Against Intellectual Monopoly

to make someone better off, right?
Because living artists and creators are not the designated beneficiaries of
such bounty and consumers of copyrighted products are not either, Qui
prodest?
    Those additional years are far in the future only if you are a living artist
or creator. But imagine that you are a large media company that owns the
copyright over some very lucrative character, or song, or movie produced
long, long ago by a great artist who is now dead. This creation has been
yielding huge royalties for many decades, a largesse you have grown accustomed to. Once the copyright expires, though, the flow of dollars will stop -
making it difficult for the executives to pretend that the company is efficient
and profitable and that they are highly creative professionals deserving every
penny of the superstar salaries and bonuses the shareholders have become
accustomed to approve. Once the copyright expires, these superstar executives may even have to work to try to produce new music, movies, and
comic characters. Hence, investing a portion of that huge flow of dollars in
lobbying the U.S. Congress is a wonderful investment.
    Because both economic logic and the U.S. Constitution encourage copyright only to the extent that it promotes the production of literary and other
copyrightable works, the rent-seeking nature of this kind of proposals is
pretty self-explanatory. Extending the length of copyright for works that have already been produced can scarcely make them more likely to be produced. The goal of this legislation is, of course, not to increase creativity.
What it means is that all the books, music, and movies that you purchased
with your hard-earned money, and that you would have owned outright
when the copyright expired, will instead continue to be owned by the big
media corporations.

    The U.S. Constitution allows copyright only for limited times, and then
only to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, and the retroactive extension clearly violates both of these provisions. After the CTEA was
passed, it was challenged in court on these constitutional grounds (in Eldred
v. Ashcroft). Surprising to some, justices who have argued that they take the
literal meaning of the Constitution seriously ruled that a limited time is in
fact an unlimited time. During the lawsuit, interesting information about
the social cost of the copyright extension emerged.
    Some numbers will put this change in context. Between 1923 and 1942, there were
approximately 3,350,000 copyright registrations. Approximately 425,000 (13%) of
these were renewed. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimated that of
these, only 18%, or approximately 77,000 copyrights, would constitute surviving
works that continue to earn a royalty. The annual royalties for one segment of those
surviving works, books, music, and film ... will be, CRS estimates, approximately
$317,000,000.... [B]ecause of CTEA, the public will both have to pay an additional
$317 million annually in royalties for the approximately 50,000 surviving works,
and be denied the benefits of those and 375,000 other creative works passing into
the public domain in the first 20 years alone. (Today, the proportions would be far
more significant, since there is no renewal requirement that moves over 85% of the
works copyrighted into the public domain. Under current law, 3.35 million works
would be blocked to protect 77,000.)6
    Most of the arguments for retroactive copyright extension during the course
of the congressional hearings were along the lines that offspring of great
artists, such as Geroge Gershwin, were incapable of earning a living except
by hawking the works of their great predecessor.7 The only intellectual argument offered was that works under copyright will be more widely available
than those that are not. From a theoretical point of view, this is a strange
argument, because monopolies do not profit by making things more widely
available.
    Strange arguments abounded during the debate over the CTEA. An oftenused one was that the U.S. media and entertainment industry needed the
extension to keep up with the European one (never mind that the same
companies are monopolizing both sides of the Atlantic Ocean), which had
just obtained or was on the verge of obtaining such extension from various national parliaments. The argument is strange for many reasons, but
one stands out: eight years later, the same media monopolists