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the decision was praised, it was praised by papers that had been skeptical
of the Court’s activism in other cases. Deference was a good thing,
even if it left standing a silly law. But where the decision was attacked,
it was attacked because it left standing a silly and harmful law. The New
York Times wrote in its editorial,
In effect, the Supreme Court’s decision makes it likely that we are
seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of
copyright perpetuity. The public domain has been a grand experiment,
one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw
freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons
we live in a time of such fruitful creative ferment.
The best responses were in the cartoons. There was a gaggle of hilarious
images—of Mickey in jail and the like. The best, from my view
of the case, was Ruben Bolling’s, reproduced on the next page. The
“powerful and wealthy” line is a bit unfair. But the punch in the face felt
exactly like that.
The image that will always stick in my head is that evoked by the
quote from The New York Times. That “grand experiment” we call the
“public domain” is over? When I can make light of it, I think, “Honey,
I shrunk the Constitution.” But I can rarely make light of it. We had in
our Constitution a commitment to free culture. In the case that I fathered,
the Supreme Court effectively renounced that commitment. A
better lawyer would have made them see differently.
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