His lawsuit, officially titled Eldred v. Ashcroft, is a way of forcing the issue. It's a measure of the strength and importance of Lessig's case that he will be opposed in court by Theodore B. Olson, the U.S. Solicitor General himself, and not some government underling. Olson won all eight cases he argued before the Supreme Court last term.

The court will consider the passage in the Constitution that states ''to promote the progress of science and useful arts,'' Congress should grant copyright only for ''limited times.'' For Congress in 1790, the limit was 14 years, plus another 14 if the creator was still alive. By that standard, "Snow White," made in 1937, would have joined Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Mark Twain in the public domain in 1965. Instead, "Snow White" is now due to enter the public domain in 2032--unless, of course, copyright is extended again. This case echoes remarkably the situation in the 18th century:

Before 1710, the Stationers' Company, a guild of printers, controlled the publication and sale of all works in England, including those of authors who had been dead for thousands of years. The Stationers scoffed at the idea that their monopoly should be in any way limited. For one thing, they warned, if the system were dismantled it would ruin the economy. Equally important, they said, they had a moral right. No other property gets taken away after 10 or 20 years, they wrote in a broadside, so why should books? It's an argument that the music and movie industries are still making today.

Nevertheless, the Statute of Anne in 1710 established a limited copyright term of 14 years. The Stationers spent the next 60 years alternately ignoring and challenging the law as they tried to suppress the Scottish publishers, who followed their own rules and were thus the Internet pirates of the era. But in a landmark case in 1774, the Stationers' monopoly was finally broken and the past was freed.

When the U.S. Constitution was drawn up several years later, this history was still fresh. Jefferson wanted to put a ''restriction against monopolies'' in the Bill of Rights, right alongside trial by jury and freedom of the press. He, like the other framers, hated concentrating power in the hands of a few, and didn't like the idea of the past calling the shots on the future either. The earth belongs to the living, Jefferson wrote Madison on Sept. 6, 1789: ''The dead have neither powers nor rights over it.''