This case was one in which the Supreme Court upheld the Bono Act, which had added 20 years to copyright terms, including retroactive additions to works already published.
Personally, I don’t think that copyright should be as long as it is—speaking as an aspiring writer—but I will confine my discussion of my opinion here to a legal argument.
The argument against the Bono Act had three fundamental points: first, that retroactively extending copyrights violated the Copyright Clause of the Copyright Act; second, that all copyright laws must be subject to First Amendment scrutiny to ensure balance between copyright and free speech; and third, that an extension of copyright is a transfer of public property (the “public domain”) into private hands, violating the doctrine of public trust.
The first point is the one I find most vital. The Court found that retroactive extensions don’t violate “limited Times” as long as said extension is limited in time. I disagree with this finding, as the foundation of copyright is specifically set forth in the Copyright clause as being “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”—given that, I would argue that any copyright extension must be able to prove that it provides a measurable benefit to that progress. A retroactive extension, however, provides no benefit because you cannot retroactively incentivise authors to produce more work; all you do by extending copyright retroactively is giving authors (or, more accurately, their publishers) more time to make money off of the texts without making any more progress.
I don’t really have any qualms with the court’s finding against the second point; I don’t think the act in question had any threats to free speech.
All of that said—it is important to take into account the greater political context of this act. The Bono Act served to bring the United States copyright term in line with European copyright, which is indeed a valuable goal, as it provides American authors with equal benefits, while keeping copyrights shorter while other countries protect them for longer would have deincentivised writing within the United States.
While I believe the ideal would be shorter copyright terms all around, I do appreciate the few times that the US moves to match an international standard and respect the Court’s decision in that light.
