Declan McCullagh has filed a story on the copyright case and Linda Greenhouse reports for the NY Times (registration required).
Kwindla Hultman Kramer has posted her account of the arguments, SCOTUSBlog has a post by Supreme Court litigator Erik Jaffe (scroll down to 1:34 pm), and LawMeme has another account.
Salon has a journal on the trip of the Internet Archive's Bookmobile to hear the oral arguments (which I wrote about earlier). Most of the 200 people who waited in line didn't get in to attend the arguments.
Declan has photos taken outside the Supreme Court (there are also links to photos of the bookmobile). If you scroll down a bit on Lawrence Lessig's page, they are adding links to coverage and other accounts. And there is more at Google News. For more background, see the opposing copyright extension site.
In the story on the case on NPR this morning (the evening report will be here), Jack Velenti argues that studios wouldn't restore films if they no longer hold the copyright. This ignores the fact that most of the studios have been awful at film preservation. If Bono is overturned, the studios would still have the resources and marketing skill to produce special edition DVDs which would outsell any cheap public domain editions. And it would allow the release of the many films which the studios would never release because they couldn't make money from them.
An example is you can get a cheap public domain version of The Third Man on DVD for $6 or you can buy the far superior Criterion special edition from a restored print with extensive supplements for $36. Most who've seen the two DVDs will agree the Criterion version is well worth the extra $30 (there is also a restored Criterion special edition of the 39 Steps and a cheap public domain version).
Further perspective from David Streitfeld in the LA Times:
- Many Films Are Lost
Only 20% of the films made in the 1920s still exist, according to the Library of Congress. Sometimes, destruction came at the hands of the studios, who wanted to salvage the valuable silver from the nitrate reels. In other cases, the films wasted away from simple neglect.
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