The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, which will ultimately determine whether to overturn the Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA).

The 1998 law gave independent copyright holders as well as media and music companies a 20-year extension on profitable, and in some cases world-famous media properties. Under the CTEA, the term for copyrighted material was increased from 75 years to 95 years, which effectively means that many works of literature, photography, film, and music created before 1925 will remain out of the realm of public domain for several more decades.

Wednesday's hearing marks part of a very long journey for Internet publisher and plaintiff Eric Eldred and his lead attorney Lawrence Lessig who sued Attorney General Janet Reno in 1999 in an attempt to overturn the CTEA.

Eldred is the owner of Eldritch Press, which publishes public domain American, French, Russian, and English literature online.

Their argument then and now is that the copyright extension act was put in motion by powerful media and music conglomerates that are unwilling to part with intellectual property which has served, in cases like AOL Time Warner, Disney, and The Music Publishers Association, as the foundation of their companies.

The suit was overturned and then revisited in May 2002 when it found its way to the Supreme Court and will be heard before the nine justices Wednesday morning.

The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to create a federal copyright system for creative material and to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" by securing for "limited times" copyright protection to authors and inventors.

One of the questions the Eldred v. Ashcroft case raises is whether Congress acted unconstitutionally in granting extended copyright protection and keeping famous properties like early Mickey Mouse cartoons, movie classics like "Gone with the Wind," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and books by Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway, to name just a few, out of the hands of the public and in the hands of media monopolies where many critics of the CTEA say they are going to waste.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), whose members include Sony Corp., The Walt Disney Co., AOL Time Warner, and MGM, filed a brief amicus in the Supreme Court in August in regards to Eldred V. Ashcroft stating that the petitioner's arguments against the extended copyright law are both "doctrinally and empirically ill-founded."

In its amicus, the MPAA states that the CTEA encourages the preservation and restoration of older, classic works of film and literature that might otherwise be lost, and it brings the U.S. copyright term more in line with the term in European Union countries.

"The CTEA keeps creators and copyright owners in this nation on even footing with their counterparts in other parts of the world and provides incentives for the creation of new works and the continued preservation and restoration of older ones," said Jack Valenti, president and CEO of the MPAA.

Over the past forty years, Congress has extended the length of existing copyrights 11 times and many advocates for overturning the CTEA argue that Congress has acted in favor of corporate interests by stopping the flow of creative material into the public domain as original copyright law deemed they should.

Eldred v. Ashcroft asks whether the current copyright term violates free speech rights provided by the First Amendment by delaying the time period until works are in the public domain, essentially making copyrighted works under the CTEA "perpetually owned, privately."

Additionally, the Supreme Court will have to construe the meaning of "limited times" and whether the 1998 copyright extension law violates the copyright clause of the Constitution.

"On the one hand, everyone agrees that Congress should be able to generate copyright law, but they should not be allowed to give copyright an extended layaway plan that works indefinitely under the auspice of 'limited times,'" said Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties advocacy organization.

"The biggest supporters of these laws are individuals and corporations with extremely valuable copyrights that are about to expire (for example, Mickey Mouse)," states the Eldred contingency. "The biggest effect of these laws is to make unavailable an extraordinary range of creative material for next generation's creators."

Other plaintiffs in the case include the Higginson Book Company, Jill A Crandall, Luck's Music Library, the American Film Heritage Association, Moviecraft Inc., and Dover Publications, Inc.

The issue is also intensified by the advent of digital media and the Internet, which now serves at the forefront of free speech and free exchange and has increased the demand for public domain material.

Eldred, Lessig and their supporters, who have filed dozens of friend-of-the-court briefs, feel that public domain material serves as the foundation and inspiration for future generations of creative minds.

Eldred is an advocate of the free flow of creative work into the public domain and is one of the founders, along with Lessig, of the Creative Commons, the brainchild of a group of Stanford University law and technology scholars from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School who think copyright laws are getting too restrictive.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit, copyright-free zone where artists in search of free creative material can search for public domain or donated creative material that won't get them a Cease-and-Desist order in their mailbox the next day.

"The important thing is that with the rise of the Internet, the public domain has become more useful and needed than ever before," said von Lohmann. "For the first time we live in a moment where everyone has the potential to have cheap access to the public domain. Getting access to public domain works is as easy as one click on the Internet."

But many works are being held back, said von Lohmann, under the umbrella of those works that still generate revenue for media companies and copyright holders, which according to von Lohmann, only account for one percent of copyrighted works in existence today.

"Many of those works are not even being published anymore, and there is a good chance those works will be lost forever just to protect profits," said von Lohmann. "It's an incredibly bad deal for the public."

The Eldred case contends that there are only a few valuable copyrights that the CTEA protects.

"This case is about freeing the vast majority of creative work still under copyright that no one seeks to protect, indeed, work which the current copyright owner doesn't even know he or she owns," the plaintiffs state. "Many films from the 1920s and 1930s are decaying in vaults because current copyright holders cannot be identified. Many books and songs published in the early part of the century are unavailable because the cost of finding the copyright owner is just too high. Congress sacrificed all these works, just to protect a few valuable copyrights."

A spokesperson for Disney argued that the extended copyright term stimulates the creation and preservation of copyrighted works, which in turn benefits the public.

"We believe Congress was correct in its conclusion," said Michelle Bergman for Disney. "We also believe Congress was correct in determining that harmonization of the U.S. copyright term with those in Europe and elsewhere would improve the balance of trade, thereby preserving U.S. jobs. Eldred is simply trying to second-guess what Congress has already decided, and we believe the Supreme Court should reject their attempt."