Obviously I'm unhappy with this decision. The court argues that the Congressional record shows no intent to violate the Constitution, while conveniently ignoring several comments, mentioned in one of the dissents, made OFF the record which indicate as much. The act is, in fact, NAMED after a man who argued in favor of perpetual copyright. Congress is obviously not going to state its intent to violate the law ON RECORD knowing how that information is used by the courts. Duh.

The Court argues that the intent of this law is simply to bring us "into compliance" with European law. I might remind the reader that the DMCA and several other copyright extremeist laws have come at us via Europe because they failed to gain steam in the U.S. standing alone. The legislators felt when they were originally presented that they wouldn't hold constitutional muster.

This is a CRIME against the public good. The people who have perpetrated it do so knowing exactly what they are doing. IF the court doesn't have the guts to do something about it, well....

The thing is that our generation has grasped onto appropriation and recontextualization to provide cultural anchors to works of art and to create emotional context, for much the same reasons that an ancient generation invented the metaphore. It is already the case in certain artistic circles that if no one samples you, you don't matter. And this is not just a fad, but rather a clear trend in the last 20 years...

Art that has the will to exist outside of this copyright system today paves the road for art that will have the need to exist outside of it tomorrow. And as these trends progress the significance of art you can't manipulate approaches zero. And herein lies the ultimate defeat of the copyright extremeists. By the time they realise the sort of mistake they've made, it will already be too late.

We lost Eldred: Majority Opinion