A Brief History of US Copyright Law and The Constitution
Sunday, January 8th, 2012Copyright laws have raised questions about whether they limit our constitutional freedom of speech for, probably, as long as they have been around. In 1788, the US Constitution was ratified. Just two years later, the Copyright Act of 1790 was passed to become the first federal copyright act in United States history.
The copyright debate was, however, on the table during the drafting of the Constitution, which led to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, known as the Copyright Clause which grants Congress the right to grant copyrights and patents which huge, greedy corporations can use to profit while leveraging the court system to easily squash competition and strong-arm the public into using limited channels of distribution. Wait is that really what it said? I thought our founding fathers were smarter than that! Let’s see…