While the framers of the Constitution's main purpose regarding copyright law was to \promote the progress of science and the useful arts,"" they could not have envisioned the legal repercussions that a technology, such as the Internet, would bring.
On February 19, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would hear the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, a dispute against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, within the year.
Challengers of the latest copyright extension claim the law is unconstitutional on the grounds that current copyrights, which grant inventors the rights to their work 70 years after their death, do not comply with the phrase ""for a limited time,"" found in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
""The extension is a retroactive law because it includes past works,"" said Chris Babbit, a law student at Harvard University and affiliate of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, which represents the challengers. ""It violates the concept of limited time and gives authors a perpetual copyright on the installment plan.""
The Bush administration, however, said that Congress promotes progress by allowing inventors the rights to their material, and also defended Congress' 1998 decision to apply the 20-year extension to current as well as future copyrighted material.
But Internet libraries, as well as other libraries, are hurt due to literature being withheld from the public sector as a result of the extension, said Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, one of the groups challenging the current law.
""The copyright law is intended to be a balance,"" Kahle said, ""but this extension denies children the opportunity to access these resources. It's an anti-children law; if these books are denied to children, we as an establishment have failed.""
According to the Internet Archive, of the 10,027 books published in 1930, a year that now falls under copyright law, only 174 remain in print, showing the need for public digital archives to have access to copyrighted materials before they are lost.
UW-Madison law Professor John Kidwell, who specializes in copyright law, said one of the main reasons copyright laws have increased is that those who are most affected by the rules have been successful at lobbying Congress.
""The beneficiaries of such extensions [such as the 1998 extension] are not the people who created the works, but rather the companies who own them, like Disney and other major corporations,"" Kidwell said.
Copyright laws have always been a source of confusion for libraries on campus, but especially so for the Mills Music Library, which deals with multiple forms of copyrighted media.
""I think to a certain degree they have overdone the laws,"" said Geri Laudati, director of the Music Library. ""Although copyright law was made in order to help creators, right now it's currently hurting students.""
Laudati said violations of copyright laws are not uncommon when dealing with sheet music, course tapes, streaming sound bytes on computers and arrangements for performances.
""Electronic reserves and the like may violate laws, but in reality they help students."" Laudati added. ""Our main concern is that older, rarer works are now receiving rights as if they were created today.""
But the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which previously heard the Eldred case, said the challengers ""lack any cognizable First Amendment right to exploit the copyrighted works of others.""
Kidwell said he agreed with the legality of the situation.
""I think it wasn't right to extend the laws, but I don't think it is unconstitutional,"" he said.
