Eldred V. Ashcroft - District Court

District Court

The original complaint was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on January 11, 1999. The plaintiffs' argument was threefold:

1. That by retroactively extending copyright terms, Congress had violated the requirements of the Constitution's Copyright Clause, which gives Congress the following power:

   "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" (emphasis added)

   Plaintiffs argued that by reading this formulation so as to allow for any number of retroactive extensions, Congress could in practice guarantee an unlimited period of copyright protection, thus thwarting the intent of the clause.
2. That any copyright law must be subject to scrutiny under the First Amendment, thereby ensuring a balance between freedom of speech and the interests of copyright.
3. That the doctrine of public trust requires the government to show a public benefit to any transfer of public property into private hands, and that the CTEA violates this doctrine by withdrawing material from the public domain.

In response, the government argued that Congress does indeed have the latitude to retroactively extend terms, so long as the individual extensions are also for "limited times," as required by the Constitution. As an argument for this position, they referred to the Copyright Act of 1790, the first Federal copyright legislation, which applied Federal protection to existing works. Furthermore, they argued, neither the First Amendment nor the doctrine of public trust is applicable to copyright cases.

On October 28, 1999, Judge June Green issued a brief opinion rejecting all three of the petitioners' arguments. On the first count, she wrote that Congress had the power to extend terms as it wished, as long as the terms themselves were of limited duration. On the second count, she rejected the notion of First Amendment scrutiny in copyright cases, based on her interpretation of Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., v. Nation Enterprises, an earlier Supreme Court decision. On the third count, she rejected the notion that public trust doctrine was applicable to copyright law.