Of course that's just a textualist response to a textualist argument. It has nothing to do with policy, on which I largely agree with the theory espoused.

I agree with a lot you said, but that limitation to certain publishers seems like a later development. If the S tatute of Anne [copyrighthistory.com] is the first copyright law (which every book and article I have read says it is), it states clearly that its intent is to promote education. I quote:

An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.

Anyway, I am going to read that website you mentioned. It sounds very interesting (no, I am not being facetious). I have never heard of such a perspective on copyright. It makes sense in the context of an autocratic culture like those of Europe before the Revolution that created the US, though.

I think you were trying to say "inaccessible to other publishers." But if you are going for the spirit of the law, it is certainly to prevent other people from making a profit from a creators work.

That was clearly the intent of the S tatute of Anne [copyrighthistory.com]. More precisely, it was to prevent rich printers from ripping off poor authors. Which, ironically enough, is precisely what copyright is doing to authors today.

I did not include any of the spirit of the law arguments specifically because the Supreme Court justices in the Eldrich v. Ashcroft [cubicmetercrystal.com] case said that such arguments were insufficient to sway their opinion.

I think it is fairly obvious that the Founding Fathers could not have imagined a term like "intellectual property" and would have been repulsed by the very idea. They certainly did not believe that ideas were property. Jefferson said so much, and Ben Franklin refused to patent his inventions.

I fleshed out some of these opinions in another article [uea.ac.uk] I wrote for that Wipout contest. Most of those arguments were devoted to the temporal terms of copyright, though, and attacking the use of the term "intellectual property."

Is there any way to argue other than based on the text or the spirit of the law? If there is, I am all ears.

It appears that I may not have been as clear as I could have been on some of my arguments. I will try to clarify some of the issues you have brought to my attention. You said:

I don't see how this follows. For one, just because open access to more information facilitates more Progress doesn't imply that it's the most efficient way.(The Constitution itself doesn't even mandate that Progress must be promoted in the most efficient manner, anyway...)

Perhaps I should have said "the best way To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts is to disseminate as much information as possible to as many people as possible." In either case, however, it is defensible. More people working on a given problem contributes to faster and better solutions. More problems solved leads to more progress.

Efficiency has to be an implied goal of all legislation. What would be the purpose in passing a law that was deliberately partially or wholly not accomplishing its goal?

You then went on to say:

The "securing for limited Times" part of the clause is the "how", not the "what"; it's not a separate goal.

Perhaps the implementation should not be a goal at all. In any case, if the entertainment industries had their way the how would be the why.

Further, you said:

The Constitution cares not a whit about authors' rights

I like this argument a lot:

You may not believe me, because of various, nefarious actions on the part of the MPAA or RIAA or Disney/Sonny Bono. We keep protecting them, and it doesn't help that they keep saying that it's their rights that are being protected.

You then argued:

The problem there would be that your definition of Progress isn't as general as the Constitution would have it.

Yes, Britney Spears's new album IS Progress, even if you find her music bland, hypermarketed, and cliched. Any other opinion has to be based on a judgment of the content itself, which reasoning, I think for obvious reasons, would not be an appropriate basis for a policy decision.

What I am against is a system in which this is the ONLY sort of art promoted. If art is ONLY what the majority of people would like, that does not do much for individualism or creativity (which are the corner stones of progress: free thinking and new ideas). Maybe there is some art out there that would mean something to me and 10 other people. If that is the case, no one should be denied access to this work for lack of profitability.

...it's not quite because they or the courts have forgotten that dissemination of information is the primary goal, or any of the stuff I mention in the paragraph above. Rather, it's because the copyright laws must still comply with First Amendment rights, and the current ones seriously damage those rights.

I am saying that We the People of the United States have the right to access any copyrighted information produced in the United States or any country that signed a treaty with our government. I am saying that the copyright clause prohibits private censorship for any material based on the fact that all information has educational potential.

I will touch on the "limited Times" argument some other day. I am only arguing one aspect of copyright for now.

I agree that the "how" no longer implements the "why." Remember, though, that the term the Constitution uses for what Congress can give to "Authors and Inventors" is "exclusive Right[s]." So they are not inventing rights. The question is whether We the People have any rights. I say we do.