Cite as: 537 U. S. 186 (2003)
Breyer, J., dissenting
he warned in general that monopolies must be "guarded with strictness agst abuse." Ibid.
Many Members of the Legislative Branch have expressed themselves similarly. Those who wrote the House Report on the landmark Copyright Act of 1909, for example, said that copyright was not designed "primarily" to "benefit" the "author" or "any particular class of citizens, however worthy." H. R. Rep. No. 2222, 60th Cong., 2d Sess., 6-7 (1909). Rather, under the Constitution, copyright was designed "primarily for the benefit of the public," for "the benefit of the great body of people, in that it will stimulate writing and invention." Id., at 7. And were a copyright statute not "believed, in fact, to accomplish" the basic constitutional objective of advancing learning, that statute "would be beyond the power of Congress" to enact. Id., at 6-7. Similarly, those who wrote the House Report on legislation that implemented the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works said that "[t]he constitutional purpose of copyright is to facilitate the flow of ideas in the interest of learning." H. R. Rep. No. 100-609, p. 22 (1988) (internal quotation marks omitted). They added:
"Under the U. S. Constitution, the primary objective of copyright law is not to reward the author, but rather to secure for the public the benefits derived from the authors' labors. By giving authors an incentive to create, the public benefits in two ways: when the original expression is created and . . . when the limited term . . . expires and the creation is added to the public domain." Id., at 17.
For present purposes, then, we should take the following as well established: that copyright statutes must serve public, not private, ends; that they must seek "to promote the Progress" of knowledge and learning; and that they must do so both by creating incentives for authors to produce and by removing the related restrictions on dissemination after
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