Essay 2 Question 1: The Love connection between Congress and Copyright Holders

Copyright has become a major focal point of my generation. You see it every time you watch a DVD. The big "illegally watching a movie is the same as stealing campaign". Or the patent wars between some of our major tech companies such as Samsung and Apple. Where Apple was just recently awarded over 100 million dollars because of Samsung's apparent infringement on Apple's one of thousands of patents they "own". The biggest problem with the copyright's is that the laws are to broad encompassing things that no longer can be used commercially and should be shared with the public so to further the public's knowledge and progress.
This is the main argument of both Lessig (a political activist for removing the Sonny Bono CTEA bill) and Eldred (a retired programmer who's mission was to create an online database of works in the Public Domain for the benefit of humanity). Eldred started his project off on the right foot, it was mainly for his daughters who he wanted to enjoy works by Hawthorne and it soon grew to become much larger and encompass many authors. And when Poems by Frost were about to opened to the public domain he was excited to scan those onto his site as well for the enjoyment of the people however, later that year the congress once again extended the copyright's length of coverage. This meant it would be illegal for him to add it to his site. Eldred told the world he planned to do it anyways which would technically make him a felon. This was when Lessig became interested and their connection formed. For both men they believed that it was wrong for Congress to extend the length of the Copyright as it was unconstitutional and gave Congress to much power but the main reason was that it limited progress and limited human knowledge!
So with this connection formed between the two they took the matter to court where they lost every battle. They then petitioned for it to go to the Supreme court. The main premise of taking it to the Supreme Court according to Lessig was that they felt the CTEA was unconstitutional. And the state reasons were 1. Extending existing terms violated the Constitutions "limited Times" requirement. 2. Extending terms also violated the First Amendment.(Lessig Ch. 13) Lessig as well as Eldred believed that "Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again."(Lessig Ch. 13) This of course is terrible news because it shows how thoughts of money come before thoughts of the greater good of humanity which can explain many of our world issues today such as Global warming, famine, poverty, among others. Many of these could be fixed or at least on the path to being fixed but because people care more about money than getting things done and improving the world as a whole.
This main fact is what upsets me most about some of our current copyright laws we have in place. The ones I am thinking of specifically deal with mobile devices and unlocking them. This was seen as a felony for a while and could cost you up to 250,000 in fines. The only reason it is not is because they decided to temporarily exclude cell phones from the list of technology that is effected by copyright. To me this is the most ridiculous part of the law. The only thing you are doing when unlocking your phone is basically letting you actually control your device and use it to the functions you want it to do, not what the cell phone company prescribes as the functions you need. It in no way hurts anyone and the cell phone companies, who were at first against allowing phones to be unlocked, no longer care because they realized that is what their customers wanted and found there was no harm in people unlocking their devices. When there is a general consensus among the people as well as the major companies I feel that Congress as a political body should meet to change the law. It is a government for the people by the people and what Congress is making it is a government for money or a government for the people as long as it means Congressmen and woman are still on companies payroll.
This is a black stain on our government that won't be removed easily. The next biggest problem with copyright law is with movies and music. It is becoming absurd. Why can I as a consumer buy a DVD and then not be able to copy it to my hard drive to watch on the go on my laptop. It's ridiculous. If I am using it for personal use who cares whether I copy it to my computer. I already bought the DVD. The same with music. It is a problem and it truly does stifle growth as a whole. I mean I remember sitting in my band class and my teacher telling us we could not get the music for Carmina Burana because the music was to expensive to buy out right and buy an individual copy for each student or even every other student. So we had to perform another piece we had learned the year before because the music was to expensive to buy. This meant in reality that the copyright law was actually restricting the bands ability to learn. We could not learn new music because it was to expensive to pay for and because we could not simply buy a copy and then make a few copies to distribute we were in fact becoming students who could not learn. And that means our musical knowledge was not expanding and in turn we were becoming stagnant in our progress as musicians. This to me is one of the biggest faults of our society. When a law restricts the ability to learn we basically our signing humanities death certificate because restricting learning means we are in theory setting a limit to how much knowledge we can obtain as a society.
In the end it all comes back to what Lessig said which is Companies and estate are just trying to "rent-seek" (in terms of economics) (Lessig, Ch. 13) which basically means they are just trying to get the extra money from the companies by saying that they will extend the copyrights of these works if they are paid x% of the profits they would earn from them extending the date. It is sickening and very well could be one of the downfalls of America as a super power and it is absolutely a downfall to what America is supposed to stand for which is freedom as well as innovation and change in what is typical to what is right. We have fallen far from what our original founding fathers had set out for us and I think it would do us good to look back to our origins so that we can set our United States back to the way they should be, United towards forward progress.