By Joel Schlosberg

New Year's Eve partiers had good reason to celebrate at the stroke of midnight on January 1. If the end of 2020 felt like a farewell to the missteps of more than one previous year, in a way it truly was. The culture of the year 1925 broke free from shackles imposed in 1998.

That year's Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was far from the first of its kind. The United States Congress had reinterpreted its Constitutional mandate to grant an "exclusive Right" to creative works "for limited Times" to encompass increasingly longer periods of time. When George Washington si...