Last week, Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill to vastly reduce copyright terms, in the future, and most surprisingly, retroactively. The bill was quickly denounced as unconstitutional, since its “too clever by half” structure insured that only one company would be affected: The Walt Disney Company. Nova Southeastern University's Copyright Officer, Stephen Carlisle, J.D., examines the text of the bill and its Constitutional flaws, and finds that Senator Hawley had failed to take into account one huge factor: if successful, his bill would put the American taxpayer on the hook for billions, if not trillions of dollars of “just compensation” payable to the Walt Disney Company.
