Eldred v Ashcroft
I actually already blogged this elsewhere so it seems a bit redundant to me, but in the interests of completeness (I've talked about the issue here before) it ought to go here too:
The Supreme Court decided 7-2 to uphold the Copyright Extension Act passed in 1998. This act extended copyright 20 additional years and was applied retroactively, removing some works from the public domain on which copyright had already expired.
Dan Gillmor has an excellent journal article on the decision:
Like public lands and the oceans, the public domain is controlled by no one -- a situation that infuriates people who believe that nothing can have value unless some person or corporation owns it. The public domain is the pool of knowledge from which new art and scholarship have arisen over the centuries.The Constitution talks about granting rights to creators of ''science and useful arts'' but only for limited periods. After that, the works can be used freely by anyone.
At the end of the article he also has links to Lawrence Lessig's blog (the lawyer who argued the case before the Supreme court) and the court documents, including dissenting opinions from Justices Stevens and Breyer.