It may be of interest to the Mudcat that one of the foremost copyright scholars in the country, William Patry of Yeshiva University/Cardozo School of Law, agrees (as I read him) with arkie that U.S. copyright law has drifted from its constitutional purposes. Patry's opinion was stated in an article provocatively entitled, "The Failure of the American Copyright System: Protecting the Idle Rich", Notre Dame Law Review, Volume 74, Number 4 (May 1997), pages 907-933, from which I quote the following two passages. (The article was written in 1997, over a year before term extension passed, so it describes term extension as a "proposal", not as an accomplished fact.)

"Proposals...to extend the term of copyright an additional twenty years present us with a striking snapshot of how far adrift current copyright thinking is from the constitutional objectives. Instead of protecting authors, these proposals are heavily weighted in favor of distributors such as publishers. Instead if encouraging living authoris to create new works for the benefit of the public, term extension is being pushed by the estates of long deceased authors" (page 908)

"United States copyright law has failed of its essential purpose--to benefit authors--and is being shaped largely by powerful distributors and their lobbyists with the dual goals of extending a monopoly (in order to extract high prices from the public) while simultaneously depriving authors of as much money as possible (though they push authors forward, puppet-like, as the intended beneficiaries). In creating this system Congress has exceeded its authority under the Constitution, and unless checked by the courts is likely to transmogrify copyright from a vehicle for the promotion of learning into a form of business protectionism divorced from the creation of new works." (page 909)

arkie, are you the same as the "Arkie" with a capital "A" who sometimes posts to the forum ?

T.