Legal Argument in an Unlikely Place

In the past few weeks I've spent a fair amount of time waiting in doctors' offices, thanks to a lovely little infection I picked up back in Richmond (I think). That's allowed me to do a fair amount of non-legal reading. Believe it or not, when it comes to reading for pleasure, I tend to stay away from legal stuff (even Grisham-esque stuff). Still, given how embedded in our daily lives the law is, it still pops up where you least expect it.

I'm currently working through a collection of Hugo Award winning short works (novellas, novelettes, and short stories) from the mid 80s. Yesterday, I read the 1983 short story winner, "Melancholy Elephants," by Spider Robinson. It consists almost completely of a conversation between two characters about the future of copyright law. I didn't see that coming! In the story, an activist tries to convince a Senator to oppose a bill that would extend copyrights in perpetuity, with protected works never entering into the public domain. The activist's argument is that creative types (musicians, writers, artists) don't actually "create" anything, they just "discover" different combinations of sounds, images, etc. Since the number of those combinations are necessarily finite, never ending copyright protection will eventually shut off the creative element. It's an interesting thought - it makes me feel a bit better about not coming up with particularly original musical/literary ideas.

Ironically, since 1983, US copyright law has gotten progressively worse. In 1998, Congress extended copyright terms to 70 years beyond the life of the creator or 95 years total in the case of works created for corporations. The Supreme Court turned back a challenge to the law based on an argument similar to the one presented in Spider's story - that extending copyright protection so long essentially subverts the Constitutional goal of copyright in the first place (to further the "progress of the useful arts."