Techdirt: Court Agrees That Pulling Content Out Of The Public Domain May Violate The First Amendment
This one comes as a bit of a surprise. The third in Larry Lessig’s triumvirate of copyright cases may present his first serious court victory on these issues (and it potentially could come back to help the second case as well). A little history first. A few years back, Larry Lessig took a copyright case to the Supreme Court. The so-called Eldred case challenged recent changes to copyright law by Congress, stating that the repeated extensions to the length of copyright violated the Constitution, which guaranteed that copyright should only last a “limited” time. The Supreme Court disagreed with Lessig and Eldred, saying that Congress was within its Constitutional right in extending copyright. However, the case opened up some potential arguments to be discussed in later cases — and Lessig has taken full advantage of that. The key point that the court made was that Congress’ actions can be scrutinized under the First Amendment when it changes the “traditional contours of copyright protection.” The court didn’t think that simply extending copyright changed the contours of copyright protection — but it did set some of the parameters for getting the courts to review changes to copyright law.
In fact, Lessig used that ruling in the next case, the Kahle case, arguing that the changes Congress made back in 1976, switching copyright from an “opt-in” system to an “opt-out” system clearly changed the traditional contours — which seems like a reasonable argument. However, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unfortunately seemed to think that Lessig was simply re-arguing the Eldred case and couldn’t tell the difference even though the Kahle case was about changes to the nature of copyright law, and the Eldred case was simply about extending copyrights. The Kahle case is being appealed to the Supreme Court. Of course, the Supreme Court tends to like to take cases where two lower courts have seemingly disagreed with each other — and a new ruling in a different case involving Lessig may have just created that type of disagreement — which could hopefully make the Supreme Court pay attention.