"The Copyright and Patent Clause provides that Congress shall have power to promote the Progress of Science by securing to Authors for limited Times the exclusive Right to their Writings. Text, history, and precedent confirm that the Copyright Clause empowers Congress to prescribe “limited Times” for copyright protection and to secure the same level and duration of protection for all copyright holders, present and future. History reveals an unbroken congressional practice of granting to authors of works with existing copyrights the benefit of term extensions so that all under copyright protection will be governed evenhandedly under the same regime. The CTEA’s baseline term of life plus 70 years, petitioners concede, qualifies as a limited time as applied to future copyrights. The Court held that the same term could be applied to existing copyrights. A key factor in the CTEA’s passage was a 1993 European Union directive instructing EU members to establish a copyright term of life plus 70 years. By extending the baseline United States copyright term to life plus 70 years, Congress sought to ensure that American authors would receive the same copyright protection in Europe as their European counterparts."