendment scrutiny in copyright cases, based on her interpretation of _Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., v. Nation Enterprises _, an earlier Supreme Court decision. On the third count, she rejected the notion that public trust doctrine was applicable to copyright law.

Court of Appeals

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The plaintiffs appealed the decision of the district court to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on May 22, 2000. The plaintiffs extended their argument on the copyright clause to note that the clause requires Congress to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", and argued that retroactive extensions do not directly serve this purpose in the standard _quid pro quo _ previously required by the courts. The case was decided on February 16, 2001. The appeals court upheld the decision of the district court in a 2–1 opinion. In his dissent, Judge David Sentelle agreed with the plaintiffs that CTEA was indeed unconstitutional based on the "limited Times" requirement. Supreme Court precedent, he argued, held that one must be able to discern an "outer limit" to a limited power; in the case of retrospective copyright extensions, Congress could continue to extend copyright terms indefinitely through a set of limited extensions, thus rendering the "limited times" requirement meaningless.

Following this ruling, plaintiffs petitioned for a rehearing _en banc _ (in front of the full panel of nine judges). This petition was rejected, 7–2, with Judges Sentelle and David Tatel dissenting.

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