Cite as: 537 U. S. 186 (2003)
Opinion of the Court
duration extensions to both existing and future copyrights. 1831 Act §§ 1, 16; 1909 Act §§ 23-24; 1976 Act §§ 302-303; 17 U. S. C. §§ 302-304.6
Because the Clause empowering Congress to confer copyrights also authorizes patents, congressional practice with respect to patents informs our inquiry. We count it signifi-cant that early Congresses extended the duration of numerous individual patents as well as copyrights. See, e. g., Act of Jan. 7, 1808, ch. 6, 6 Stat. 70 (patent); Act of Mar. 3, 1809, ch. 35, 6 Stat. 80 (patent); Act of Feb. 7, 1815, ch. 36, 6 Stat. 147 (patent); Act of May 24, 1828, ch. 145, 6 Stat. 389 (copy-right); Act of Feb. 11, 1830, ch. 13, 6 Stat. 403 (copyright);
that legal monopoly ended in 1695, concerns about monopolistic practices remained, and the 18th-century English Parliament was resistant to any enhancement of booksellers' and publishers' entrenched position. See Rose, supra, at 52-56. In this country, in contrast, competition among publishers, printers, and booksellers was "intens[e]" at the time of the founding, and "there was not even a rough analog to the Stationers' Company on the horizon." Nachbar, Constructing Copyright's Mythology, 6 Green Bag 2d 37, 45 (2002). The Framers guarded against the future accumulation of monopoly power in booksellers and publishers by authorizing Congress to vest copyrights only in "Authors." Justice Stevens does not even attempt to explain how Parliament's response to England's experience with a publishing monopoly may be construed to impose a constitutional limitation on Congress' power to extend copyrights granted to "Authors."
6 Moreover, the precise duration of a federal copyright has never been fixed at the time of the initial grant. The 1790 Act provided a federal copyright term of 14 years from the work's publication, renewable for an additional 14 years if the author survived and applied for an additional term. § 1. Congress retained that approach in subsequent statutes. See Stewart v. Abend, 495 U. S. 207, 217 (1990) ("Since the earliest copyright statute in this country, the copyright term of ownership has been split between an original term and a renewal term."). Similarly, under the method for measuring copyright terms established by the 1976 Act and retained by the CTEA, the baseline copyright term is measured in part by the life of the author, rendering its duration indeterminate at the time of the grant. See 1976 Act § 302(a); 17 U. S. C. § 302(a).
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