That’s especially the case when you consider the personal backgrounds of the people who have been getting the judicial appointments during the last twenty years or so. They don’t know what you’re talking and they probably don’t care. It’s like trying to explain Mozart to a gopher.

I’m not sure what the solution is– casual infringement, a “use it anyway” mentality?

I wasn’t at oral argument, obviously. But my suggestion to you is that when the Chief Judge keeps asking “How was this case different from Eldred?”, you are obviously not convincing him that the two are different. You make little progress by believing your own position (“The cases were plainly different.”) and having a “huh” moment. And the decision reflects that.

As Chief Justice Roberts said recently at Northwestern, lawyers need humility and ought to pretend that they are not necessarily right.

“We get hundreds and hundreds of briefs, and they’re all the same,” Roberts told a crowd of eager law students and faculty members last week at the Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. “Somebody says, ‘My client clearly deserves to win, the cases clearly do this, the language clearly reads this,’ blah, blah blah. And you pick up the other side and, lo and behold, they think they clearly deserve to win.”

How about a little recognition that it’s a tough job? Roberts asked.

“I mean, if it was an easy case, we wouldn’t have it.”

From the Washington Post.

Two quick thoughts:

I’ve email you an alternative format for your graph as well as some thoughts. However, I thought I would post them here as well since others may be able to improve on my proposal (the graph can be downloaded here). I haven’t done it up all pretty but I do think it has few interesting facets:

1. It doesn’t place (c) and PD content in competition (a traditional graph makes it look like they are racing against each other)
2. The traditional graph risks making the (c) material appear to be a small sliver on top of PD materials, this version eliminates that risk.
3. It highlights the total aggregate published material ((c) +PD) (although I know I need to find a better way than negative numbers to express the PD material)
4. It emphasizes PD and (c)’s relative ‘market share’

The other variable not considered in your chart is the rate at which published material might disappear. It may sound odd, but I imagine that a significant amount of published material is lost through accident (and theft? – is this considered lost?). For example a library burning down or a server crash may destroy the only copies of some content. This material would be eliminated from aggregate total. This ‘rate of erosion’ is probably higher among PD content than (c) content since (c) owners have a greater incentive to protect/backup/etc� their content. I might assume that (c) material is lost/destroyed at a rate of .05% a year, whereas PD content is lost/destroyed at a rate of .2% percent a year. (0f course the numbers may be higher after the opt-out rule takes effect, but then all of my variables have plucked out of thin air…). I’m not sure if this is sufficiently relevant or if you agree but I think it occurs and would make the gap between (c) and PD even greater.

Cheers,
Dave

ie.
OptIn: of items produced, a percentage is copywritten.
OptOut: oddly same items produced, but much more are copywritten.

Meaning: Taking out the formalness did not increase number of items created but instead decreased the number of items that could be used publicly. Hence, the laws attempt did not increase the amount of information that was generate but had a negative effect on what could be used. This was not the original intent of those law.

I have two suggestions: One, that a new democratic controlled congress may be easier to lobby on the policy issue, and I stress may because they are beholden to large interests, and that it could be added to the 2008 conversation.

Two: on challenging legal grounds. Perhaps now would be the time to take up SANTA CLARA COUNTY v. SOUTHERN PAC. R. CO., 118 U.S. 394 (1886). That is, clearly, the framers of the constitution did what they could to create a state in which an individual retained the greatest freedom against the collective. By granting corporations personhood in this argument, that court created a power imbalance of copyright unforseen by the founders who thought they would only be created by governments in the public interest. Instead, you have a class of “persons” whose interest is legally defined as increasing money, instead of “progress in the arts and sciences.” I do not know if anyone could reargue case law more than 100 years old, but I would suggest either litigating this somehow, or lobbying to make it so that non-persons who take advantage of copyrights and patents must reorganize themselves to make “progress in the arts and sciences” their number one duty, not fiduciary to shareholders.

I do not think this would be any easier than the current path, but may present a legal path as opposed to policy. Not that these suggestions have much to do with Kahle, other than to show that the “people” who lobbied most heavily for increased copyright succeeded because they were able to accumulate resources far beyond the average individual.

If one were to go down another path, one might look at the contracts being used by corporations to generate un-bylined corporate newsletters, “advertorial,” success stories, marketing materials… Are these promoting the arts, as understood by the framers. Why do they get copyright? Why shouldn’t they have to “opt-in”?

Sorry this is rambling, IANAL…

KT

Seth Finkelstein, in his usual dispassionate manner, appears to hit the nail on the head.

We were not arguing that First Amendment review should apply to a 200 year old tradition. We were instead asking that First Amendment review be applied to a radical change in that tradition.

the “tradition” seems to be that it is well within the constitutional authority of the U.S. congress to determine the procedures which “promote progress” in the arts and sciences. that seems to be the “clear holding” of Eldred.

instead of seeing this as a defeat, why not see it (as we do) as a victory for democracy?

What are your plans for pursuing the case?

The apparent similarity with Eldred is that removing the formalities for existing works with a registered copyright is equivalent to an unconditional extension of their term, already rejected as an argument.

A more interesting argument may be the effectively forced subjection of all published works – specifically those without a registered copyright – to the copyright system. But even this is subject to the argument that it’s merely a formality, even though to try to reproduce the prior system would require the creation of a massive bureaucracy to track works where the author does not want a copyright but favors the free reproduction of the work without administrative hassle… which is impossible now because you need the administrative hassle to so indicate.