"Copyright doesn't last forever"
While in the U.S. copyright can't last forever, says the Constitution,
never-ending retroactive extensions accomplish the same thing.
I'm reminded of this: "Following the enactment of the Copyright Term
Extension Act in 1998, a coalition of plaintiffs led by publisher Eric Eldred
argued that this act and a previous extension of the copyright term in the
1970s had created a de facto "perpetual copyright on the installment plan".
This argument was rejected by the US Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft,
which held that there was no limit to how many times the term of copyright
may be extended by Congress, so long as it is still a limited term at the
time of each extension."
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_copyright#United_States
I agree with Eldred: The U.S. already has never-ending copyright - it's not
listed as being that way in the law in order to work around the Constitution.
When it keeps getting retroactively extended over and over without end such
that things never actually get elevated into the public domain, one can't say
that "copyright doesn't last forever" in the United States in practice.
