Congress adopts Copyright Extension Act

IN LATE SEPTEMBER, THE 105TH CONgress voted to extend copyright protection from fifty to seventy years after the death of an author. Named for the late Republican representative from California, the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act will give libraries and educators limited rights to use noncommercial copyrighted material during the final twenty years of protection. Still, many fear the new extension-which was pushed by owners of copyrights on motion pictures and sound recordings about to come into the public domain-will hinder the dissemination of knowledge for the public benefit.

Proponents of the measure argue that copyright extension is necessary to provide incentives for new creative work, to align United States law with international copyright standards, and to protect the balance of trade in intellectual property. They cite the recent addition by the European Union of a "life-plusseventy-years" term for copyrighted material, and the EU's "rule of the shorter term," which allows EU members to recognize another nation's shorter copyright term for works from that nation.

The AAUP opposes copyright extension, and points to the purpose of copyright law under the U.S. Constitution. According to Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8, of the Constitution, Congress has the power to secure "for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." But the Constitution states that the law is meant to promote useful knowledge, and that the benefit to the public is paramount. The law allows creators to receive private benefits as an incentive to create, but those private benefits must be balanced against the benefit to the public. In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, the Association pointed out that the public benefits not only when works enter the public domain (allowing them to be copied for educational purposes), but also when creators derive new works from older ones. The progress in and continued existence of our intellectual and cultural life therefore depend on a vibrant public domain.

For the first time in the over twohundred-year history of copyright law in the United States, we have entered a twenty-year period of stagnancy in which virtually no new material will enter the public domain. Schools that wish to publicly perform plays and music, archivists who wish to restore lost or forgotten works, scholars and creative artists who wish to use older cultural building blocks in creating new works, and the U.S. public through its continued royalty payments will foot a very heavy bill," says Dennis S. Karjala, professor of law at Arizona State University, who has worked with the AAUP Government Relations department in opposing extension. "Term extension represents a corporate welfare measure that will transfer millions of dollars from ordinary Americans into the pockets of large corporations and descendants of creative authors from the distant past. New creativity will suffer."