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

I was convinced that to win, I had to keep the Court focused on a single point: that if this extension is permitted, then there is no limit to the power to set terms. Going with the government would mean that terms would be effectively unlimited; going with us would give Congress a clear line to follow: Don't extend existing terms. The moots were an effective practice; I found ways to take every question back to this central idea.

One moot was before the lawyers at Jones Day. Don Ayer was the skeptic. He had served in the Reagan Justice Department with Solicitor General Charles Fried. He had argued many cases before the Supreme Court. And in his review of the moot, he let his concern speak:

"I'm just afraid that unless they really see the harm, they won't be willing to upset this practice that the government says has been a consistent practice for two hundred years. You have to make them see the harm--passionately get them to see the harm. For if they don't see that, then we haven't any chance of winning."

He may have argued many cases before this Court, I thought, but he didn't understand its soul. As a clerk, I had seen the Justices do the right thing--not because of politics but because it was right. As a law professor, I had spent my life teaching my students that this Court does the right thing--not because of politics but because it is right. As I listened to Ayer's plea for passion in pressing politics, I understood his point, and I rejected it. Our argument was right. That was enough. Let the politicians learn to see that it was also good.

The night before the argument, a line of people began to form in front of the Supreme Court. The case had become a focus of the press and of the movement to free culture. Hundreds stood in line for the chance to see the proceedings. Scores spent the night on the Supreme Court steps so that they would be assured a seat.

Not everyone has to wait in line. People who know the Justices can ask for seats they control. (I asked Justice Scalia's chambers for seats for my parents, for example.) Members of the Supreme Court bar can get a seat in a special section reserved for them. And senators and congressmen have a special place where they get to sit, too. And finally, of course, the press has a gallery, as do clerks working for the Justices on the Court. As we entered that morning, there was no place that was not taken. This was an argument about intellectual property law, yet the halls were filled. As I walked in to take my seat at the front of the Court, I saw my parents sitting on the left. As I sat down at the table, I saw Jack Valenti sitting in the special section ordinarily reserved for family of the Justices.

When the Chief Justice called me to begin my argument, I began where I intended to stay: on the question of the limits on Congress's power. This was a case about enumerated powers, I said, and whether those enumerated powers had any limit.

Justice O'Connor stopped me within one minute of my opening. The history was bothering her.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Congress has extended the term so often through the years, and if you are right, don't we run the risk of upsetting previous extensions of time? I mean, this seems to be a practice that began with the very first act.

She was quite willing to concede "that this flies directly in the face of what the framers had in mind." But my response again and again was to emphasize limits on Congress's power.

MR. LESSIG: Well, if it flies in the face of what the framers had in mind, then the question is, is there a way of interpreting their words that gives effect to what they had in mind, and the answer is yes.

There were two points in this argument when I should have seen where the Court was going. The first was a question by Justice Kennedy, who observed,

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, I suppose implicit in the argument that the '76 act, too, should have been declared void, and that we might leave it alone because of the disruption, is that for all these years the act has impeded progress in science and the useful arts. I just don't see any empirical evidence for that.

Here follows my clear mistake. Like a professor correcting a student, I answered,

MR. LESSIG: Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all. Nothing in our Copyright Clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion about impeding progress. Our only argument is this is a structural limit necessary to assure that what would be an effectively perpetual term not be permitted under the copyright laws.

That was a correct answer, but it wasn't the right answer. The right answer was instead that there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of briefs had been written about it. He wanted to hear it. And here was the place Don Ayer's advice should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer was a swing and a miss.

The second came from the Chief, for whom the whole case had been crafted. For the Chief Justice had crafted the Lopez ruling, and we hoped that he would see this case as its second cousin.

It was clear a second into his question that he wasn't at all sympathetic. To him, we were a bunch of anarchists. As he asked:

CHIEF JUSTICE: Well, but you want more than that. You want the right to copy verbatim other people's books, don't you?

MR. LESSIG: We want the right to copy verbatim works that should be in the public domain and would be in the public domain but for a statute that cannot be justified under ordinary First Amendment analysis or under a proper reading of the limits built into the Copyright Clause.

Things went better for us when the government gave its argument; for now the Court picked up on the core of our claim. As Justice Scalia asked Solicitor General Olson,

JUSTICE SCALIA: You say that the functional equivalent of an unlimited time would be a violation [of the Constitution], but that's precisely the argument that's being made by petitioners here, that a limited time which is extendable is the functional equivalent of an unlimited time.

When Olson was finished, it was my turn to give a closing rebuttal. Olson's flailing had revived my anger. But my anger still was directed to the academic, not the practical. The government was arguing as if this were the first case ever to consider limits on Congress's Copyright and Patent Clause power. Ever the professor and not the advocate, I closed by pointing out the long history of the Court imposing limits on Congress's power in the name of the Copyright and Patent Clause-- indeed, the very first case striking a law of Congress as exceeding a specific enumerated power was based upon the Copyright and Patent Clause. All true. But it wasn't going to move the Court to my side.

As I left the court that day, I knew there were a hundred points I wished I could remake. There were a hundred questions I wished I had answered differently. But one way of thinking about this case left me optimistic.

The government had been asked over and over again, what is the limit? Over and over again, it had answered there is no limit. This was precisely the answer I wanted the Court to hear. For I could not imagine how the Court could understand that the government believed Congress's power was unlimited under the terms of the Copyright Clause, and sustain the government's argument. The solicitor general had made my argument for me. No matter how often I tried, I could not understand how the Court could find that Congress's power under the Commerce Clause was limited, but under the Copyright Clause, unlimited. In those rare moments when I let myself believe that we may have prevailed, it was because I felt this Court--in particular, the Conservatives--would feel itself constrained by the rule of law that it had established elsewhere.

The morning of January 15, 2003, I was five minutes late to the office and missed the 7:00 A.M.call from the Supreme Court clerk. Listening to the message, I could tell in an instant that she had bad news to report.The Supreme Court had affirmed the decision of the Court of Appeals. Seven justices had voted in the majority. There were two dissents.

A few seconds later, the opinions arrived by e-mail. I took the phone off the hook, posted an announcement to our blog, and sat down to see where I had been wrong in my reasoning.

My reasoning. Here was a case that pitted all the money in the world against reasoning. And here was the last naïve law professor, scouring the pages, looking for reasoning.

I first scoured the opinion, looking for how the Court would distinguish the principle in this case from the principle in Lopez. The argument was nowhere to be found. The case was not even cited. The argument that was the core argument of our case did not even appear in the Court's opinion.

Justice Ginsburg simply ignored the enumerated powers argument. Consistent with her view that Congress's power was not limited generally, she had found Congress's power not limited here.

Her opinion was perfectly reasonable--for her, and for Justice Souter. Neither believes in Lopez. It would be too much to expect them to write an opinion that recognized, much less explained, the doctrine they had worked so hard to defeat.

But as I realized what had happened, I couldn't quite believe what I was reading. I had said there was no way this Court could reconcile limited powers with the Commerce Clause and unlimited powers with the Progress Clause. It had never even occurred to me that they could reconcile the two simply by not addressing the argument. There was no inconsistency because they would not talk about the two together. There was therefore no principle that followed from the Lopez case: In that context, Congress's power would be limited, but in this context it would not.

Yet by what right did they get to choose which of the framers' values they would respect? By what right did they--the silent five--get to select the part of the Constitution they would enforce based on the values they thought important? We were right back to the argument that I said I hated at the start: I had failed to convince them that the issue here was important, and I had failed to recognize that however much I might hate a system in which the Court gets to pick the constitutional values that it will respect, that is the system we have.

Justices Breyer and Stevens wrote very strong dissents. Stevens's opinion was crafted internal to the law: He argued that the tradition of intellectual property law should not support this unjustified extension of terms. He based his argument on a parallel analysis that had governed in the context of patents (so had we). But the rest of the Court discounted the parallel--without explaining how the very same words in the Progress Clause could come to mean totally different things depending upon whether the words were about patents