Re: [dvd-discuss] O'Connor quoted at USA Today from Eldred oralargument

["D. C. Sessions" <dvd(at)lumbercartel.com>]

On Wed, 2002-10-09 at 10:35, Bryan Taylor wrote:

> I'm really curious to hear what Scalia thought. As a textualist, I would hope
> he would be able to see that allowing one retro-active extension would also
> allow repeated retro-active extensions which would allow unlimited duration
> which is facially invalid.

I'm more interested in how the Court would approach the
inductive argument.  Quite a bit of today's hearing
danced around the Court's objection to dictating any
kind of limit to Congress wrt "limited times."

According to the DOJ, Congress is within the Constitution
to set copyright to anything less than "grant in perpetuity."
I wish there'd been some chance to counter with "how about
999,999 years?"  and then do the Abraham.  Patently, there
is *some* finite Constitutional limit on how long is a
"limited time," or else (as any mathematician could point
out) you might as well have perpetuity.

Given that the Court can't ultimately avoid setting *some*
limit, they then can't dodge the question of whether the
1998 Act crosses it.

-- 
| It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance  |
|  It's the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance  |
|   It's the one who won't be taken who cannot seem to give     |
|    and the soul afraid of dyin' that never learns to live     |
+------------- D. C. Sessions <dcs@lumbercartel.com> -----------+