June 06, 2003
Sorites and EldredSeems like the
Sorites and Eldred
Seems like the Supreme Court can't recognize a
Sorites Paradox when presented with one. (Sorites describes a class of "little-by-little" paradoxes, along the lines of "One grain of corn isn't a heap; if n grains aren't a heap, then n+1 grains aren't a heap; ergo no number of grains is a heap." I'll have more to say on this later.) In
Eldred v. Ashcroft, the plaintiff asked the Court to strike down the retroactive portion of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act. Briefly, the Constitution grants Congress the power to create a monopoly on the distribution of a work in order to promote the public good, but only for a limited time. In the beginning that was 14 years, renewable once, but over time Congress has kept expanding that time (11 times in the past 40 years). The Sonny Bono Act extends it to the author's lifetime + 75 years, or 95 years for a corporation and makes it retroactively apply to copyrights that were about to expire under the old limits. Lawrence Lessig, for the plaintiff, argued that allowing Congress to retroactively extend the limit made it effectively unlimited, contrary to the Constitutional clause establishing the power in the first place. The Court sided with the government, apparently buying (albeit with greater or lesser degrees of unease among the 7 justices who voted against Eldred) the argument that if a term is limited, extending it by another finite term makes the new term still limited, and so within the power of Congress to grant.
Posted by joshua at June 6, 2003 02:50 PM
This doesn't seem quite right, as a Sorites paradox.
(1) 14 years is a finite amount of time.
(2) If x is a finite amount of time, x + some finite amount of time is a finite amount of time. Therefore,
(3) There is no finite amount of time, such that it is not an infinite amount of time.
This seems perfectly sound.
I strongly agree with what I take your position to be, that such extensions are unreasonable -- but not because they result in infinite periods of time.
If for every R > 0 there exists S > 0 such that for all real numbers x > S, we have f(x) > R, then the limit of f(x) is infinity. On a more practical level, I don't think that there would be any question that the Court would have rejected it-- on the grounds that it was a blatant attempt to skirt the meaning of limited-- if Congress had attempted to set the new term to ten billion years (roughly twice the expected remaining lifespan of our sun). Given an upper finite limit it's a perfectly normal Sorites.
Due to the proliferation of comment spam, I've had to close comments on this entry. If you would like to leave comment, please use one of my recent entries. Spam delenda est!