[DMCA-Activists] Court Nixes Case on Recasting of Copyright

[Seth Johnson]

> http://news.com.com/Court+nixes+lawsuit+fighting+copyright+law/2100-1030_3-5466329.html


Court nixes lawsuit fighting copyright law


By John Borland
Story last modified Wed Nov 24 13:11:00 PST 2004 


A lawsuit brought by a group of Internet archivists against
recent congressional actions expanding copyright protections has
been dismissed by a federal judge. 

The case was led by Net pioneer Brewster Kahle, whose most recent
Internet Archive project aims to make a huge digital archive of
Web sites and other media. The court's ruling, issued late last
week, marks another setback for a movement of activists and
scholars against expanding legal protections for artistic works. 

Kahle and his allies contended that Congress' lengthening of
copyright-protection terms--even when an author's work didn't
request further protection--had radically transformed traditional
copyright law. They asked the courts to rule that much of this
recent copyright law change was illegal, which potentially could
have opened up large amounts of books, movies and music created
in the 1960s and 1970s to public domain use. 

In a decision made available Wednesday, federal Judge Maxine
Chesney concluded that Congress did have substantial flexibility
in expanding copyright protections without court interference. 

The court relied primarily on last year's Supreme Court ruling
that said Congress had the power to extend the term of copyright.
In that decision, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg said the court was
"not at liberty to second-guess congressional determinations and
policy judgments of this order." 

Kahle and another public domain-based archive had sought to
distribute so-called orphan works, or books and other works that
were still under copyright but no longer in print or available to
the public. That was not possible under the recent round of
copyright extensions, they said. 

Kahle said Wednesday that the decision would be appealed, and
that they had always planned to fight the primary battle in the
appellate courts. The court had not directly addressed what he
said was the primary thrust of the case--a change in laws to
automatically renew copyrights, instead of requiring copyright
holders to reregister, he said. 

"The key component of the district court ruling is that the judge
did not consider the main aspect of this case, which is the
changing of the contour of copyright law from opt in to opt out,"
Kahle said. "That has dramatically changed what's under
copyright, and even more ominously, changes the nature of what
can be put on the Internet."