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ited times to authors and investors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

The importance of the phrase "limited times" was not lost on early legislators, who saw copyright as a trade-off that ensured everyone would have free use of discoveries and artistic works after an appropriate period of compensation. The first U.S. copyright law provided that the exclusive rights would expire after a term of fourteen years, renewable at the author's request for another fourteen years. As copyright holders—increasingly, large publishing companies—grew in power and made return trips to Washington, that copyright term was extended eleven times in the past forty years. More than once, it happened just as Mickey Mouse was nearing his expiration date (or emancipation date, depending on one's point of view). In 1998, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act set a new record, extending what had grown to seventy-five years of copyright for corporate works and life-plus-fifty years for works by individuals by a further twenty years apiece. The bill was challenged in court by a team including Lawrence Lessig, who argued that Congress's constant extensions were a way of sneaking around the constitutional requirement for limited time. After Lessig's side lost in lower courts, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 agreed to consider the case.

So far, the courts have been almost as uniformly pro-copyright holder as Washington has been. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's illegal to hack encryption technology that protects copyrighted material. And this has been interpreted very broadly. In one of the best-known cases, that involving the DVD encryption technology known as CSS and the override program called DeCSS, it is often missed that DeCSS did not itself facilitate copying. CSS kept DVD discs from being played on computers that didn't contain the licensed technology for de-encryption. In practice, this meant that only Windows and Apple machines could play the DVDs. DeCSS just allowed Linux users to play DVDs that were purchased legally. Any DVD could be copied, legally or otherwise, without having to de-encrypt it. Yet not only were the purveyors of DeCSS found to have violated the DMCA, but journalistic websites that linked to pages that linked to pages that contained the DeCSS program were barred from doing so by the courts.

Likewise, the record industry won the biggest digital lawsuit besides