Z:gnu-www-ja-eldred-amicus--6ca59a-Notwithstanding this evident c/en

Notwithstanding this evident constitutional principle, the Court of Appeals held that Congress may create a perpetuity in copyrights so long as it does so sequentially, by repeatedly extending all existing copyrights for nominally &ldquo;limited&rdquo; terms. This holding contradicts the spirit of both the Copyright Clause and the First Amendment. The Court of Appeals erroneously held, following its own precedent, see Schnapper v. Foley, 667 F.2d 102, 112 (1981), that the single phrase comprising the Copyright Clause, empowering Congress &ldquo;To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,&rdquo; imposes no substantive limitation on Congress through its declaration of purpose. But the Court of Appeals acknowledged, as it must, that this Court's cases show clearly that Congressional power is indeed limited by the Copyright Clause, and so its effort is bent to the disintegration of a single phrase of twenty-seven words, directed at showing that the first nine are somehow constitutionally irrelevant.