[Ecommerce] U.S. court upholds copyright law on 'orphan works'

[Manon Ress]

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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
U.S. court upholds copyright law on 'orphan works'

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20070122-1200-copyright-
appeal-.html

By Eric Auchard
REUTERS

12:00 p.m. January 22, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO =96 A U.S. appeals court has rejected a bid by Internet
activists to roll back federal laws that extended copyright
protection over orphan works, or books and other media that are no
longer in print.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower
court decision to dismiss Kahle v. Gonzales, which argued that legal
changes made in the 1990s had vastly extended copyright protections
at the expense of free speech rights.

Orphaned works are a hot-button issue for the publishing industry,
which has resisted efforts by Web companies Google Inc., Yahoo Inc.
and the Internet Archive =96 working with major academic libraries =96 to
scan orphaned and out-of-copyright works to make them available for
free on the Web.

Prior to 1978, the number of orphaned copyright works was limited by
requirements that intellectual property holders renew their rights
within a certain period of years. Otherwise ownership of these works
would pass into the public domain.

Amendments to U.S. copyright law in the Sony Bono Copyright Term
Extension Act of 1992 made renewal registration optional, rather than
mandatory, in order to preserve copyrights. A 1998 amendment further
extended the renewal term to 67 years.

Critics of the changes had mocked the law as an effort to prolong
Walt Disney Co.'s copyright hold over Mickey Mouse.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of these changes
to copyright law in a 2003 decision, Eldred v. Ashcroft, which the
three-judge Ninth Circuit panel cited.

=93They (the plaintiffs) make essentially the same argument, in
different form, that the Supreme Court rejected in Eldred. It fails
here as well,=94 the eight-page opinion written by Ninth Circuit Judge
Jerome Farris stated.

Plaintiffs in the case in 2004 filed a lawsuit against the U.S.
government. They included Brewster Kahle, head of the nonprofit
Internet Archive, best known for its periodic time capsule of Web
sites, and which also provides free access to digital audio, book and
films.

=93What is at stake is libraries being able to have out-of-print books
on their digital bookshelves as they have out-of-print books on the
physical shelves we grew up with,=94 Kahle wrote in November when
arguments were heard in the case.


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Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org

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