Z:gnu-www-ja-eldred-amicus--db62b3-As important as the principle/en

As important as the principle of limited time is in the general restraint of the harms that flow from statutory monopolies, in the area of copyright it has an even more crucial purpose to serve. The limited term of copyright ensures the steady replenishment of the public domain, the vast repository of the common culture of humankind. The public domain is the springboard of societal creativity, the zone of free reproduction and exchange that makes innovation possible. As Yochai Benkler has elegantly shown, the existence of a vital and expanding public domain reconciles the exclusive rights of the copyright system with the underlying goals of the system of free expression protected by the First Amendment. See Yochai Benkler, Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain, 74 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 354, 386-394 (1999). The Court below erred in its facile dismissal of petitioners' First Amendment concerns. That Court first held in its opinion that the First Amendment's requirements are &ldquo;categorically&rdquo; satisfied by the distinction between expression and idea, and then that any material covered by copyright but subject to the defense of fair use is therefore so copiously protected for purposes of free expression that no First Amendment claim can possibly lie. 239 F.3d, at 375-376.