Page:Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians.pdf/16

WHAT IS CREATIVE COMMONS? - 3 - was called the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), and it was enacted in 1998. This Act extended the term of copyright protection for every work in the United States—even those already published—for an additional 20 years, so that the copyright term equaled the life of the creator plus 70 years. (This move put the U.S. copyright term in line with some other countries, though the term in many more countries remains at 50 years after the creator’s death to this day.)

(Fun fact: The CTEA was commonly referred to as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act because the extension came just before the original Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, would have fallen into the public domain.)

Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig (figure 1.1) believed that this new law was unconstitutional. The term of copyright had been continually extended over the years. The end of a copyright term is important—it marks the moment when a work moves into the public domain, whereupon everyone can use that work for any purpose without permission. This is a critical part of the equation in the copyright system. All creativity and knowledge build on what came before, and the end of a copyright term ensures that copyrighted works eventually move into the public domain and thus join the pool of knowledge and creativity from which we can all freely draw to create new works.

The 1998 law was also hard to align with the purpose of copyright as it is written into the U.S. Constitution—to create an incentive for authors to share their works by granting them a monopoly over them. How could the law possibly further incentivize sharing works that already existed?

Lessig represented a web publisher, Eric Eldred, who had made a career of making works available as they passed into the public domain. Together, they challenged the