Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186, 15 (2003)

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200

ELDRED v. ASHCROFT

Opinion of the Court

purpose to evade the "limited Times" prescription prompted Congress to adopt the CTEA.

To comprehend the scope of Congress' power under the Copyright Clause, "a page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner, 256 U. S. 345, 349 (1921) (Holmes, J.). History reveals an unbroken congressional practice of granting to authors of works with existing copyrights the benefit of term extensions so that all under copyright protection will be governed evenhandedly under the same regime. As earlier recounted, see supra, at 194, the First Congress accorded the protections of the Nation's first federal copyright statute to existing and future works alike. 1790 Act § 1.5 Since then, Congress has regularly applied

5 This approach comported with English practice at the time. The Statute of Anne, 1710, 8 Ann. c. 19, provided copyright protection to books not yet composed or published, books already composed but not yet published, and books already composed and published. See ibid. ("[T]he author of any book or books already composed, and not printed and published, or that shall hereafter be composed, and his assignee or assigns, shall have the sole liberty of printing and reprinting such book and books for the term of fourteen years, to commence from the day of the first publishing the same, and no longer."); ibid. ("[T]he author of any book or books already printed . . . or the bookseller or booksellers, printer or printers, or other person or persons, who hath or have purchased or acquired the copy or copies of any book or books, in order to print or reprint the same, shall have the sole right and liberty of printing such book and books for the term of one and twenty years, to commence from the said tenth day of April, and no longer.").

Justice Stevens stresses the rejection of a proposed amendment to the Statute of Anne that would have extended the term of existing copyrights, and reports that opponents of the extension feared it would perpetuate the monopoly position enjoyed by English booksellers. Post, at 232- 233, and n. 9. But the English Parliament confronted a situation that never existed in the United States. Through the late 17th century, a government-sanctioned printing monopoly was held by the Stationers' Company, "the ancient London guild of printers and booksellers." M. Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright 4 (1993); see L. Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective ch. 3 (1968). Although

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