History of copyright protection When originally conceived, copyright was quite different to what it has now become. Indeed, having terms of protection last beyond the author's lifetime (by 95 years) and be increased retroactively obviously do nothing to motivate authors to create original works. It seems that even patents do not spur innovation the way they were supposed to, with notorious examples like amazon's 1-click ordering system showing how broken the business process section of this field is. The egregious DMCA puts corporate copyright holders in control of even public domain works. The current state of copyright is not in keeping with the original intent of the Constitution, and may be overturned by the Supreme Court.