Re: [dvd-discuss] [openlaw] Government takes more extreme lineinsecond "Eldred" case

["John Zulauf" <johnzu(at)ia.nsc.com>]

openlaw@eon.law.harvard.edu wrote:
> 
> In the second challenge to Congress' power to extend the term of
> copyrights, the government has argued for even broader powers than it
> claimed in Eldred I.  In this case, Golan v. Ashcroft, the government now
> claims that Congress has the power not only to extend existing copyrights,
> but also to "restore" the copyright of work that has entered the public
> domain.  And unlike Eldred I, the government does not maintain that
> copyright is "largely" immune from First Amendment scrutiny; now the
> government claims it is totally immune from First Amendment scrutiny.  The
> government has also offered an extraordinary but mistaken theory about the
> history of the 1790 statute.
> 
> Read the government brief and Golan's reply at
> <http://openlaw.org/golanvashcroft/>

The more I read these briefs the more convinced I am that this will
never be settled until "We the People" address the current "To promote
progress in the profits of the oligarchy" Copyright laws.  Arguing that
since the initial copyright matched the European one the framers wanted
us to slavishly follow them is hogwash.  Claiming that shorter terms (28
v 42) insufficiently protected "men of letters" is so ingenuous in the
$1 to the band $10 to the publisher world of media conglomerates that it
should (but won't be) laughed out of the courts.  As I wrote earlier
there is plenty of ammunition to educate the populace on the copyright
pickpockets of our society -- but we have to somehow do it (and right
now proposing lower copyright terms is as politically correct as suggest
the clubbing of baby fur seals) 

The media companies are hobbling and taxing the society as a whole --
and in return we get the occasional LOTR and oodles and oodles of Land
Before Time VII.  This value proposition doesn't work for me anymore,
but eventually the Congress of the USA is going to have act to make it
better.  Cynically this won't happen until other equally rich industries
stand up in protest of the current "First Church of the Holy Copyright"
which is our current political faith.

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