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This changed in 1831, to a maximum 42 years. In 1909, Congress extended the maximum to 56 years. The Copyright Term Extension Act extended copyright to 70 years after the author's death.

In the 20 years after the Act came into force, no copyright works would pass into the public domain. The average term of copyright went from 32.2 years in 1973 to 95 years in 2003.

The act was also dubbed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Mickey Mouse Protection Act — both sardonic tributes to supporters, California congresswoman Mary Bono (widow of actor, politician and singer Sonny Bono) and Disney. For Disney, the law delayed the entry into the public domain of the earliest Mickey Mouse films.

According to Mary Bono “Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever”. She spoke admiringly of Jack Valenti, Hollywood lobbyist and president of the Motion Picture Association of America, who sought to ban the video cassette recorder, saying in a 1982 congressional hearing it was “to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone”. The theme was constant — America itself was at risk if copyright was not protected.

But the path to an internet controlled by content providers was less certain with the coming of Barack Obama. In an age geared towards burdensome regulation, a policy statement from his campaign promised change: “Barack Obama believes we need to update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.”

Obama also took a stand on issues close to the heart of the copyright industry — the DMCA's ability to control technology which was able to work around copyright prevention. One complaint was the DMCA's ability to block people from backing up the DVD, CD or video game they had bought. Valenti spluttered in an interview in 2004: “Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever. No enterprise in the world gives you a backup copy of anything. You go buy a suit of clothes and you tear it and you come back and the guy says I'll try to sew it up for you, but he doesn't give you a backup pair of trousers. If you need a backup copy of a DVD you can go out and buy another one.”

Obama saw it differently. “I would support, in concept, allowing Americans to make a single backup copy of a digital product they have purchased . . . As policymakers, we are in a constant process of examining our laws to ensure that the protections we place on intellectual property are sufficient to encourage invention without hindering innovation that builds on previous work or unfairly limiting

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