Intellectual Property - Ethics for the Information Age - page 175

paper. Apollo manufactured and sold piano rolls of copyrighted songs. White-Smith
Music Company sued Apollo for infringing on its copyrights. In 1908 the Supreme Court
ruled that Apollo had not infringed on White-Smith Music's copyrights. The court
suggested that Congress ought to change copyright law if it wanted owners of copyrights
to have control over recordings such as piano rolls and phonograph records. Congress
responded by revising the Copyright Act in 1909. The new copyright law recognized that
player piano rolls and phonograph records could be copyrighted.
Some people believe the expansion of the scope of copyright protection has shifted
the balance of private versus public rights too far toward the copyright holders. They
say it is no coincidence that copyright terms were extended just before Mickey Mouse
was to enter the public domain. The Walt Disney Corporation lobbied Congress to pass
the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998, protecting its profits
derived from Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and its other famous characters [29]. Some
critics suggest that since Walt Disney made a great deal of money on SnowWhite and the
Seven Dwarfs , Cinderella , Pinocchio , The Hunchback of Notre Dame , Alice inWonderland ,
and The Jungle Book , all based on stories taken from the public domain, it's only fair that
at some point Walt Disney characters become part of the public domain, available for
others to use in new creative works [30].
Eric Eldred, who digitizes old books and makes them freely available over the Web,
led a group of petitioners who challenged the CTEA. They argued that the US Consti-
tution gives Congress the power to grant exclusive rights to authors for “limited times,”
and that the writers of the Constitution expected copyright durations to be short. By
extending the terms of existing copyrights 11 times in 40 years, they said, Congress had
exceeded its constitutional power [31].
The government and groups representing the entertainment industry, including
the Walt Disney Co., the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Recording
Industry Association of America, argued that Congress does have the constitutional
authority to extend the terms of existing copyrights [32].
In a 7-2 decision the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government and
the entertainment industry, stating that the petitioners did not demonstrate how the
CTEA had crossed “a constitutionally significant threshold.” In the opinion of the
Court, “Those earlier Acts did not create perpetual copyrights, and neither does the
CTEA” [33].
In 2004 the Royal Society of Arts in London commissioned an international group
of artists, scientists, and lawyers to create a statement regarding intellectual property
laws. The group wrote the Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual
Property. Within the charter is the following statement: “The expansion in the law's
breadth, score, and term over the last 30 years has resulted in an intellectual property
regime which is radically out of line with modern technological, economic and social
trends. This threatens the chain of creativity and innovation on which we and future
generations depend” [34]. The charter proposes a set of public interest tests that gov-
ernments should apply before approving further changes to intellectual property laws.
To date, the Adelphi Charter has had little influence on the global debate over intellectual
property.