Justice Breyer on Verdi's Othello
 Yesterday the Supreme Court heard arguments in Eldred vs. Ashcroft, a "copyright terms"
case which has come to symbolize (for the tech industry at least) the
power of content monopolists like Disney and their sock puppets on
Capitol Hill. For a popular account of the case, see
Newsweeks's Steve Levy's short piece on MSNBC, Glitterati vs. Geeks.
Here's the collection of
pages devoted to the case by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet &
Society. And here's the New York
Times story about yesterday's hearing. The Times's print
edition excerpted the oral arguments, from which I get the following:
Mr. Olson: If you are an 80-year-old writer, that may make a
considerable difference in terms of what you decide to do.
Justice Breyer: How could it?
Mr. Olson: If you have no incentive, if you know that this is going
to go into the public domain sooner rather than later, it may affect
your judgment with respect to . . . .
Justice Breyer: So you think, say, Verdi, Othello, Verdi, Othello, 80
years old, the prospect of an extra 20 years way down the pike would
have made a difference?
Mr. Olson: Well, I think that again illustrates why the authority is
invested in Congress . . . .
Put aside for a moment the strained quality in Solicitor General Theodore Olson's
answers. Was Breyer being even more clever and pointed
than at first appears?
Had the copyright on Shakespeare's Othello been
indefinitely extended as Congress has done lately, then Verdi and Boito
could not have written the opera in the first place. And the same
is true for Shakespeare's own source, Giralidi Cinithio's
Hecatomithi. Had Elizabeth I been of the same mind as Rep. Sonny Bono, absurdly extended copyright terms
would have effectively shut Shakespeare down, depriving him of the
sources for Othello, Hamlet, Lear,
Macbeth, and almost of his other plays -- not to mention The Rape of Lucrece (cribbed from Livy), Venus and Adonis (cribbed from Ovid), etc.
Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig makes good use of this irony
in his Eldred brief, pointing out that had these same indefinite
copyrights been in force during our own century, Disney could not have
created its own animated versions of Pinnochio, Hunchback of Notre Dame, The
Little Mermaid . . . .
8:44:49 PM 
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