LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 3, 2002

A crucial U.S. copyright case

October 9 is the day the U.S. Supreme Court has set aside to hear arguments in the case known as "Eldred vs. Ashcroft." The subject of the case - a 20 year extension to copyright protection - may seem obscure, but the outcome of this case may well change the shape of copyright law (and intellectual property law in general) in the U.S. for a long time.

The specific details of this case are as follows. Eric Eldred operates the Eldritch Press, a collection of books which are in the public domain. Mr. Eldred's plans to add a number of new works, including poems by Robert Frost, were thwarted by the "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act," which added twenty years to copyright terms. Works that were in the public domain were suddenly brought back under copyright protection, and thus could no longer be posted publicly. And works that were about to enter the public domain - the famous example (and seeming motivation for the copyright extension) being Micky Mouse - now will not for another two decades.

The U.S. Constitution describes the congressional power to regulate intellectual property in typical, terse fashion:

The key points here are (1) the statement that promoting the progress of science and the arts is the purpose of granting a monopoly right to intellectual property, and (2) the phrase "limited times." The plaintiffs in Eldred vs. Ashcroft (the case is being argued by none other than Lawrence Lessig) are making the claim that the new, longer copyright terms go beyond any reasonable "limited time," and that they no longer promote the creation of new works. After all, the authors whose works benefit from the extra 20 years of protection are dead; even the strongest economic incentives are unlikely to motivate them to produce anything of any interesting quality. The plaintiffs in this case are asking the court to rule that the Congress has exceeded its constitutional authority in making this law, and that the law should thus be void.

The Supreme Court is an unpredictable institution; it could do almost anything in response to this case. It is also a slow institution. The case will be argued on the 9th, but the eventual ruling will not be heard until sometime next year.

How is all of this relevant to free software? There is an ongoing push in the U.S. to establish absolute control over ideas in many forms. As Mr. Lessig has argued many times, the concept of an intellectual commons, with ideas available to all, is being pushed aside. But that commons is the source of much that intellectual property owners want to protect. Disney took "The Little Mermaid" from the commons, but wants to hold on to its rather less gory version forever.

Free software benefits from a deep commons of shared ideas and code. Those who feel threatened by free software would like to fight it by withholding ideas from that commons. Whether the issue is file formats, network protocols, or patented algorithms, the problem is the same: monopolies on ideas reduce the commons from which free software developers can draw. The expansion of intellectual property monopolies in the U.S. has gone unchallenged for years, with results like copyright extension, the DMCA, and future delights like the CBDTPA.

Eldred vs. Ashcroft has the potential to put limits on the expansion of intellectual property law and the fencing off of the intellectual commons. It could be the turning point in this battle - but it could turn in either direction. We can only wish the best of luck to the plaintiffs in this fight, and thank them for making the effort.

(See also: the Eldred vs. Ashcroft page).

Comments (none posted)

The status of the subscription experiment

As of Wednesday Morning (October 2), there are almost 1200 individual subscribers to LWN. We also have all of three confirmed (small) corporate subscriptions, with discussions happening with others. With luck, we will be able to announce our first large corporate subscription in the near future. Many thanks to all of you who have shown your support for LWN.

So where does that leave us? It takes on the order of 1000 subscribers to support one full-time LWN editor with a minimal salary (i.e. less than they can make elsewhere) once taxes, health insurance, connectivity, and, perhaps, an occasional trade show are thrown in. So, in other words, we have made some real progress, but we are still some distance from being able to operate LWN at its current level of staffing (and, thus, content).

It is, of course, early to say what the steady state subscription level will be. Corporate subscribers, in particular, move slowly. But, it seems reasonably clear that, unless we get a new surge in interest, LWN will likely go forward as a smaller operation than it is now. The good news is that (1) it looks like LWN will continue, in some form, and (2) we have been surprised before; the situation may yet improve.

The best way to make things improve remains corporate subscriptions. We'll ask our readers one more time to encourage their employers and universities to look into our group subscription offerings. These subscriptions make LWN available to large groups of people while doing a lot to help keep LWN on the air.

The subscription system itself seems to be working reasonably well - not bad for a big body of completely new code that had its first real stress test when deployed on the site. A few glitches remain, and we are working on it. In particular, there seems to be a cookie problem with Internet Explorer that is proving hard to track down - especially since we have very few Windows systems around here. It is not our desire to exclude IE users - they are responsible for about 20% of our traffic. We will work this one out somehow.

Thanks yet again for your support of LWN. We will continue to do our best to produce a site that is worthy of that support.

Comments (49 posted)

Page editor: Jonathan Corbet

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition

• Security: Comparing vulnerability counts; new problems with apache, fetchmail, heimdal, tar, etc.
• Kernel: The feature freeze is coming; The end of task queues; superfluous security hooks; CPUFreq
• Distributions: A request for information
• Development: JACK Meterbridge 0.0.4, MySQL 4.0.4-beta, Kyocera releases PPD files, Mod_python 3.0 beta 2, ZOPE 2.6.0 Beta 1, Maaate 0.3.0, WaveSurfer 1.4.5, Phoenix 0.2, Samba-3.0alpha20, GnuPG 1.2, SBCL 0.7.8, omniORB 4.0.0.
• Commerce: OSI approves two new licenses; Red Hat Linux 8.0 released; IBM, Red Hat and Tarantella Team Up In Italy to Offer Integrated Infrastructure Solution
• Press: Linux powers high rise display, digital device hit list, California Community Colocation Project, Lulu Tech Circus, Linux gains in Australia, Introduction to netfilter/iptables, Red Hat 8.0.
• Announcements: The Case for Linux in Universities, LPI News-Letter, Linux Gazette #83, Netcraft Web Server Survey, Software et Internet Expo, Lulu Tech Circus, The Open Group Conference, Linux.conf.au 2003 registration.

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