I have decidedly-mixed feelings on this morning's decision by the Supreme Court to uphold the extension of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act — and my ambivalence is not merely because the thing is named after Sonny Bono. Unlike many of my friends (with whom I've argued this), I am not a big fan of works lapsing into the public domain. I do not think that writers or their heirs are greedy swine for wanting to hold onto a property that someone thinks "should" belong to all. I think, in this materialistic world of ours, that a creation is a commodity and that society has no more right to void ownership rights than they have to say that you can't own those precious family heirlooms that Grandma left you in her will. I also do not see the greater good that is supposedly achieved by books and movies lapsing into the public domain. Seems to me most of what we get from that is a lot of really cheap, bad videotapes in K-Mart, and publishing houses that get to print books without having to pay an author or respect the wishes of one.
I recognize that there are cases where public domain facilitates the preservation of classic work and the creation of new art. I just think they're the exception, not the rule. The argument has been advanced that public domain "liberates" certain works of art, preventing copyright owners from sitting on them and keeping them from the world. I'm not sure that's as true as some say. I think public domain provides a disincentive for copyright owners to invest in preservation and restoration. But if keeping great works available is our primary concern, there could be a clause in the copyright laws that said works have to be preserved and kept in print for their owners to retain custody.
I also have no great love for companies like Disney continuing to own properties like Mickey Mouse, but fear the "little guy" will get trampled by the decision that Disney has "earned enough." In my ideal world, after the formal term of the copyright, the rights would revert to the estates of Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney, and the current company would have to go to them and reacquire the rights.
Where my feelings get mixed on this issue is that I think the Supreme Court, in saying it's okay to tack more decades onto copyrights that would otherwise have expired, is going against the Constitution. That most imperfect of perfect documents does say something about copyrights expiring, and Congress has done all that it can to see that this never occurs. On the one hand, I'm glad because I think copyrights should not expire, and I think that clause in the Constitution — authored at a time when it was beastly difficult to reprint anything at all — is outdated and in need of changing. No one is talking about changing it, however; they're just doing fancy footwork to not comply. I like the result but I don't like seeing the Constitution circumvented to arrive at it.