The linked Lawrence Lessig op-ed [0] makes reference to a Supreme Court case he argued, where the 70-year version of this law was upheld. Luckily, unlike the so

The linked Lawrence Lessig op-ed [0] makes reference to a Supreme Court case he argued, where the 70-year version of this law was upheld. Luckily, unlike the sound recordings in question, Supreme Court oral arguments are available to posterity unencumbered, under a legal framework that encourages small, innovative providers like oyez.org to deliver them to the public. Here's the argument in question: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/01-618 https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/01-618 It's fascinating to hear these oral arguments, because you have some of the smartest legal minds in the world making references on the fly to obscure two-hundred-year-old case law, stringing things together in logical ways in much the same way that the most exciting engineering conversations in our line of work involve rapid conversations at a whiteboard, where deep technical knowledge and logic come together to create frameworks and business models that have never existed before. But while lawyers and justices are engineers in one way, building case-law "frameworks" to improve the citizenry's experience based on a wide range of constitutional knowledge and common sense... lawmakers are engineers in another way, "hacking" those frameworks to see what they can get away with. Sometimes "hacking" is good, but it's entirely dependent on the moral compass of the hacker. In this specific case, the Supreme Court had argued on the basis of a balance of harm to different types of "progress" as laid out in the Constitution: is it more likely that progress will be economically incentivized if copyright terms are extended retroactively, or if copyright terms are not extended retroactively? At the time, a lot of this was tied up in ensuring consistency with international law. But that's not the case under the 144-year CLASSICS Act now being considered - as Lessig describes in the op-ed, "no other jurisdiction creates a similar right anywhere." So to me, the balance if the Supreme Court were to review this case would be to consider a streaming music provider's incentives. Do more people hear and become inspired by 1930's public-domain jazz music if: (a) it's all public domain, anyone can start a startup streaming it; or (b) it's protected, and large streaming companies like Spotify can invest more money into the propagation of the work because they have exclusive rights to a subset of it, even if the subset that is now "orphaned" is not accessible as it would be in (a)? It's a complicated question, and as a technologist I would lean towards (a) if harmony with international law is no longer a consideration. But, as I mentioned, legislators are "hackers," and with the Supreme Court unable (by design) to proactively limit their ability to build on the existing precedent that extensions are possible... it all comes down to their moral compass and alignment with their economic incentives. ...and per [1], Orrin Hatch has received $664k over his career from the "TV/Movies/Music" industry. (IANAL but things like this make me want to be one.) [0] https://www.wired.com/story/congress-latest-move-to-extend-copyright-protection-is-misguided/ https://www.wired.com/story/congress-latest-move-to-extend-c... [1] https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/industries?cid=N00009869&cycle=CAREER https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/industries?c...