[License-discuss] Golan v. Holder

[Marc Whipple]

The Supreme Court long ago made clear that patents and copyrights are a matter of almost unlimited discretion for Congress. The *one* thing the Constitution makes clear about patents and copyrights - that they are to be effective for a limited time - Congress has demonstrated that they do not intend to be limited by, and the Court does not take efforts to make them seriously.

They probably wouldn't sit still for Congress completely eliminating Fair Use due to First Amendment concerns, but if they wanted to institute a sweat-of-the-brow doctrine to protect telephone directories tomorrow, the Supremes wouldn't say boo.

MW

-----Original Message-----
From: license-discuss-bounces at opensource.org [mailto:license-discuss-bounces at opensource.org] On Behalf Of Chris Travers
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2012 1:28 AM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Golan v. Holder

Is it just me or does Golan more or less read out of the Constitution any functional requirements regarding copyright law and read the copyright/patent clause basically as delegating unlimited power to Congress in this regard?  I mean can Congress now start allowing telephone directories to be copyrighted, since we no longer care about promoting the progress of anything?