Business Services Industry

U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Congress' Extension of Copyright Protection.

Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, January, 2003

By Jan Crawford Greenburg, Chicago Tribune Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Jan. 16--WASHINGTON--Rejecting a major challenge to federal copyright law, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Congress did not exceed its authority when it passed a 1998 law that gave authors and inventors another 20 years to dictate the sale and use of their words, images and music.

A ruling striking down the law would have made about 425,000 works, including early images of Mickey Mouse and songs by George Gershwin, freely available to the public. With the 1998 law, Congress extended the copyright for those works and thereby entitled copyright holders to lucrative licensing fees for another two decades.

But the court, in a 7-2 ruling, said that...

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works. HighBeam Research

 

BNET TalkbackShare your ideas and expertise on this topic

Please add your comment:

  1. You are currently: a Guest |
  2.  

Basic HTML tags that work in comments are: bold (<b></b>), italic (<i></i>), underline (<u></u>), and hyperlink (<a href></a)

advertisement
advertisement
  • Click Here
  • Click Here
  • Click Here
advertisement