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Re: [dvd-discuss] Copyright term only increased twice



It's hard to read his "scholarly article" it's so full of rhetorical fallacies 
that it gets tedious after a few pages. I'm on page 40 right now and that's 
double spaced! Strawman arguments "demolished" by ad hominam, irrelvant, 
excluded middle, name calling and in a couple of instances comical - he proves 
what he alleges to disprove. The strawmen are not a pile of shredded straw but 
stand amused.....


On 8 Aug 2002 at 13:47, Bryan Taylor wrote:

Date sent:      	Thu, 8 Aug 2002 13:47:33 -0700 (PDT)
From:           	Bryan Taylor <bryan_w_taylor@yahoo.com>
Subject:        	[dvd-discuss] Copyright term only increased twice
To:             	dvd-discuss <dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu>
Send reply to:  	dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu

> 
> A completely bizarre and amazing argument is put forth by Scott Martin and
> similar arguments were made in the DOJ reply brief. Martin puts it thusly:
> 
> <quote>
> In fact Congress revised its view of the appropriate
> duration of copyright protection only twice in the past forty
> years: once in the 1976 Copyright Act – which changed the term
> from an initial term of 28 years plus a renewal term to a term
> of life-of-the-author plus 50 years (with a commensurate
> increase in the term of protection for existing works), and then
> again in the 1998 Sonny Bono Term Extension Act – which added 20
> years of additional protection to all existing terms of
> copyright. The other nine extensions were short interim
> extensions passed during the deliberation over the 1976 Act in
> order to ensure that authors of works on the cusp of falling
> into the public domain would not be penalized by Congress'
> glacial pace in enacting the new Copyright Act.
> <quote>
> 
> This argument proves what it intends to refute: Congress has made it clear that
> it will not allow any more works to enter the public domain.
> 
> In forty years, it made two fundamental changes. From 28+28 to life+50 to
> life+70. Given that almost all authors live longer than 26 years, Mr. Martin has
> shown us that on average the term will be extended every 20 years by an amount
> greater than 20 years. Worse, even if Congress can't keep up with their average
> pace for 20 year+ extensions every year, Congress will pass "interim"
> retroactive extensions for no other reason than to assure that no works enter
> the public domain. 
> 
> For forty years already, Congress has had the goal to prevent ANY works from
> entering the public domain. If they continue this with yearly 1-year extensions
> or 20-year extensions every 20 years, or a mix of the two, it does not matter.
> 
> The error made by those who support the CTEA is that they believe the
> Constiution requires only that each "term" in a sequence of terms be limited.
> That is a bait and switch tactic that doesn't square with the text: they know
> something has to be finite, so they invent a new thing for it to be, the "term",
> so that it doesn't have to be the important thing which is the total period of
> copyright protection (the union of the terms of protection). The Constitution
> requires that the **"securing"** be for "limited times". It does not say that
> the limit is on the duration of each individual term in a supposed sequence of
> terms whose union can be of infinite duration. That sort of accounting is called
> a pyramid scheme, and it is found in the books of bankrupt companies, not the
> Constitution.
> 
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