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SAA Exerts Leadership on Copyright Extension



With apologies for cross-posting:

Yesterday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case to
decide whether or not the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act extending
copyright protection of existing copyrights by an additional 20 years is
constitutional.  The appeal asked the Court to agree to hear - and to
overturn - a decision by the federal appeals court for the D.C. Circuit.

On December 13, 2001, The Society of American Archivists, the American
Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries, filed an
amicus curiae brief requesting that the Supreme Court hear the case
http://www.ala.org/washoff/eldred.html).  The New York Times declared that
the Court's decision to rule on the matter "held the potential of producing
the most important copyright case in decades."

The brief to the Supreme Court argued, "the practical result of copyright
term extension, by maintaining unnecessary barriers to the accessibility of
information, diminishes the ability of the public to be educated, to be
entertained, and to engage in debate. Through excessive copyright extension,
copyright owners will continue to restrict access to and exert censorial
control over millions of works, thereby chilling discourse and cultural
development long after incentives for production have ceased to operate."

This case will present a great opportunity for archivists, librarians,
historians and others to explain our view on the importance of the public
domain and the harm that flows from keeping works almost perpetually locked
up.   As Roy Rosenzweig wrote in a recent article in the Journal of American
History, "for historians, copyright protection has redlined...much of
twentieth century history."

SAA has exerted leadership at the forefront of this issue and will continue
to lead efforts to overturn the law. Mark Greene, a member of SAA Council,
and, with Peter Hirtle and Bill Maher, of Council's working group on
Intellectual Property, noted that the stakes for archivists in this case are
very high:

"The growing reluctance of publishers to risk printing even excerpts from
unpublished material without clear copyright permission has begun to
significantly hamper scholars' ability to use archival sources. The last
Civil War veterans died in the 1950s; under CTEA copyright, protection in
unpublished letters from that war could endure until 2030.  How such
ever-lengthening copyright protection helps 'to promote the Progress of
Science and useful Arts,' as the Framers intended, is anyone's guess."

More about the case can be found at
http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvashcroft/


Susan E. Fox, CAE
Executive Director
Society of American Archivists
527 S. Wells St., 5th Floor
Chicago, IL  60607
312-922-0140
fax:  312-347-1452
sfox@archivists.org
www.archivists.org

The mission of the Society of American Archivists is to serve the
educational and informational needs of our members and to provide leadership
to ensure the identification, preservation, and use of the nation's historic
record.

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