Z:gnu-www-ja-eldred-amicus--89e561-No one seriously contends that/en

No one seriously contends that Congress may achieve an expressly unauthorized end by dividing the means of its achievement into multiple statutes. Yet the Court of Appeals held that, so long as each individual statute states a precise numerical increment, Congress can extend the life of existing copyrights indefinitely. This conclusion is in direct conflict with the language of the Copyright Clause, Article I, &#167;8, cl. 8, in its natural sense. The constitutional history of England and British North America, moreover, is unambiguous about the importance of &ldquo;limited Times&rdquo; in the control of all state-awarded monopolies, of which genus copyright and patent are species. The very evils that led English and British North American constitutional lawyers to insist on the strictly limited term of royal and statutory monopolies, and to embody that requirement in the Copyright Clause of Article I, are present in the retroactive extension of existing copyrights by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), Pub. L. No. 105-298, Title I, 112 Stat. 2827, at issue in this case.