Professor William Landes and the Honorable Richard Posner have published The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Law, which suggests, among other things, that the Walt Disney Corp. supported the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act because the company would benefit more from the financial windfall created by the act's retroactive extension of copyright than it would from exploiting public domain works 20 years sooner.

It was worth reading all 48 pages of the monograph to stumble upon this gem of a sentence: "The possibility of retroactive legislation is a candle to rent-seeking moths."

(Via Marty Schwimmer via Volokh.)