Z:gnu-www-ja-eldred-amicus--af1b60-No pattern of legislation coul/en

No pattern of legislation could more clearly indicate the presence of the very evils against which the Framers of the Constitution and their forebears contended, and which gave rise to the Copyright Clause and its requirement for &ldquo;limited Times.&rdquo; When our predecessors in the struggle for constitutional liberty perceived a danger from corruption in the grant of monopolies, the danger they apprehended was from the executive, which might use its power to grant such monopolies to raise money independent of the legislature. In our time the risk is that the legislature, which is granted the power to create such monopolies by Article I, &#167;8, will use that power to benefit copyright holders at the expense of the public domain. Such a purpose&mdash;to turn the system of free expression into a series of private fiefdoms for the benefit of monopolists, who may choose to rebate a small portion of the monopoly rents thus extracted from the population in the form of campaign contributions&mdash;is forbidden to Congress by the plain wording of the Copyright Clause and by the First Amendment. The use of repeated interim extensions to achieve the effect of a perpetuity is not less dangerous than the single enactment that all parties concede would be unconstitutional. On the contrary, such a legislative practice increases the dangers of corruption without reducing the harm to the public domain.