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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

110 Supreme Court Justices seated since the Copyright Clause was enacted along with the Constitution in 1787, versus Kubrick from Hacker News. I wonder who's right about whether copyright law is constitutional.

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This is a completely bald-faced appeal to authority, and it's not even a very good authority: it costs much less for Big Media to keep 110 decision-making people quiet over the years (through downward pressure from the other parts of government lobbied into agreement with them) than the amount they make while doing so; however, it costs much too much to convince the entire public of their side. In a democracy, if the public disagrees with a law, it's not really a law, no matter what the legislators say.

It's an appeal to authority in an argument about authority. The question kubrick set up wasn't "is copyright law right" or "sensible" or "practicable"; it's "is it constitutional". The answer: yes.

So the law is within the bounds of common sense when it defines the copyright period as the life of the author plus 99 years? The constitution says a copyright is granted for a limited time to encourage artists to create. How is Walt Disney going to be encouraged to create another Mickey Mouse when he's been dead for 40 years?

Appeal to authority is not always wrong. In terms of "Is it Constitutional?", the Constitution itself says the Supreme Court decides. Citing the Supreme Court on the question of whether something is constitutional isn't an "appeal to authority fallacy", it's just plain correct, whether or not it is also an "appeal to authority".

And as near as I can see, tptacek is correct in the citation. It may be vague but it is substantially correct; if it were unconstitutional to treat copyright as a property right, it would have been ruled so sometime in the last 200 years, instead of becoming the foundation of the system.

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