Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig (short story to read .TXT) 📕

that the Court would not hear our arguments if it thought these were just the arguments of a group of lefty loons. This Supreme Court was not about to launch into a new field of judicial review if it seemed that this field of review was simply the preference of a small political minority. Although my focus in the case was not to demonstrate how bad the Sonny Bono Act was but to demonstrate that it was unconstitutional, my hope was to make this argument against a background of briefs that covered the full range of political views. To show that this claim against the CTEA was grounded in law and not politics, then, we tried to gather the widest range of credible critics--credible not because they were rich and famous, but because they, in the aggregate, demonstrated that this law was unconstitutional regardless of one's politics.

The first step happened all by itself. Phyllis Schlafly's organization, Eagle Forum, had been an opponent of the CTEA from the very beginning. Mrs. Schlafly viewed the CTEA as a sellout by Congress. In November 1998, she wrote a stinging editorial attacking the Republican Congress for allowing the law to pass. As she wrote, "Do you sometimes wonder why bills that create a financial windfall to narrow special interests slide easily through the intricate legislative process, while bills that benefit the general public seem to get bogged down?" The answer, as the editorial documented, was the power of money. Schlafly enumerated Disney's contributions to the key players on the committees. It was money, not justice, that gave Mickey Mouse twenty more years in Disney's control, Schlafly argued.

In the Court of Appeals, Eagle Forum was eager to file a brief supporting our position. Their brief made the argument that became the core claim in the Supreme Court: If Congress can extend the term of existing copyrights, there is no limit to Congress's power to set terms. That strong conservative argument persuaded a strong conservative judge, Judge Sentelle.

In the Supreme Court, the briefs on our side were about as diverse as it gets. They included an extraordinary historical brief by the Free Software Foundation (home of the GNU project that made GNU/ Linux possible). They included a powerful brief about the costs of uncertainty by Intel. There were two law professors' briefs, one by copyright scholars and one by First Amendment scholars. There was an exhaustive and uncontroverted brief by the world's experts in the history of the Progress Clause. And of course, there was a new brief by Eagle Forum, repeating and strengthening its arguments.

Those briefs framed a legal argument. Then to support the legal argument, there were a number of powerful briefs by libraries and archives, including the Internet Archive, the American Association of Law Libraries, and the National Writers Union.

But two briefs captured the policy argument best. One made the argument I've already described: A brief by Hal Roach Studios argued that unless the law was struck, a whole generation of American film would disappear. The other made the economic argument absolutely clear.

This economists' brief was signed by seventeen economists, including five Nobel Prize winners, including Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, and George Akerlof. The economists, as the list of Nobel winners demonstrates, spanned the political spectrum. Their conclusions were powerful: There was no plausible claim that extending the terms of existing copyrights would do anything to increase incentives to create. Such extensions were nothing more than "rent-seeking"--the fancy term economists use to describe special-interest legislation gone wild.

The same effort at balance was reflected in the legal team we gathered to write our briefs in the case. The Jones Day lawyers had been with us from the start. But when the case got to the Supreme Court, we added three lawyers to help us frame this argument to this Court: Alan Morrison, a lawyer from Public Citizen, a Washington group that had made constitutional history with a series of seminal victories in the Supreme Court defending individual rights; my colleague and dean, Kathleen Sullivan, who had argued many cases in the Court, and who had advised us early on about a First Amendment strategy; and finally, former solicitor general Charles Fried.

Fried was a special victory for our side. Every other former solicitor general was hired by the other side to defend Congress's power to give media companies the special favor of extended copyright terms. Fried was the only one who turned down that lucrative assignment to stand up for something he believed in. He had been Ronald Reagan's chief lawyer in the Supreme Court. He had helped craft the line of cases that limited Congress's power in the context of the Commerce Clause. And while he had argued many positions in the Supreme Court that I personally disagreed with, his joining the cause was a vote of confidence in our argument.

The government, in defending the statute, had its collection of friends, as well. Significantly, however, none of these "friends" included historians or economists. The briefs on the other side of the case were written exclusively by major media companies, congressmen, and copyright holders.

The media companies were not surprising. They had the most to gain from the law. The congressmen were not surprising either--they were defending their power and, indirectly, the gravy train of contributions such power induced. And of course it was not surprising that the copyright holders would defend the idea that they should continue to have the right to control who did what with content they wanted to control.

Dr.Seuss's representatives, for example, argued that it was better for the Dr. Seuss estate to control what happened to Dr. Seuss's work-- better than allowing it to fall into the public domain--because if this creativity were in the public domain, then people could use it to "glorify drugs or to create pornography."14 That was also the motive of the Gershwin estate, which defended its "protection" of the work of George Gershwin. They refuse, for example, to license Porgy and Bess to anyone who refuses to use African Americans in the cast.15 That's their view of how this part of American culture should be controlled, and they wanted this law to help them effect that control.

This argument made clear a theme that is rarely noticed in this debate. When Congress decides to extend the term of existing copyrights, Congress is making a choice about which speakers it will favor. Famous and beloved copyright owners, such as the Gershwin estate and Dr. Seuss, come to Congress and say, "Give us twenty years to control the speech about these icons of American culture. We'll do better with them than anyone else." Congress of course likes to reward the popular and famous by giving them what they want. But when Congress gives people an exclusive right to speak in a certain way, that's just what the First Amendment is traditionally meant to block.

We argued as much in a final brief. Not only would upholding the CTEA mean that there was no limit to the power of Congress to extend copyrights--extensions that would further concentrate the market; it would also mean that there was no limit to Congress's power to play favorites, through copyright, with who has the right to speak.

 

Between February and October, there was little I did beyond preparing for this case. Early on, as I said, I set the strategy.

The Supreme Court was divided into two important camps. One camp we called "the Conservatives." The other we called "the Rest." The Conservatives included Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O'Connor, Justice Scalia, Justice Kennedy, and Justice Thomas. These five had been the most consistent in limiting Congress's power. They were the five who had supported the Lopez/Morrison line of cases that said that an enumerated power had to be interpreted to assure that Congress's powers had limits.

The Rest were the four Justices who had strongly opposed limits on Congress's power. These four--Justice Stevens, Justice Souter, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer--had repeatedly argued that the Constitution gives Congress broad discretion to decide how best to implement its powers. In case after case, these justices had argued that the Court's role should be one of deference. Though the votes of these four justices were the votes that I personally had most consistently agreed with, they were also the votes that we were least likely to get.

In particular, the least likely was Justice Ginsburg's. In addition to her general view about deference to Congress (except where issues of gender are involved), she had been particularly deferential in the context of intellectual property protections. She and her daughter (an excellent and well-known intellectual property scholar) were cut from the same intellectual property cloth. We expected she would agree with the writings of her daughter: that Congress had the power in this context to do as it wished, even if what Congress wished made little sense.

Close behind Justice Ginsburg were two justices whom we also viewed as unlikely allies, though possible surprises. Justice Souter strongly favored deference to Congress, as did Justice Breyer. But both were also very sensitive to free speech concerns. And as we strongly believed, there was a very important free speech argument against these retrospective extensions.

The only vote we could be confident about was that of Justice Stevens. History will record Justice Stevens as one of the greatest judges on this Court. His votes are consistently eclectic, which just means that no simple ideology explains where he will stand. But he had consistently argued for limits in the context of intellectual property generally. We were fairly confident he would recognize limits here.

This analysis of "the Rest" showed most clearly where our focus had to be: on the Conservatives. To win this case, we had to crack open these five and get at least a majority to go our way.Thus, the single overriding argument that animated our claim rested on the Conservatives' most important jurisprudential innovation--the argument that Judge Sentelle had relied upon in the Court of Appeals, that Congress's power must be interpreted so that its enumerated powers have limits.

This then was the core of our strategy--a strategy for which I am responsible. We would get the Court to see that just as with the Lopez case, under the government's argument here, Congress would always have unlimited power to extend existing terms. If anything was plain about Congress's power under the Progress Clause, it was that this power was supposed to be "limited." Our aim would be to get the Court to reconcile Eldred with Lopez: If Congress's power to regulate commerce was limited, then so, too, must Congress's power to regulate copyright be limited.

 

The argument on the government's side came down to this: Congress has done it before. It should be allowed to do it again. The government claimed that from the very beginning, Congress has been extending the term of existing copyrights. So, the government argued, the Court should not now say that practice is unconstitutional.

There was some truth to the government's claim, but not much. We certainly agreed that Congress had extended existing terms in 1831 and in 1909. And of course, in 1962, Congress began extending existing terms regularly--eleven times in forty years.

But this "consistency" should be kept in perspective. Congress extended existing terms once in the first hundred years of the Republic. It then extended existing terms once again in the next fifty. Those rare extensions are in contrast to the now regular practice of extending existing terms. Whatever restraint Congress had had in the past, that restraint was now gone. Congress was now in a cycle of extensions; there was no reason to expect that cycle would end. This Court had not hesitated to intervene where Congress was in a similar cycle of extension. There was no reason it couldn't intervene here.