Cite as: 533 U. S. 483 (2001)
Stevens, J., dissenting
the complex questions presented by this case. It is, nevertheless, one that is consistent with the statutory text and entirely faithful to the statute's purposes. Respect for the policies motivating its enactment, to which I now turn, makes it wrong for the Court to reject this reading of § 201(c).
It is likely that the Congress that enacted the 1976 revision of the law of copyright did not anticipate the developments that occurred in the 1980's which gave rise to the practices challenged in this litigation. See Miller, Copyright Protection for Computer Programs, Databases, and Computer-Generated Works: Is Anything New Since CONTU?, 106 Harv. L. Rev. 977, 979 (1993) (in 1976, "Congress . . . decided to avoid grappling with technological issues that obviously required more study than the legislative process was then willing to give them").15 Thus, in resolving ambiguities in the relevant text of the statute, we should be mindful of the policies underlying copyright law.
Macaulay wrote that copyright is "a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers." T. Macaulay, Speeches on Copyright 11 (A. Thorndike ed. 1915). That tax restricts the dissemination of writings, but only insofar as necessary to encourage their production, the bounty's basic objective. See U. S. Const., Art. I, § 8, cl. 8. In other words, "[t]he primary purpose of copyright is not to reward the author, but is rather to secure 'the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors.' " 1 M. Nimmer & D. Nimmer, Copyright § 1.03[A] (2000) (quoting Fox Film Corp. v. Doyal, 286 U. S. 123, 127 (1932)); see also Breyer, The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of
15 See also H. R. Rep. 116. In the quarter century since the 1976 Act became law, "the databases [in existence] have grown by a factor of 39 . . . . In 1975, the 301 databases in existence contained about 52 million records. The 11,681 databases in 1999 contained nearly 12.86 billion records for a growth by a factor of 242." Williams, Highlights of the Online Database Industry and the Internet: 2000, in Proceedings of the 21st Annual National Online Meeting 1 (M. Williams ed. 2000).
519
Page: Index Previous 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007