The Supreme Court rejected the Eldred case by a margin of 7-2. Copyright, for the foreseeable future, is infinite. Personally, I think if this is going to be the case, then let's make it retroactive. If Disney gets to own the rights to "Steamboat Willie" for all time, then the heirs of Hans Christian Andersen, Rudyard Kipling and the Brothers Grimm should be able to sue them for infringing upon the original stories; the descendants of the Brontë sisters should have rights to the profits of all the TV and film adaptions of their work over the past hundred years, and the distant relatives of Shakespeare should be able to sue everybody. It's only fair.
The point of copyright law is that ideas cannot be owned by anyone. However, to promote learning in the Arts and Sciences, people are given exclusive rights to their creations, for a limited time. After this period has expired, the work enters the public domain. There it becomes part of the cultural fabric, able to be repeated, embellished, or reworked by society. Shakespeare isn't an important part of Western culture because he was responsible for several good plays back in the 16th Century; it's because those plays are still being performed today, and have been for the past several hundred years. Because they're in the public domain. Because anyone can have access to them and perform them, without having to pay a tithe to a publisher.
Do you really think it is wise to leave our cultural history in the hands of corporations? The same corporations that have wiped influential parts of British TV history from existence, simply because they needed the space? The ones that deny access to 93% of the 37,000 films released between 1927-46? Or the ones that only keep 174 books in print out of the 10,027 released in 1930?
