United States
In the United States, perpetual copyright is prohibited by its Constitution, which provides that copyright is "for limited times". However, it neither specifies how long that term can be, nor does it impose any restriction on the number of times the term may be extended. Indeed, since the enactment of the Copyright Act of 1790, copyright term has been successively extended by Congress on four occasions, retroactively extending the terms of any copyrights still in force. Following the enactment of the Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998, a coalition of plaintiffs led by publisher Eric Eldred argued that this act and a previous extension of the copyright term in the 1970s had created a de facto "perpetual copyright on the installment plan". This argument was rejected by the US Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft, which held that there was no limit to how many times the term of copyright may be extended by Congress, so long as it is still a limited term at the time of each extension.
State and common law have granted perpetual copyright in certain special cases not covered by federal copyright law. Sound recordings made before 1972 are under the jurisdiction of state copyright laws which provide perpetual protection. Prior to January 1, 1978, when the Copyright Act of 1976 came into effect, unpublished works were protected by common law, which recognized perpetual copyright in these works for as long as they remained unpublished. The 1976 Copyright Act exerted federal jurisdiction over unpublished works for the first time and all copyrights in these works were assigned a fixed term even if they remain unpublished.
Read more about this topic: Perpetual Copyright
Famous quotes related to united states:
“The House of Lords, architecturally, is a magnificent room, and the dignity, quiet, and repose of the scene made me unwillingly acknowledge that the Senate of the United States might possibly improve its manners. Perhaps in our desire for simplicity, absence of title, or badge of office we may have thrown over too much.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never well-informed.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States
His laughter tinkled among the teacups.
I thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the birch-trees,
And of Priapus in the shrubbery
Gaping at the lady in the swing.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The United States is the only great nation whose government is operated without a budget. The fact is to be the more striking when it is considered that budgets and budget procedures are the outgrowth of democratic doctrines and have an important part in developing the modern constitutional rights.... The constitutional purpose of a budget is to make government responsive to public opinion and responsible for its acts.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing to the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)