Copyright
Valenti's mixing his religious metaphors interestingly.
I've already talked about the restoration question. And I said that copyright extension will promote restoration of works with significant current commercial value, but hinder restoration of works without such value.
As I believe Eldred amici have explained, there are many works whose current copyright holders are not even known, but which are still under copyright -- in some sense a result of the lack of deposit and renewal requirements -- and the resulting uncertainty can block any effort to use or preserve those works.
The fact is that there are lots of scholars and lots of volunteers restoring work all the time. (In some cases, they can get new copyrights in their restorations! That's troubling, in some ways, but it's much less troubling than a blanket copyright extension. Lessig suggested at oral argument that you could extend copyright only to the extent that a copyright holder actually agreed to restore a work -- and independent copyrightability of restorations seems like an obvious way to accomplish that. This would, as Lessig said, make that kind of copyright extension into a quid pro quo instead of a giveaway. It's too bad the Justices didn't pay too much attention to this point.)
