High court to consider Internet-centered copyright challenge

In a case initiated by an Internet publisher, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed yesterday to review whether Congress has exercised too much authority in copyright protection. The outcome could affect the availability of books, music and movies online.

The case was among a number affecting businesses and workers. In separate decisions, the court refused to give states the right to get around overtime laws for their own workers, refused to make it harder for shoppers to sue stores over discrimination, and declined to rule on cases dealing with privacy rights for workers.

In the Internet publishing case, a non-profit publisher and other plaintiffs argue that Congress sided too heavily with writers, other creators and other owners of such rights when it passed a law in 1998 retroactively extending copyright terms by 20 years.

With the extension, older Disney movies and other works that might have entered the public domain soon -- and thus be freely and legally available over the Internet -- would continue to receive copyright protections for at least two more decades.

Although the case isn't limited to the online world, it could determine "if the Internet really transforms the ways in which information gets to people and the things they can do with it once they have it," said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor who is representing the plaintiffs.

Zittrain said the high court's ruling, expected this spring, could also affect future attempts at extending copyright terms retroactively.

In 1790, copyrights lasted 14 years. With the 1998 extension, the period is 70 years after the death of the creator, if the person is known. Works owned by corporations are now protected for 95 years.

Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, which represents published book authors, said writers need to be compensated or "they will be forced to turn to other lines of work."

But critics say the copyright clause was written into the Constitution not only to reward creators but also to make the works available for the public to exchange and develop into new works.

Repeated extensions, they say, mean copyrights aren't truly limited.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of information studies at the University of Wisconsin, said online publishers would love to make out-of-print works they don't own available over the Internet. But they can't legally as long as Congress keeps extending copyrights.

The lead plaintiff in the case is Eric Eldred, who runs an organization called Eldritch Press that places public-domain materials online.

Among the other cases that the Supreme Court ruled on yesterday:

State employee overtime. States lost their attempt to get around federal labor laws that require them to pay their workers overtime.

Iowa, supported by eight other states, asked the court to rule that states have a constitutional right to set their own labor policies. Justices declined to review the case, without comment.

The Iowa Supreme Court had sided with the employees last fall.

Worker privacy. The court refused to decide whether police can use video cameras to secretly monitor people on the job without getting a warrant. The court declined, without comment, to review Lindalee Cowles' arguments that workers have privacy rights at their own desks.

Campus police suspected that Cowles was stealing money. Without getting a warrant, officers crawled through vents in the ceiling and installed a hidden video camera aimed at her desk.

The Alaska Supreme Court ruled that Cowles could not expect privacy because other employees had access to her desk in the University of Alaska-Fairbanks theater box office.

Her lawyer, Robert John, said in court filings that the decision "establishes an unacceptable double standard, where the well-paid professional, executive or manager with his or her own office is deemed to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the workplace."

Discrimination against shoppers. Justices declined to review a $1.2 million verdict against the department-store chain Dillard's Inc., which was accused of keeping a black woman from claiming a sample of cologne that had been available to others.

Stores frequently fend off customer complaints. Dillard's wanted the court to set boundaries for lawsuits under a federal civil rights law.

Dillard's had been sued in this case by Paula Hampton after she was detained by a guard in 1996 for suspicion of shoplifting at a store in Overland Park, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City.

An all-white jury awarded Hampton $56,000 in actual damages and $1.1 million in punitive damages. A divided panel of the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision.

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