IT'S still not possible to copyright an idea, only the creative expression of that idea. But worldwide, corporations are trying to expand protections beyond creative works to other intangibles, such as the facts and figures held in computer databases. Meanwhile, Congress keeps extending the copyright productions that already exist.
The authors of the U.S. Constitution mandated that Congress should grant copyright protection to authors for only a limited time, with the assumption that intellectual works would eventually belong to the public. No one then imagined the growth of multigenerational industries built on a single story or a set of cartoon characters that had become essential to the cultural life of the nation.
Originally, under British law, American Colonial authors could protect their work for only 14 years. By 1831, Congress had provided a 28-year term renewable for an additional 14 years. And in 1909 (thanks partly to lobbying by author Mark Twain), it expanded the extension to 28 years, for a total of 56 years.
Then, in 1976, along with offering copyright protection to virtually every kind of intellectual production, Congress greatly expanded the term to the life of the author plus 50 years, thus making creative work a far more formidable "property." Come 1998, Rep. Sonny Bono's widow, Mary Bono (who was serving out the balance of his term), persuaded Congress to lengthen U.S. copyright to 70 years past the death of the author -- matching European laws. The bill had been heavily lobbied by Disney, eager to protect Mickey Mouse and other foundations of its corporate life. Among its provisions, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of that same year provided new "fences" for intellectual property by making it a crime to provide any means of breaking copy protections on media such as CDs and DVDs.
Today, as the game of "extreme copyright" becomes ever more intense, Congress and the courts wrestle with increasingly complex and nearly metaphysical questions -- such as the responsibility of an author who "subconsciously" imitates the work of another, and the rights to "orphan works" for whom a proprietor cannot be identified.
Many of the hottest controversies turn on questions of "fair use," under which newspapers, scholars and others are allowed to quote small portions of works without permission. Just now, publishers are trying to prevent Google from scanning millions of books into its databases -- not so they can be read in their entirety but so that limited phrases can be searched on the Internet under fair use.
As we move deeper into the Age of Copyright, these questions have become much more than academic -- they have become central to our digital lives.
-- M.P.Z.
