Posts Tagged: "copyright clause"

The new reality is that content creators are getting squeezed all around. Increasingly many want things to be free and don’t care whether they copy a public domain work or whether it is something that is copyrighted. They don’t see it as wrong, but this makes it difficult to make a living for content creators. Truthfully, for some content creators it is darn near impossible. Yet everywhere you turn content creators are getting the short end of the stick. If it isn’t blatant and wanton copyright infringement online (which I have to deal with all the time), it is authors getting pennies on the dollar for eBooks or musicians who worked with Pandora to help the company get off the ground taken to Congress so the U.S. government can step in and take from creators for the benefit of the company they helped create. Even the name of the bill supported by Pandora — the Internet Radio Fairness Act — is insulting and misleading.

To all those who can read the Constitution it has to be clear that the Supreme Court’s decision in Golan v. Holder is absurd. It is a ridiculous decision that lacks intellectual honesty and defies common sense. Further, the facts of this case provide ample ground for the suspicions of many who wonder why it is that the United States is so interested in losing its identity and compromising Constitutional principles in order to facilitate some ill conceived plan to join the world community. Simply stated, treaties and international law cannot trump the Constitution. With all due respect to the six Justices who ruled in favor of stripping works from the public domain, the Constitution does not support this decision and any attempts to argue to the contrary are insulting and show a contemptuous understanding of the history and role of intellectual property in America.