I am familiar with legal Eagle, and I generally like him, though this underlines that these are entertainment videos and not law review submissions (which by the same progression aren’t generally sophisticated academic history papers).

I reckon either Devin or whoever else wrote the script was going off memory, and it all got conflated. It’s a miss, to be sure, but if I were inclined to cut him some slack, the CTEA was basically an amendment to the Copyright Act of 1976, and the whole Sonny Bono thing is more of an aside in the much longer video. Frankly, calling it Bono’s major policy accomplishment is a bit off in general, as Bono was just a co-sponsor on a similar bill, probably because the the entertainment industry backed his campaigns, and he had passed away by the time final version of the CTEA further extended 1976’s similar extension.

I would say just be careful with Legal Eagle, and view it as informational but not unimpeachable. In the videos I’ve watched, I haven’t seen anything that makes me think he’s communicating in bad faith or regularly being sloppy in how he analyzes issues. He of course has an agenda to serve his audience and to get content out in between whatever real legal work and firm management he does. I do feel pretty smug that I was complaining about law school not putting things into historical context, and here we see that’s exactly where our friendly neighborhood popularizer drops the ball.

Seriously, there is virtually no discussion of how language changes over the decades, how events of the day influence legislators and judges, and how all of that impacts future interpretation. The rise of “originalism” and “textualism” is specifically because law students are taught that they’re equipped to understand 250 year old texts just as well as the original drafters, and that the drafters were invariably operating with what we would consider acceptable morality. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that pretending to do so gives you the necessary cover to interpret the thing in exactly as retrograde a way as you need to satisfy conservative elites.