Imagine being director of a children’s music camp that for decades has performed Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” when suddenly, Congress decrees that you may not perform that music anymore. Or imagine being a museum curator and suddenly being told that you must remove prints by Picasso and Escher that you’ve displayed for years.

Sound far-fetched? Congress did just this in 1994 when it granted copyrights to thousands of foreign authors for works that had been uncopyrighted in the United States for decades, and thus free for all to use.