The Copyright Boat Anchor on Creativity and Research

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

This particular two line sentence in the U.S. Constitution has been turned into morass of complex regulations and interpretations of those regulations numbering into the thousands of pages. Originally styled to protect authors and inventors, the United States Copyright Law now primarily protects publishers and aggregators that take advantage of the extended terms of copyright protection to take advantage of the authors and make money through contractual limitations that go far beyond the original intent of the Constitution.

Presently, under the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This legislation lengthens copyrights for works created on or after January 1, 1978 to “life of the author plus 70 years,” and extends copyrights for corporate works to 95 years from the year of first publication, or 120 years from the year of creation, whichever expires first. The reason why these extensions were passed by the U.S. Legislature was that Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse was in danger of passing into the public domain. With the new laws, Walt Disney now has an extension to 2023 and enough time to seek further extensions to the copyright act. These extensions were not created to protect authors, but to protect the United States Balance of Payments. See Copyright Extension. See also, "When is 1923 Going to Arrive and Other Complications of the U.S. Public Domain." If you think you understand copyright law, I suggest you read this article carefully.

Determining when and if the copyright on any particular work has expired has become a complicated and almost impenetrable morass of changing laws and regulations, not to mention thousands of court cases that have interpreted those same confusing rules. Some large aggregator companies have used this intense legal confusion to create large digitized collections of books and other material and under a claim of copyright protection have contractually limited the use of the items even when some are clearly in the public domain. Essentially, these companies are circumventing the law by claiming that they have the ability to enforce a contract with those who agree to their provisions. I seriously doubt that these companies have negotiated a contract with each of the actual copyright holders of all of the thousands and perhaps millions of books that they include under their contractual umbrella. It is now common to claim that "copyright law was supposed to prevent publishers from literally stealing each other's business." See comments to "Is it legal to scan a book you own to create an ebook for your own personal use?" I suggest that this commentator and all those others who believe that publishers were intended to be protected read Article 1, Section 8 quoted above. 

In an attempt to get some control over the interpretation of the laws and regulations, Cornell University has since 1999 published a summary of the current status of the copyright laws called "Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States 1 January 2016."  If you examine this chart carefully, you can see that certain works, those unpublished works when the death date of the author is not known, are protected as far back as 1896, however, most works registered or first published before 1923 have now passed into the public domain.

Copyright law in the United States and most of the rest of the world is a good idea that has been twisted and changed until the original concept is hardly recognizable. Copyright reform on a large scale is long overdue.