Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA).

Internet publisher Eric Eldred was the lead petitioner, and was joined by a group of commercial and non-commercial interests who relied on the public domain for their work (including Dover Publications) and many amici including the Free Software Foundation, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Bureau of National Affairs, and the College Art Association.

The plaintiffs' argument was threefold: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and DiscoveriesIn response, the government argued that Congress does indeed have the latitude to retroactively extend terms, so long as the individual extensions are also for "limited Times", as required by the Constitution.

On the second count, she rejected the notion of First Amendment scrutiny in copyright cases, based on her interpretation of Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., v. Nation Enterprises, an earlier Supreme Court decision.

In his dissent, Judge David Sentelle agreed with the plaintiffs that CTEA was indeed unconstitutional based on the "limited Times" requirement.

Lessig focused the Plaintiffs' brief to emphasize the Copyright Clause restriction, as well as the First Amendment argument from the Court of Appeals case.

One of the arguments supporting the act was that life expectancy has significantly increased among the human population since the 18th century, and therefore copyright law needed extending as well.

However, the major argument for the act that carried over into the case was that the Constitution specified that Congress only needed to set time limits for copyright, the length of which was left to their discretion.

[2] The Supreme Court declined to address Lessig's contention that Lopez and Morrison offered precedent for enforcing the Copyright clause, and instead reiterated the lower court's reasoning that a retroactive term extension can satisfy the "limited Times" provision in the Copyright Clause, as long as the extension itself is limited instead of perpetual.

[4] In a separate dissenting opinion, Justice Stevens also challenged the virtue of an individual reward, analyzing it from the perspective of patent law.

He argued that the focus on compensation results only in "frustrating the legitimate members of the public who want to make use of it (a completed invention) in a free market".

Yet while a formula pairing commercial viability to duration of protection may be said to produce more economically efficient results in respect of high technology inventions with shorter shelf-lives, the same perhaps cannot be said for certain forms of copyrighted works, for which the present value of expenditures relating to creation depend less on scientific equipment and research and development programs and more on unquantifiable creativity.

Lessig later expressed regret that he based his argument on precedent rather than attempting to demonstrate that the weakening of the public domain would cause harm to the economic health of the country.

Golan v. Ashcroft and Peters's Uruguay Round portion survived a motion to dismiss even though its own challenge to the Sonny Bono Act did not.