Use your favorite search engine to find a news story relating to copyright law on the Web. Write a brief (500-1,000 word) paper reporting on this event (don't copy the article verbatim; use your own words!) and analyze the impact or effect that you believe it will have on Web sites and Internet users.

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act
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This act retroactively extended the duration of copyright from the life of author plus fifty years to the life of the author plus seventy years, in the case of individual works, and from seventy-five years to ninety-five years in the case of works of corporate authorship and works first published prior to January 1, 1978.

Ninety-nine percent of the public thinks that a copyright is some kind of formal legal document. They think you have to go get it, or protect it, or defend it, or preserve it, or buy it, or hire a lawyer to make sure you have it.

Lest we all forget, copyright is simply a right, like all our other rights and it goes like this: Whoever creates something that has never been created before has the exclusive right to copy it. We need to recognize that It's not the person who registers it with the Library of Congress. It's the person who does it first. Just the act of creation makes the right kick in.

Unlike other rights, though, this one is transferable. You can sell your copyright, license your copyright, or give your copyright away. What's most often done is that you let a big company, e.g., a book publisher use the copyright for a specific period of time, in return for money, and at the end of that period the right reverts back to you.

In relationship to our other rights, this is a right with a specific term. Our founding fathers wanted that term to be 14 years, with an additional 14 years if the author were still alive. After 28 years, they figured you'd had your chance to exploit your creation, and now it belonged to the nation at large. They we attempting to assure we would never evolve into a system of hereditary privilege, similar to the printers guilds of Renaissance England. These guilds tied up rights to dead authors and tightly controlled what could or could not be printed and who could or could not use literary material.

Our founders wanted America to be the land of free ideas as well as free people.

Sadly, their principles have deteriorated because Congress slowly eroded their principles. They have allowed our system to become an carbon copy replica of the medieval Stationers' Company which controlled the English copyrights, only its names today are Disney, Bertelsmann, and AOL Time Warner. These big media companies, holding the copyrights of dead authors, have said, in effect, that Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton were wrong and that we should go back to the aristocratic system of hereditary ownership, granting copyrights in perpetuity. To effect this result, they've liberally greased the palms of Congressmen in the form of campaign contributions and it's worked.

In the name of Mickey Mouse and other American icons, congress has gradually lengthened that 14-year limit on copyrights. At one time it was as much as 99 years, then scaled back to 75 years. only to be finally entirely suspended in 1998.

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of that year says simply that there will be no copyright expirations for 20 years, meaning that everything published between 1923 and 1943 will not be released into the public domain. Presumably they'll take up the matter again in 2018 and decide whether any of these books, movies, or songs are ever set free. There are 400,000 of them.

What's especially hypocritical about this law is that many of the works produced in this period, such as The Wizard of Oz, are based on works from previous centuries that are already in the public domain. It's as though Congress is saying that it would be wrong for the heirs of the Brothers Grimm to own a perpetual copyright to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, because it belongs to all people, but Walt Disney's version of their work should earn money forever.

With 1923 as the cutoff date, all sound movies are protected for another 20 years. All pre-war Broadway musicals are protected. All swing-era music is protected. Even the song "God Bless America" falls into this period.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court has agreed to rule on a case challenging the Bono Act. It was brought by Eric Eldred of Derry, N.H., who started a website for his teenage daughters in which he published online versions of classic literary texts a site that eventually became a destination for students around the world and received a commendation from the National Endowment for the Humanities. That all changed on Oct. 7, 1998, when the Bono Act was passed.

I firmly belive that our congress looked at the whole controversy as a property-rights issue. It's not.

In my estimation it is more of a free-speech issue. Our Constitution states that copyrights are to be granted for "limited times." I don't know any definition of "limited" that would mean 75 years plus a 20-year extension plus the chance of getting another extension later. The whole issue was argued three centuries ago by our founding fathers and it was established as a principle of democracy that, when the author is dead, his work becomes the property of all. This was modified slightly to allow the first generation after his death to continue to collect royalties, presumably to protect widows and children. But that's all that was intended.

There was no argument ever made for a third- or fourth-generation royalty, much less a perpetual assignment of royalties to a corporation that never dies.

Why is all this important?
Companies are in the business of making money. Creators and writers, artists and webmasters are in the business of expanding civilization. Tools for making money are available in many ways but the tools for expanding civiliztion are a limited commodity. They appear e.g., in the works of Hemingway and Faulkner. They are resident in the movies of Disney and Capra and lest not forget the songs of Kern and Berlin.

How does this apply to the internet?
All of these books, articles, songs and art are a part of our national treasure which need to be available for viewing for the next generations of our citizens be it in paper or electronic format or just on an internet website that a loving father created for his children to view.

a darlin Creation by Dixie