The Supreme Court has found Congress can extend copyright protection to works that had previously been in the public domain
link here. The decision was 6-2 with one recusal. The story is covered
here and
here, but focus should be on the two dissenters who held that Congress had exceeded its authority when judged by the constitutional provision that copyright was justified when it served "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."
The Court majority dismissed the minority view by saying that the current copyright interpretation is settled law and they won't change it. This keeps the arts in a box where the current copyright holder has a monopoly extending beyond his lifetime. Most often they are held by a corporation which creates nothing.
This is another step in the process of extending the reach of intellectual property law to suppress new creation and extend monopoly, to the cost of the public. One begins to wonder if this will ever change for the better.
It will ratchet up until abolition - and things may well get pretty totalitarianesque prior to abolition.
This is just plain stupid. I hope they do not do this
Megaupload was shut down for supposed copyright violations, even though they are a storage service and not an uploader. Millions of dollars in cash and hardware was seized along with arrests of several company executives. How sad.
They will NEVER stop copyright infringement.
They will NEVER stop copyright infringement.
