Supreme Court Docket Report - January 18, 2012

Originally published January 18, 2012

Keywords: extended copyright protection, foreign works, Telephone Consumer Protection Act, do not call requests, prerecorded messages

Today the Supreme Court issued two decisions, described below, of interest to the business community.

Uruguay Round Agreements Act—Copyright Protection of Foreign Works Telephone Consumer Protection Act—Federal Jurisdiction Uruguay Round Agreements Act—Copyright Protection of Foreign Works

Golan v. Holder, No. 10-545 (previously discussed in the March 7, 2011 Docket Report).

Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, 17 U.S.C. §§ 104A, 109(a), implements Article 18 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which requires member states to provide a minimum level of copyright protection to foreign works published in a member state. One effect of Section 514 was to grant copyright protection to certain works that were in the public domain. Today, in a 6-2 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Section 514 under the Copyright Clause and the First Amendment. The case resolves a matter of importance to both businesses whose works receive protection under Section 514 and businesses that wish to make use of such works.

Throughout much of the 20th century, the U.S. extended copyright protection only to authors whose countries granted reciprocal rights to U.S. authors and whose works were printed in the U.S. In 1989, the U.S. became a signatory to the Berne Convention. Article 18 of the Convention provides that a member country must grant copyright protection for a work published in another member country unless the work's copyright term has expired in either the country where protection is claimed or the country of origin. At that time, the U.S. did not extend protection to works already in the public domain. That changed in 1994, when Congress enacted Section 514, which extended U.S. copyright protection to works that were protected in their countries of origin but had been unprotected in the U.S. for any of three enumerated reasons.

Petitioners challenged the constitutionality of Section 514 in federal court. The district court held that Section 514 did not violate the Copyright Clause but did violate the First Amendment. The Tenth Circuit affirmed the Copyright Clause holding but reversed the First Amendment holding. In today's majority opinion, which was authored by Justice Ginsburg, the Supreme Court affirmed the...