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The Supreme Court held 1/15/03, by a 7-2 margin, that the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act’s (“CTEA”) twenty-year base copyright term enlargement for pre-enactment works does not violate either the Copyright and Patent Clause’s directive that copyright protection be “for limited Times” or the First Amendment’s speech protections. In rejecting petitioners’ Copyright Clause arguments, the Court relied heavily on the concession that the CTEA’s base copyright term qualifies as a “limited Tim[e]” when applied to post-enactment works. The Court reasoned that a time span appropriately limited as applied to future copyrights does not cease to be limited when applied to existing copyrights. It further relied on Congress’ consistent practice of applying previous copyright- and patent-term extensions to existing and future works. Finally, the Court held that, in enacting the CTEA, Congress rationally determined that longer copyright terms would encourage restoration and public distribution of works and rationally responded to a 1993 European Union directive establishing a copyright term of life plus seventy years but denying this protection to any national of a non-European Union country that does not confer reciprocal protections. The Court further held that CTEA does not violate the First Amendment, reasoning that the temporal proximity of the adoption of First Amendment and the Copyright and Patent Clause indicates the Framers’ view that the limited monopoly conferred by a copyright is compatible with principles of free speech. Moreover, the CTEA did not abrogate many First Amendment protections built into copyright law, including the doctrine of "fair use" and the extension of protection only to expression, and not ideas. The Eldred decision is important to any business that owns copyrights or seeks to use copyrighted materials.