Lawrence Lessig, now a Stanford University Law School professor, who argued against the extensions the other day, told the court under questioning that if the 1998law was struck down well then, by golly, other extensions like the 1976 law that extended copyrights past an author's mere lifetime could be challenged too. Justice Stephen Breyer, for one, seemed appalled at the prospect of pulling out the stitches holding up the whole fabric of copyright law. "The chaos that would ensue would be horrendous," he said.

Lessig and his client, Internet publisher Eric Eldred, may be on shaky ground anyway claiming the 20-year extension, known by its detractors as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act," violates the constitutional limits on copyright duration.

The Constitution is pretty silent on the matter as Chief Justice William Rehnquist remarked. "What the framers thought is not applicable to many of today's commerce rules," he said, though Sandra Day O'Conner felt that while it might be constitutional, CTEM, as policy, "flies in the face of what the framers had in mind."

Copyright holders such as AOL have argued that they need the current level of copyright protection to fund future work. (CTEM is supposed to have added $6 billion to the American royalty stream.)

Eldred publishes books with expired copyrights on the web for free and was persuaded to sue the government by Lessig, the Microsoft critic who was stopped from becoming the special master in the antitrust trial. He is now the chief critic of the new information economy, claiming that the IP laws strangle innovation, a dicey causal claim the Supremes have been left to ponder.

Maureen O'Gara's LinuxGram is published weekly by G2 Computer Intelligence Inc. and distributed by Linux Business Week Copyright 2002 G2 Computer Intelligence.