Yesterday the L.A. Times published a thorough and intelligent article on one of my favorite topics, copyright law.

Congress has extended copyright 11 times in the past 40 years, most recently by 20 years under the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. These repeated extensions are lobbied for by entertainment industry players who fear losing profits when their works enter the public domain -- for instance, Disney, which became what it is today by retelling public domain stories, but doesn't want that to happen to its own works (as Ben recently pointed out).

These corporations would extend their own copyrights forever if they could, in violation of the original spirit of copyright, which aims release creative works into the public domain after "limited Times" to spur more creativity. Sadly, these shamelessly profit-motivated extensions are met with little opposition from apathetic consumers.

This fall Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and author of The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, will appear in the Supreme Court to challenge the state of copyright law in a suit against the U.S., Eldred v. Ashcroft. The plaintiff is a retired father who personally put online annotated versions of dozens of public domain books to help students and scholars, and would have continued had he not been stymied by the Sonny Bono Act.

The court will consider the passage in the Constitution that states "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," Congress should grant copyright only for "limited times." For Congress in 1790, the limit was 14 years, plus another 14 if the creator was still alive. By that standard, "Snow White," made in 1937, would have joined Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Mark Twain in the public domain in 1965. Instead, "Snow White" is now due to enter the public domain in 2032--unless, of course, copyright is extended again."

If you don't believe this is serious, listen to the hysteria of the entertainment industry as it clings to its copyrights:

An Assn. of American Publishers official last year called librarians who believed in free content--a central principle of libraries for a few centuries--"Ruby Ridge or Waco types." Jack Valenti, chief executive of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, calls the struggle against unauthorized copying a "terrorist war." In a February op-ed piece in the Washington Post, he asserted that "the movie industry is under siege from a small community of professors.

And how does copyright law affect the Internet? Here's an anecdote about the Aibo, Sony's robot dog toy:

An Aibo fan wrote a software program to make the dog dance to jazz. When the fan posted the code on the Internet so that other Aibo enthusiasts could teach their own dogs to dance, Sony lawyers contacted him and told him he had violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Even though you've spent $1,500 for an Aibo, Sony still has control over how you play with it.

What can you do? Educate people in whatever small way you can, and consider supporting Lessig in Eldred vs. Ashcroft.