Tuesday 20 May 2003 17.00 –18.00 followed by questions and discussion

Venue: St Peter's College The Latner Room

Organised by Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre

Speaker: Professor Wendy Gordon (Boston University School of Law)

The speaker proffers two key distinctions regarding the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. First, the Article distinguishes between the CTEA’s retrospective term extension and the retrospective extensions enacted by prior Congresses. The Article suggests that the CTEA provisions are questionable in ways that earlier retrospective extensions may not have been. Second, the Article distinguishes between the “public goods” problems faced by non-creative physical activities such as film preservation and the “public goods” problems faced by creative activities such as authorship. Professor Gordon argues that the Copyright Clause is exclusively or primarily concerned with the latter. Therefore, she argues, the CTEA’s retrospective extension embodies a constitutionally impermissible tradeoff: it discourages creative activity and gains—at most—some encouragement for non-creative activity. In addition, the Article reviews and expands on the usual economic arguments for limiting the duration of intellectual property. In particular, the Article recasts the dry language of economics—the “increased costs of creation”—in a way that makes clear the aesthetic and psychological costs imposed by a long copyright.